This article will explore the historical account and political actualisation of Machiavelli and La Boétie in the work of Claude Lefort. In the 1970s, Lefort renewed the interpretation of Machiavelli and La Boétie by underlining their common ‘radical humanism’. The long-overlooked insights into desire and social division of the two Renaissance thinkers underline the subversive potential of humanism against its common ideological and oligarchic uses. But the history of radical humanism cannot be separated from its topicality, as it is one (...) of the germs of the democratic revolution. This radicalism echoes and inspires Lefort's agonistic theory of democracy. After Machiavelli and La Boétie, his work grapples with the continued dependency of the subjects on visible and invisible masters. Indeed, according to Lefort, contemporary societies long for certainty and remain haunted by servitude in the form of ideology (be it bourgeois, totalitarian or invisible). (shrink)

According to Wiredu, the Akan profess secular esteem rather than religious worship to supra-natural beings, who they perceive in an empirical sense. He backs this up by re-reading what he sees as the Akan general ontology in a way that denies them of the concepts of the supernatural, the transcendental, the mental, the spiritual, and an ontologically distinct mind. At the end of denying the three criteria of worship as well as all of these other concepts which might otherwise be (...) available to the Akan, one might struggle to find any evidence that the Akan even had a religion. I dispute this secular reading, and I more generally demonstrate that the characterizations of the Akan attitude to divinity as non-worshipping, non-supernatural, non-transcendent, and non-spiritual, are either conceptually flawed, factually incorrect, or both. (shrink)

The paradoxical logic of transparency and mediation Transparency is the metaphor of our time. Whether in government or corporate governance, finance, technology, health or the media – it is ubiquitous today, and there is hardly a current debate that does not call for more transparency. But what does this word actually stand for and what are the consequences for the life of individuals? Can knowledge from the arts, and its play of visibility and invisibility, tell us something about the paradoxical (...) logics of transparency and mediation? This Obscure Thing Called Transparency gathers contributions by international experts who critically assess the promises and perils of transparency today. (shrink)

“What we have learned from Saussure” affirms Merleau-Ponty “is that, taken singly, signs do not signify anything, and that each one of them does not so much express a meaning as mark a divergence of meaning between itself and other signs.” While it has often been stressed that Merleau-Ponty was arguably among the earliest philosophical readers of Saussure, the real impact of this reading on Merleau-Ponty’s thinking has rarely been assessed in detail. By focusing on the middle period – the (...) years between the publication of the Phenomenology of Perception and the abandonment of the book project The Prose of the World – a special interest in language and its ideality becomes all the more evident. Now this period is crucial for understanding the turn of the later years: similarly to Saussure, who shifted the problem of meaning from a problem of referentiality to an issue of self-differentiation of the linguistic field, Merleau-Ponty shifts his account of perception from a relationship based on sensory subjects and perceived objects to an immanent differentiation of the sensible world. The genesis ofan articulated world can be conceptualized with the experience of children’s language acquisition and the phenomenon of “deflation.” At a certain point in her development, the child interrupts her incessant babbling and learns to shape pauses and silences, which are the precondition for meaningful sounds. Learning how to speak – as it were – would thus be learning how not to speak. The child may only enter a specific language by means of a phonematic restriction; to become a member of a language community is to lose the capacity to speak all languages. (shrink)

ABSTRACT While the first generation of the so-called Frankfurt School has promoted a strong interconnection between social critique and knowledge of the social world, contemporary critical theory seems to consider that epistemological issues don’t deserve anymore consideration. Is it really possible to elaborate a convincing theory of social critique without taking seriously the various links between social critique and knowledge? This article argues that the answer is no. In a first step, it recalls the ways in which the philosophical debate (...) about social critique is currently articulated and how it disconnects social critique and knowledge. One of the reasons for such a disconnection relates to a vision of politics as consisting mainly in a conflict between normative principles, notably between conceptions of social justice. This vision of politics is criticized in the second step of this paper. A second reason, examined in the third part of the paper, relates to the risk of epistemic violence. The shared but questionable assumption is that any sociological or philosophical attempt to produce knowledge would necessarily lead to epistemic violence rather than to epistemic empowerment. (shrink)

Aunque fueron muchos los intentos en la modernidad de superar el dualismo cuerpo y mente, las teorías filosóficas del lenguaje en muchos casos lo reintrodujeron de manera sutil pero no menos eficaz. El artículo discute varios teoremas para pensar la materialidad del signo y muestra la preponderancia, desde Kierkegaard hasta el estructuralismo post-Saussuriano, de pensar la materialización como algo necesario, pero arbitrario en su modalidad. En esta concepción, el cuerpo del lenguaje no es solamente aquello que se puede sino aquello (...) que se debe poder modificar: la corporalidad de la expresión es lo que debe poder ser absolutamente sustituible para conservar la unidad del sentido. Sin embargo, en muchos casos, el sentido emerge precisamente de la singularidad insustituible, de la configuración de los signos en la poesía o de la gestualidad inimitable del actor. El articulo argumenta en favor de introducir, en esta discusión, la distinción fenomenológica entre Kó'rper y Leib, que - como Husserl sugirió - también puede pueden pensarse según la diferencia entre lo representable y lo irrepresentable, entre lo que no tiene papel constituyente y que desde luego puede ser sustituido, y lo que permite ser representado por otro porque es insustituible. Although in the modern age there were plenty of attempts to overcome the mind-body dualism, its philosophical theories of languages reintroduced it in a subtle but not less effective way. In this article several theorems to think on the materiality of the sign are discussed, and the preponderance, from Kierkegaard to the post-Saussurean structuralism, of thinking the materialization as something necessary but arbitrary in its modality, is shown. The body of language under this understanding is not only that which can be modified, but that which must be modifiable: the corporeality of the utterance must be substitutable in order to preserve the unit of meaning. Nevertheless, in many cases, the meaning comes precisely from the unsubstitutable singularity, from the configuration of the signs in poetry or from the inimitable actor's gestures. The article argues for introducing in this discussion the phenomenological distinction between Kórper and Leib, which - as Husserl suggested - may also be thought from the difference between the representable and the irrepresentable, between what does not have a constituent role and hence can be substituted, and what allows to be represented by another because it is unsubstitutable. (shrink)

This is the first English-language translation of an important book that contributes to contemporary debates about social suffering in sociology, social psychology, political theory and philosophy. Renault provides a systematic account of the ways in which social suffering could be conceptualised.

BackgroundThe COVID-19 pandemic has magnified pre-existing challenges in healthcare in Africa. Long-standing health inequities, embedded in the continent over centuries, have been laid bare and have raised complex ethical dilemmas. While there are very few clinical ethics committees (CECs) in Africa, the demand for such services exists and has increased during the COVID-19 pandemic. The views of African healthcare professionals or bioethicists on the role of CECs in Africa have not been explored or documented previously. In this study, we aim (...) to explore such perspectives, as well as the challenges preventing the establishment of CECs in Africa.MethodsTwenty healthcare professionals and bioethicists from Africa participated in this qualitative study that utilized in-depth semi-structured interviews with open-ended questions. Themes were identified through thematic analysis of interviews and open-ended responses.ResultsKenya and South Africa are the only countries on the continent with formal established CECs. The following themes emerged from this qualitative study: (1) Lack of formal CECs and resolution of ethical dilemmas; (2) Role of CECs during COVID-19; (3) Ethical dilemmas presented to CECs pre-COVID-19; (4) Lack of awareness of CECs; (5) Lack of qualified bioethicists or clinical ethicists; (6) Limited resources to establish CECs; (7) Creating interest in CECs and networking.ConclusionsThis study illustrates the importance of clinical ethics education among African HCPs and bioethicists, more so now when COVID-19 has posed a host of clinical and ethical challenges to public and private healthcare systems. The challenges and barriers identified will inform the establishment of CECs or clinical ethics consultation services (CESs) in the region. The study results have triggered an idea for the creation of a network of African CECs. (shrink)

The distinction between rules and similarity is central to our understanding of much of cognitive psychology. Two aspects of existing research have motivated the present work. First, in different cognitive psychology areas we typically see different conceptions of rules and similarity; for example, rules in language appear to be of a different kind compared to rules in categorization. Second, rules processes are typically modeled as separate from similarity ones; for example, in a learning experiment, rules and similarity influences would be (...) described on the basis of separate models. In the present article, I assume that the rules versus similarity distinction can be understood in the same way in learning, reasoning, categorization, and language, and that a unified model for rules and similarity is appropriate. A rules process is considered to be a similarity one where only a single or a small subset of an object's properties are involved. Hence, rules and overall similarity operations are extremes in a single continuum of similarity operations. It is argued that this viewpoint allows adequate coverage of theory and empirical findings in learning, reasoning, categorization, and language, and also a reassessment of the objectives in research on rules versus similarity. Key Words: categorization; cognitive explanation; language; learning; reasoning; rules; similarity. (shrink)

Fake news can originate from an ordinary person carelessly posting what turns out to be false information or from the intentional actions of fake news factory workers, but broadly speaking it can also originate from scientific fraud. In the latter case, the article can be retracted upon discovery of the fraud. A case study shows, however, that such fake science can be visible in Google even after the article was retracted, in fact more visible than the retraction notice. We hypothesize (...) that the reason for this lies in the popularity-based logic governing Google, in particular its foundational PageRank algorithm, in conjunction with a psychological law which we refer to as the “law of retraction”: a retraction notice is typically taken to be less interesting and therefore less popular with internet users than the original content retracted. We conduct an empirical study drawing on records of articles retracted due to fraud in the Retraction Watch public database. The study tests the extent to which such retracted scientific articles are still highly ranked in Google –and more so than information about the retraction. We find, among other things, that both Google Search and Google Scholar more often than not ranked a link to the original article higher than a link indicating that the article has been retracted. Surprisingly, Google Scholar did not perform better in this regard than Google Search.We also found cases in which Google did not track the retraction of an article on the first result page at all. We conclude that both Google Search and Google Scholar run the risk of disseminating fake science through their ranking algorithms. (shrink)

This paper contrasts the Hegelianism of contemporary neo-pragmatism and the Hegelianism of classical pragmatism as it has been reassessed in contemporary Deweyan scholarship. Drawing on Dewey’s interpretation of Hegel, this paper argues that Hegel’s theory of the spirit is in many aspects more akin to Dewey’s pragmatism than Brandom’s. The first part compares Dewey’s pragmatism with Hegel’s conceptions of experience and the theory/practice relation. The second part compares Dewey’s naturalism with Hegel’s theory of the relation between nature and spirit.

Shareholder activism has become a force for good in the extant corporate governance literature. In this article, we present a case study of Nigeria to show how shareholder activism, as a corporate governance mechanism, can constitute a space for unhealthy politics and turbulent politicking, which is a reflection of the country’s brand of politics. As a result, we point out some translational challenges, and suggest more caution, in the diffusion of corporate governance practices across different institutional environments. We contribute to (...) the literature on corporate governance in Africa, whilst creating an understanding of the political embeddedness of shareholder activism in different institutional contexts—i.e. a step closer to a political theorising of shareholder activism. (shrink)

Kwasi Wiredu, arguably the most influential African philosopher, has proposed a democracy by consensus as an alternative to the majoritarian democracy African countries inherited from their colonial masters. His proposal has generated a lot of debates, and these debates have spanned several aspects of his proposal. In this paper, I focus on the debate regarding his attribution of immanence to the practice of consensus in traditional African social relations. Bernard Matolino has recently written an article defending Wiredu's employment of the (...) word immanence in describing the traditional African attitude to social relations. In this article, I find Matolino's defense to be unsustainable. (shrink)

The article explores the striking coincidences in Heidegger's and Blanchot's account of the image as death mask. The analysis of the respective theories of the image brings forth two radically divergent conceptions of thinking as "laying patent" (Heidegger) and of thinking as "laying bare" (Blanchot).

Epiphenomenalism has had a long historical tradition. It is the view that mental properties are causally inert with respect to the physical world. In this paper, I argue that this tradition faces enormous challenges and needs better arguments to defend its position, and to demonstrate this, I interrogate the strands including computationalism, the idea of the illusion of conscious will, and causal exclusionism.

Preoccupation with multiparty aggregative democracy in Africa has produced superficial forms of political/electoral choice-making by subjects that deepen pre-existing ethnic and primordial cleavages. This is because the principles of the multiparty system presuppose that decision-making through voting should be the result of a mere aggregation of pre-existing, fixed preferences. To this kind of decision-making, I propose deliberative democracy as a supplementary approach. My reason is that deliberation, beyond mere voting, should be central to decisionmaking and that, for a decision to (...) be legitimate, it must be preceded by deliberation, not merely the aggregation of pre-existing fixed preferences. I agree with arguments that when adequate justifications are made for claims/demands/conclusions, deliberation has the potential to have a salutary effect on people’s opinions, transform/evolve preferences, better inform judgments/voting, lead to increasingly ‘common good’ decisions, have moral educative power, place more burden of account-giving on public officers, and furnish subjects/losers/outvoted with justifications for collectively binding decisions. I argue that a deliberative turn in politics in Africa will have a mitigating effect on tribal and money politics. (shrink)

Recent debates about aesthetics are characterized by a partly intentional, but also partly involuntary, vagueness. Whether it be aestheticisation or anesthetisation, articisation or desartification: what is upheld or deplored under one and the same label in fact designates rather different things. The paper makes a suggestion as to how the field could be reorganized. Taking heed of what political theory discusses as the “political difference” between “politics” and “the political”, the aim is to examine what would be gained by working (...) with an “aesthetic difference” that does not straightforwardly equate “the aesthetic” with “art”, and “the aesthetic” with the totality of sensuous-aisthetic processes. An aesthetic thinking would then amount to a thinking that does justice to these inner polarities and remains faithful to the ambiguity of its objects. (shrink)

We examine a special case of inquiry games and give an account of the informational import of asking questions. We focus on yes-or-no questions, which always carry information about the questioner's strategy, but never about the state of Nature, and show how strategic information reduces uncertainty through inferences about other players' goals and strategies. This uncertainty cannot always be captured by information structures of classical game theory. We conclude by discussing the connection with Gricean pragmatics and contextual constraints on interpretation.

Promettant à la fois la capture de l’instant et son dépassement vers l’intemporel, le medium photographique voit son destin intimement lié à la catégorie du temps. L’article suggère cependant que cette inclusion du temps dans l’image s’est acquise, au cours de l’histoire de la photographie, au prix d’une essentialisation du momentané. À rebours d’une telle approche, il s’agit de repenser l’instantané photographique comme découlant de l’accident, si bien que la photo figure non plus l’instant fécond, mais bien le temps de (...) l’accident, qui correspond, dans tous les sens du terme, à un arrêt de mort. (shrink)

As Hegel once said, in Byzantium, between homoousis and homoiousis, the difference of one letter could decide the life and death of thousands. As this article seeks to argue, Byzantine thinking was not only attentive to conceptual differences, but also to iconic ones. The iconoclastic controversy (726-842 AD) arose from two different interpretations of the nature of images: whereas iconoclastic philosophy is based on the assumption of a fundamental 'iconic identity', iconophile philosophy defends the idea of'iconic difference'. And while the (...) reception in the Latin West of the controversies over the image as a mere problem of referentiality of the letter explains why its originality has remained underestimated for centuries, reexamining Byzantine visual thinking in the light of today's 'pictorial turn' reveals its striking modernity. (shrink)

Some of the traditions and cultural beliefs and practices of the Idoma people of Nigeria have been influenced both positively and negatively as a result of the advent of Christianity in the area. The aim of this research is to investigate some of the cultural beliefs and practices of the Idoma people before the advent of Christianity, the people’s response to the new faith and the propelling factors behind the responses of the people. In doing so, a comparative study on (...) these beliefs and practices after the advent of Christianity in Idoma traditional society was done. The study adopts a qualitative phenomenological research design and descriptive method for data analysis. Personal interviews form a primary source of data collection, while the secondary source includes library sources. This method of study was chosen to allow the data collected to speak for themselves without any interference from the researchers. The study unveils that the advent of Christianity in the Idoma traditional society had some impact and consequences on the traditional and cultural practices of the people, such as death and burial ceremonies, the Aje-alekwu festival and widowhood practices among others. The study recommends that there should be a synergy between Idoma traditional beliefs and practices and Christianity for peaceful co-existence, progress and development in the area. Contribution: It is erroneously believed that in the contemporary society, traditional religious practices are going to die and become a thing of the past. However, one would observe from this study that Idoma people still hold their traditional beliefs and practices in high esteem despite the influence of Christianity in the area. (shrink)

Die Phänomenologie stellt eine der Hauptströmungen der Gegenwartsphilosophie dar und findet in zahlreichen Wissenschaften sowie in Praxis und Therapeutik starke Resonanz. Nach 120 Jahren Wirkungsgeschichte füllt die Bibliothek phänomenologischer Werke zahllose Bücherregale und selbst für Expert:innen ist die Forschungsliteratur mittlerweile unüberschaubar geworden. An allgemeinen Einführungen sowie spezialisierter Fachliteratur mangelt es dabei keineswegs, wohl aber an einem Handbuch, in dem sowohl der Vielfalt der historischen Entwicklungen als auch dem berechtigten Wunsch nach innerer systematischer Kohärenz Rechnung getragen wird. Das Handbuch Phänomenologie schließt (...) diese Lücke. Ausgewiesene Autor:innen bereiten in eigens für diesen Band verfassten Artikeln komplexe sachliche Zusammenhänge übersichtlich auf. Durch seinen Aufbau eignet sich das Handbuch sowohl für Anfänger:innen als auch für Fortgeschrittene. Anhand bündig präsentierter Grundbegriffe und Verfahren konturiert das Handbuch die Spezifik der phänomenologischen Methode, spart dabei jedoch nicht die Kontroversen und methodologischen Neuausrichtungen aus, die von ihrer Lebendigkeit und Vielstimmigkeit zeugen. Ein umfangreicher Schlussteil ist der Rezeption und Anwendung in einzelnen Wirkfeldern gewidmet. Als Hilfsmittel zur eigenständigen Erschließung der phänomenologischen Denkrichtung und zu ihrer Anwendung auf aktuelle Probleme zeichnet sich das Handbuch durch seine Leser:innenfreundlichkeit und einen stark forschungspraktischen Bezug aus. Ein Kompendium, das sich bald als ABC der Phänomenologie etablieren dürfte. (shrink)

Seit über 30 Jahren gibt es in den deutschen wie französischen Kultur- und Geisteswissenschaften das Bestreben, den Begriff der »Lesbarkeit« von seiner engen Bindung an den geschriebenen Text zu emanzipieren. Die vorliegende Ausgabe von Trivium lässt einige der maßgeblichen Stimmen in dieser Debatte zu Wort kommen. Auf der gemeinsamen Schnittfläche von Mikrohistorie, Semiologie, Psychoanalyse, Kulturgeschichte, Physiognomie und Mantik zeichnet sich ein neues und zugleich altes Verständnis des Lesens ab. Wenn sich in der Moderne die Frage nach dem Lesen von Spuren (...) – und damit im weiteren Sinne von Indizien, Symptomen, Vorzeichen etc. – neu stellt, so wird damit an eine archaische Praxis des Lesens neu angeknüpft, welche uns vor das unabschließbare Problem der Lesbarkeit der Welt stellt. -/- Lire. Voilà une chose que ne réfléchissent plus les sur-alphabétisés que nous sommes, habitués à ingérer les signes sans y prendre garde. Repenser la lecture et l’investir d’une fonction critique suppose de méditer la lettre en revenant à son antériorité : se souvenir que, de tout temps et avant tout livre, il y a eu des lecteurs. Des lecteurs – littéralement – avant la lettre. L’art de la lecture réunit le chasseur lisant les déjections des animaux dans les forêts, l’astronome babylonien scrutant les cartographies stellaires, le pêcheur hawaïen lisant les courants marins en plongeant dans l’eau sa main et l’amant déchiffrant aveuglément le corps de l’aimée. On apprend à lire non seulement des textes, mais encore des partitions de musique, des tableaux de peinture, des cartes à jouer, des notations chorégraphiques, des sillons dans la terre, des tourbillons dans l’eau, des gestes révélateurs ou bien des rêves. (shrink)

Ces dernières années ont été le théâtre d'une étonnante résurgence de la question anthropologique. Parmi les propositions les plus débattues, il y a eu celle qui consisterait à penser l'homme non pas comme un animal doué de langage, mais avant tout comme un homo pictor ou encore comme un homo spectator, capable de produire et de reconnaître ses propres images. Si entre-temps, cette idée d'une anthropologie par l'image a permis d'inaugurer des nouveaux domaines de recherche, comme l'anthropologie visuelle, celle-ci relève (...) cependant d'une histoire déjà plus ancienne dont cet ouvrage livre quelques clés. Entre ceux qui considèrent que les images sont le reflet exact de l'homme et ceux qui, au contraire, sont d'avis que les artefacts visuels mènent une vie dont les raisons échappent à la logique anthropocentrique, se dessinent aujourd'hui les lignes de front de ce qui s'apparente à une nouvelle querelle de l'image. (shrink)

Im Zeitalter der Hochspezialisierung sind sie selten geworden, die Philosoph*innen, die an der Universität wie im Feuilleton gleichermaßen zuhause sind. Dieter Thomä ist einer dieser Wenigen. Ob in leichtfüßigen Kolumnen oder in tiefschürfenden Studien zur Geistesgeschichte - stets gilt sein Interesse den Unruheherden innerhalb von Ordnungen, den Umschlagspunkten, an denen ein System kippt. In vier Jahrzehnten publizistischer Tätigkeit hat er der Philosophie neue Gegenstände erschlossen und die Öffentlichkeit mit provokativen Zeitdiagnosen bereichert. Anlässlich seines 60. Geburtstags werden die Denkanstöße gewürdigt, die (...) von seiner beherzten theoretischen Quertreiberei ausgingen. (shrink)

If literary avant-garde journals and their communities have been, in the twentieth century, a space for creating, if not sustaining, major political utopias, it should help explain why this “literary communism,” as Jean-Luc Nancy called it, is not a weakened or substitutional form of politics. No myth without narration, no implementation without an instrumentation, no organic unity without a political organ voicing its claim, in short: no organicity without an organon. But can there be a (literary) community that does not (...) aim at the achievement of its own assumed truth, a form of writing in common that does not serve to convey a meaning, but bears witness, in its very form, to the fragmentation of meaning? This essay examines three attempts of an affi rmative answer to this question by reappraising three interrelated experimental cases: Jena around 1800 and the Athenaeum journal of the Early Romantics; Walter Benjamin’s journal projects, from the Angelus Novus to the prison camp journal at the end of his life; Maurice Blanchot and the failed trans-European project of what was arguably the most ambitious intellectual journal enterprise of the century, the Revue internationale in the early 1960s. (shrink)

Owing most probably to Western-style modernization, marriage is increasingly understood to be a business strictly for married couples. However, I argue that this is an error, as many inexperienced couples are left to their own devices, and thereby often fail to utilize marriage to acquire the social competencies that are crucial to wider social responsibilities, including political leadership. The modern atomic conception of marriage is influenced by the Kantinspired Western conception of moral autonomy. Nevertheless, I reject this conception as excessively (...) absolutist, and argue that moral autonomy can be tempered by lack of experience, human desire and circumstantial pressures in life. Many African societies view marriage as a union of societies rather than that of individuals, and I argue that the moral support offered by the extended family and the community at large is ultimately geared to inculcate in the spouses inter-personal and social skills of restraint, prudence, tolerance, constructive criticism and other virtues desperately needed to execute societal responsibilities. (shrink)

In decrying the evils of supernaturalism, African philosopher Kwasi Wiredu proposes humanism, by making concern for human well-being the basis for morality. However, the presentation of humanism as a simple replacement of supernaturalism is objectionable. Wiredu’s notion of supernaturalism is too narrow, since it is only a variant of supernaturalism. His reference to humanism is too broad, since humanism is an umbrella of very conflicting worldviews, such as that between secular and theistic humanism. Although Wiredu does not specify which variant (...) of humanism he means, and although he acknowledges that the Akan believe in a Supreme Being, his general ontology shows that he is closer to the secular than the theistic variant. This article explores the ideological extensions of the two and argues that theistic humanism provides the compatibility needed for being religious and at the same time basing morality on humanistic/naturalistic concerns. In doing so, it distinguishes supernaturalism per se from its ethical and cosmological variants. As a corrective to Wiredu, this article blames these two variants of supernaturalism, rather than supernaturalism per se, for the evils that Wiredu adduces. The conclusion is that in theistic humanism, humanism escapes the dangers of ethical and cosmological supernaturalism without necessarily adopting the antisupernaturalist connotations currently popular with modern secular humanism. (shrink)

The originality of Glenberg's theoretical account lies in the claim that memory works in the service of physical interaction with the three-dimensional world. Little consideration is given, however, to the role of memory in action. We present and discuss data on spatial memory for action. These empirical data constitute the first step of reasoning about the link between memory and action, and allow several aspects of Glenberg's theory to be tested.

In the early 1990s, W.J.T. Mitchell and Gottfried Boehm independently proclaimed that the humanities were witnessing a ‘pictorial’ or ‘iconic turn’. Twenty years later, we may wonder whether this announcement was describing an event that had already taken place or whether it was rather calling forth for it to happen. The contemporary world is, more than ever, determined by visual artefacts. Still, our conceptual arsenal, forged during centuries of logocentrism, still falls behind the complexity of pictorial meaning. The essay has (...) two parts. In the first, it tries to assess the exact meaning of the ‘pictorial’/’iconic turn’, and (re)places it into the context of Anglo-American visual studies and German Bildwissenschaften. It the second, it addresses the famous claim by the philologist Ernst Robert Curtius that ‘image sciences are easy’ by advocating for three ‘turns of the screw’ to make visual studies more difficult: a shift from iconology to symptomatology, a shift from extensive to intensive and a shift from the indicative to the subjunctive. (shrink)

Dans son oeuvre tardive, Merleau-Ponty a souligné les convergences entre une pensée philosophique et une pensée s’exprimant par l’écriture littéraire, considérant que toutes deux répondent à une tâche commune liée à la description du monde. Ses premiers écrits théoriques – Simone de Beauvoir comme Jean-Paul Sartre l’ont souligné – sont quant à eux marqués par une distance plus nette vis-à-vis de la pratique littéraire. Pourtant, bien avant de publier ses premières monographies, Merleau-Ponty est l’auteur d’un livre écrit pour le compte (...) d’un autre : Nord. Récit de l’arctique, paru en 1928 chez Grasset. Le roman qui traite de la vie d’un explorateur dans le grand nord canadien, entre commerce de fourrures entre rencontre avec les Inuits, n’est qu’un travail de commande, que Merleau-Ponty ne revendiquera jamais. On trouve cependant dans cet écrit de jeunesse quelques motifs intéressants qui préfigurent sa pensée à venir. In his late writings, Merleau-Ponty stressed the convergences between philosophy and literature, highlighting their “common task” of describing the world. His early philosophical texts though – both Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre pointed this out – insist on demarcating themselves from literature. However, well before publishing his first monographs, Merleau-Ponty had already written a book on someone else’s behalf: Nord. Récit de l’arctique, published in 1928 by French publisher Grasset. The novel, which deals with the life of an explorer in Canada’s far north, between fur trade and encounters with the Inuit, is the result of ghostwriting, carried out for a friend. Merleau-Ponty later never stood to that book. There are nonetheless some interesting motifs in this early piece of writing that prefigure his future thinking.Nei suoi ultimi scritti, Merleau-Ponty ha sottolineato le convergenze tra filosofia e letteratura, evidenziando il loro “comune compito” nel descrivere il mondo. I suoi primi testi filosofici – lo hanno sottolineato sia Simone de Beauvoir che Jean-Paul Sartre – insistono però a distinguersi dalla letteratura. Tuttavia, ben prima di pubblicare le sue monografie, Merleau-Ponty aveva già scritto un libro per conto terzi: Nord. Récit de l’arctique, pubblicato nel 1928 per le stampe di Grasset. Per questo romanzo, che tratta della vita di un esploratore nell’estremo nord canadese, tra commercio di pellicce e incontri con gli Inuit, Merleau-Ponty fa da ‘ghostwriter’ ad un amico. Mentre ulteriormente, egli non si avvalse mai della paternità del romanzo, questo primo scritto contiene già alcuni spunti che prefigurano il suo pensiero futuro. (shrink)

This article presents the process of creation and expansion of the Fundação Abrinq pelos Direitos da Criança et do Adolescente (Abrinq Foundation for Rights of Children and Adolescents). Established in 1990 by a group of entrepreneurs from the Brazilian Toy Manufacturers’ Association (ABRINQ), the Fundação Abrinq has been successful at raising the issue of children in Brazilian society by bridging business and several other sectors of society. This article more particularly examines (1) the societal challenges related to the situation of (...) children in Brazil; (2) the creation and development of the Abrinq Foundation; and (3) the achievements of this innovative bridging organization over 15 years. (shrink)