We challenge Ruchkin et al.'s claim in reducing short-term memory (STM) to the active part of long-term memory (LTM), by showing that their data cannot rule out the possibility that activation of posterior brain regions could also reflect the contribution of a verbal STM buffer.

Guillaume Collett questions to what extent we can locate Deleuze within the Lacanian School during the late-1960s, prior to Guattari. In so doing, he offers a new, integrated reading of Deleuze's The Logic of Sense by understanding it as a 'psychoanalysis of sense', and gives a new interpretation of Deleuze's conception of philosophy itself. The Psychoanalysis of Sense shows that Deleuze was not merely aware of the debates animating the Lacanian School during the 1960s: he sought to contribute to them. (...) Emphasising his appropriation of the work of post-Lacanian Serge Leclaire, Collett explains how Deleuze constructed a more singular and immanent theory of the linguistic structure of the unconscious - granting the erogenous body a larger structuring role. (shrink)

The debate over rival conceptions of political legitimacy tends to focus on first-order considerations—for example, on the relative importance of procedural and substantive values. In this essay, I argue that there is an important, but often overlooked, distinction among rival conceptions of political legitimacy that originates at the meta-normative level. This distinction, which cuts across the distinctions drawn at the first-order level, concerns the source of the normativity of political legitimacy, or, as I refer to it here, the grounds of (...) political legitimacy. If we focus on the grounds of political legitimacy, there are three main conceptions of political legitimacy: will-based, belief-based, and fact-based conceptions. I present an objection to each of those main conceptions and defend a hybrid account of the grounds of political legitimacy. (shrink)

The macro-level debate on the economic impact of multinational enterprises (MNEs) is still unsettled. This article explores micro-level evidence by examining what Fortune Global 250 firms themselves report about their economic impact. Such reporting embodies corporate attempts to account for their economic implications, in addition to the environmental and social aspects of their activities that have traditionally received more attention in the context of corporate responsibility. Firms' reports turn out to provide a rich illustration of the mechanisms through which MNEs (...) (can) affect economic development (including sheer size, technology transfer, and backward linkages) and of how such impacts are being operationalized and measured. The authors test which MNEs are most likely to disclose information on the various mechanisms and find that it is influenced by region, sector, and size but not by profitability. Implications of this exploratory study for research and practice are discussed. (shrink)

In this paper we focus on the difficulty in judging what is called covert hate speech. We emphasize the need for a multidimensional framework when analysing covert hate speech in situ, and the need to consider the multifaceted dimension of such speech act to assess its performativity. To explain such need, we apply the test of the Rabat Plan of Action and adopt a pragmatic perspective to analyse a specific covert hate speech act, considering such speech act as both an (...) expressive and potentially performative act. We focus on the prosecution of hate speech against a woman holding a poster during an anti-safe pass demonstration. Her poster inferred a link between conspiracy theory, the government strategy addressing the Covid pandemic and many other collectives, primarily the Jewish community. Our analysis of the sign adopts a radically context-dependent methodology combining a pragmatic approach and the Rabat Plan of Action test. We then contrast our analysis with the legal and media perspective on the issue. We conclude by suggesting the benefit of integrating pragmatic analysis with application of normative set of rules such as the Rabat Plan of Action test, even though the fluidity of meaning always poses a challenge to any authority tasked with judging such communicative events. (shrink)

Pascal’s wager has received the attention of philosophers for centuries. Most of its criticisms arise from how the wager is often framed. We present Pascal’s wager three ways: in isolation from any further apologetic arguments, as leading toward a regimen intended to produce belief, and finally embedded in a larger apology that includes evidence for Christianity. We find that none of the common objections apply when the wager is presented as part of Pascal’s larger project. Pascal’s wager is a successful (...) argument in its proper place. However, the most interesting features of our first two presentations of the wager turn out to be either irrelevant or missing from our reading: infinite utility and the relativity of evidence. The successful wager is a boring wager. Still, this study shows us how the wager might profitably be incorporated into different apologetic contexts and why it often can’t. (shrink)

On ne peut que saluer la parution de cet ouvrage important, dont le sous-titre exprime d’emblée l’originalité et la force : élucider le sens de la notion aristotélicienne de dynamis par l’étude de son histoire ou de sa genèse (cf. p. 7 et 32). Cette méthode de travail répond à la volonté de débrouiller les fils d’une ambiguïté bien connue de la notion aristotélicienne de puissance, qui se partage entre deux acceptions principales, explicitées en Metaph. Θ : d’une part, la (...) puissance kata kines... (shrink)

This paper deals with Aristotle’s criticism of a metaphysical principle of evil. On several occasions in the Metaphysics, Aristotle notes that some of his predecessors, e.g. Empedocles and Plato at least, have been forced to admit the existence of a principle of evil, for the very same reasons that led them to define the good as a principle. Needless to say Aristotle too admits that the good belongs to the range of principles, but he obviously does not think he is (...) committed to the same position concerning evil. This article tries to determine why it can legitimately be so, i.e. on which grounds Aristotle’s conception of the good as a principle can save him from having to make room for its contrary too among the principles. In the first part of this paper, I define the two main logical rules which, according to Aristotle, led Empedocles and Plato to admit the evil among the principles : the rule of homogeneity between a principle and its effect, and the rule of contrary principles. In the two following parts, I study how Aristotle manages to avoid the undesirable consequences of these logical rules : first, by providing a definition of an absolutely first principle which has no contrary ; second, by providing a new definition of the relation of contrariety itself, thanks to which the hypothesis of a principle of evil turns to be both useless and contradictory. (shrink)

Le mouvement des femmes contre les agressions sexuelles pointe la responsabilité du patriarcat, d’un système de classement binaire qui organise la domination des hommes sur les femmes. La sociologie française préfère parler d’une domination masculine, expliquée par la volonté des hommes de s’approprier la fécondité des femmes pour Françoise Héritier, ou de construire un monde de l’entre-soi pour Pierre Bourdieu. Pour Carol Gilligan et Naomi Snider, le patriarcat est une force de hiérarchisation genrée qui s’applique à toutes les relations sociales, (...) mais qui rencontre aujourd’hui une résistance, celle des femmes et celles de toutes les minorités sexuelles. (shrink)

Στή σκηνή πού παριστάνεται στήν « κύλικα τῆς Μερόης », πολλοί θέλησαν νά διακρίνουν τόν βασιλέα Βόκχορι, τόν βασιλέα Σολομῶντα ἤ καί τόν Αὔγουστο μέ ἀλληγορία τῆς Αἰγύπτου. Ή κύλικα ἀνακαλύφθηκε στή βασιλική νεκρόπολη, στά περίχωρα τῆς πυραμίδας τοῦ βασιλέα Άμενιχαμπάλ, καί βρίσκεται σήμερα στό Museum of Fine Arts τῆς Βοστώνης. Οἱ συγγραφείς τοῦ ἄρθρου ἐρμηνεύουν τή σκηνή σάν ἐπεισόδιο ἀπό τήν τραγωδία τῆς Μήδειας : ὁ Κρέων καθισμένος στό ἕδρανο καί ἕνας φρουρός πού ἑτοιμάζεται νά ἐκτελέσει τίς διαταγές του, (...) ἡ Μήδεια μέ τά παιδιά της καί ὁ παιδαγωγός πού πρόκειται νά τά περιμαζέψει. Ή κύλικα τοποθετεῖται μέσα στά πλαίσια τῆς τορευτικῆς τέχνης στις ἀρχές τῶν αὐτοκρατορικῶν χρόνων καί συζητείται ή προέλευση ἀπό ἐργαστήριο τῆς 'Αλεξάνδρειας ἤ τῆς Ρώμης. Προτείνεται νά συνδεθεῖ μέ τήν ἀποστολή ἀπό τό Νέρωνα ἐκστρατευτικοῦ σώματος στή Νουβία, τό 61 μ.Χ. καί νά θεωρηθεῖ σάν διπλωματικό δῶρο, προσφορά τοῦ αὐτοκράτορα στό βασιλέα τῆς Μερόης. (shrink)

Dans la culture occidentale, le paysage est le plus souvent reconnu comme une portion d'espace appréhendée à distance, selon un point de vue unique; l'étendue, telle qu'elle est circonscrite par le regard, l'emporte sur la temporalité qui se trouve négligée. Or, le territoire est affecté de changements incessants, que ceux-ci soient d'origine naturelle ou déterminés par l'intervention des hommes; les dispositifs techniques, qu'ils s'agissent des "machines de locomotion" ou des "machines de vision" contribuent à conférer une dimension temporelle à la (...) perception des sites. Le lieu est également le réceptacle des émotions, des souvenirs ou des anticipations de chacun. Paysages en devenir traite de la manière dont un certain nombre d'oeuvres artistiques contemporaines transcrivent et accompagnent les variations et les évolutions du paysage. (shrink)

Cet ouvrage collectif réunit quatorze contributions d’anthropologues, dont les recherches ont intégré la dimension du genre dans les questions de parenté. Elles ont été menées dans des aires géographiques très diverses, tant en Amérique du Sud et du Nord qu’en Asie. Les études se sont centrées, pour la plupart, sur l’observation de sociétés restreintes contemporaines, tout en faisant référence à l’histoire et aux mythes qui déterminent leur mode de construction du genre. En réunissant tous ce...

Political decisions have the potential to greatly impact our lives. Think of decisions in relation to abortion or climate change, for example. This makes political legitimacy an important normative concern. But what makes political decisions legitimate? Are they legitimate in virtue of having support from the citizens? Democratic conceptions of political legitimacy answer in the affirmative. Such conceptions righly highlight that legitimate political decision-making must be sensitive to disagreements among the citizens. But what if democratic decisions fail to track what (...) there is most reason to do? What if a democratically elected government fails to take measures necessary to protect its population from threats related to climate change? Peter argues that the legitimacy of political decisions doesn't just depend on respect for the citizens' will; and defends a novel hybrid conception of political legitimacy, called the Epistemic Accountability conception. According to this conception, political legitimacy also depends on how political decision-making responds to evidence for what there is most reason to do. Grounds for Political Legitmacy starts with an overview of the main ways in which philosophers have thought about political legitimacy, and identifies the epistemic accountability conception as an overlooked alternative. It then develops the epistemic accountability conception of political legitimacy and discusses its implications for legitimate political decision-making. Considering the norms that should govern political debate, it examines the role of experts in politics, and probes the responsibilities of democratically elected political leaders and as well as of citizens. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to provide an epistemological argument for why public reasons matter for political legitimacy. A key feature of the public reason conception of legitimacy is that political decisions must be justified to the citizens. Critics of the public reason conception, by contrast, argue that political legitimacy depends on justification simpliciter. Another way to put the point is that the critics of the public reason conception take the justification of political decisions to be based on reasons (...) that are agreement-independent. I call such reasons objective reasons. Public reasons are, however, agreement-dependent. The debate between defenders and critics of a public reason conception of political legitimacy focuses on whether objective reasons or public reasons are the right basis for the justification of political decisions. My defense of the public reason conception will grant to its critics that there are objective reasons and allow that such reasons can affect the legitimacy of political decisions. But I will show, focusing on epistemic constraints on the justification of political decisions, that it does not follow that the justification of those decisions is necessarily agreement-independent. In the epistemic circumstances that are typical of political life, public reasons will be required for the justification of political decisions. (shrink)

As a Catholic nun, to suggest Jacqueline Pascal as autonomous might at first glance seem contradictory. We show that her moral deference to the divine is not at all forfeiting her autonomy, but that aligning her own law with God's law is to align her own law with rationality itself, that is, the laws of nature. Her theoretical structure begins with a theory of virtue—viz., how and to whom we have an obligation to be moral. For her, acting in accordance (...) with cultural restrictions or following church orders against her own conscience would be living by the laws of another and so not acting autonomously. Pascal would not live by other's laws, regardless of whether her actions conform to the categories by which society expected her to act. The framework for her laws laid in Pascal's understanding of self-governance: if she wants to act virtuously then she must autonomously follow God's law by making it her own through the sentiments of her heart. Thus, she cannot live by the laws of men, but by the laws of her human nature and in alignment with a rightly ordered universe, that is, God's law, which we show parallels with a Stoic framework of autonomy. (shrink)

The continuous spontaneous localization (CSL) model modifies Schrödinger's equation so that the collapse of the state vector is described as a physical process (a special interaction of particles with a universal fluctuating field). A consequence of the model is that an electron in an atom should occasionally get “spontaneously” knocked out of the atom. The CSL ionization rate for the 1s electrons in the Ge atom is calculated and compared with an experimental upper limit for the rate of “spontaneously” generated (...) x-ray pulses in Ge. This gives, for the first time, an experimental constraint on the parameters which characterize this model (the GRW parameters and the relative collapse rate of electrons and nucleons). It is concluded that the values assigned to the GRW parameters by GRW may be maintained only if the coupling of electrons to the fluctuating field is 0.35% or less than the coupling of nucleons, suggestive of a mass-proportional (and therefore gravitational) collapse mechanism. For other allowed values of the GRW parameters, it is still argued that nucleons should collapse more rapidly than electrons. (shrink)

Fabienne Peter on whether difficult political decisions should be made by experts.

While Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus is quite rightly considered a fully fledged response to May ’68 and as one with the radical politics of the 1970s, their 1980 follow-up, A Thousand Plateaus, has tended to provoke a more perplexed reaction. In this article, I will argue that we can nonetheless extract a definite line of argumentation serving a precise political end if we relate the text back to Foucault's mid-1970s output on power/knowledge. In particular, I will emphasise Deleuze and Guattari's (...) appropriation of the Foucaultian notion of dispositif via their concept of the assemblage, the former being understood as a concrete articulation of lines of power, knowledge and subjectivation, as well as the Foucaultian ‘diagram’, the latter being a more abstract or indeterminate stage of the dispositif whose relative indeterminacy, for Deleuze and Guattari, offers a means of escape. I will show that, making room for the assemblage's opening back onto the relative indeterminacy of its generative stages, the assemblage incorporates into itself a more immanent alternative to the dispositif that is focused on collective desire rather than power, within which resistance becomes a primary and generative dimension rather than a counter-attack. In the first section, I will outline Foucault's approach to power, knowledge and subjectivation, emphasising Deleuze's reading of Foucault though without trying to overdetermine my reading in this way. Next, I will turn to the Foucaultian diagram. In the third section, I will focus on A Thousand Plateaus, demonstrating how the notion of assemblage developed in this text responds to and builds upon Foucault's approach to power/knowledge and subjectivation in order to reconceive resistance. (shrink)

Ken Binmore casts his naturalist theory of justice in opposition to theories of justice that claim authority on the grounds of some religious or moral doctrine. He thereby overlooks the possibility of a political conception of justice−a theory of justice based on the premise that there is an irreducible pluralism of metaphysical, epistemological, and moral doctrines. In my brief comment I shall argue that the naturalist theory of justice advocated by Binmore should be conceived of as belonging to one family (...) of such doctrines, but not as overriding a political conception of justice. (shrink)

Journal of Economic Methodology, Volume 19, Issue 2, Page 165-167, June 2012.

Dans son interprétation du Timée, Calcidius rapporte un exposé de Numénius sur la manière dont Pythagore, suivi par Platon, conçoit l’origine du monde. À cette occasion, Numénius identifie la matière à trois entités : la dyade indéterminée, la nécessité et l’âme mauvaise du monde évoquée dans les Lois (fr. 52 Des Places). L’article montre en quoi ces trois analogies permettent de comprendre le rôle qu’il attribue à la matière dans l’origine du mal, et ce même avant l’incarna­tion de l’âme, d’après (...) les témoignages sur sa pensée fournis par Jamblique (fr. 43 Des Places) et Énée de Gaza (fr. 49 Des Places). Il analyse le contexte philo­sophique et exégétique de ces analogies, montrant combien la pensée de Numénius est profondément ancrée dans les cadres fournis par l’école platonicienne, tant pour ses choix herméneutiques que pour ses débats avec les autres écoles (le stoïcisme essentiellement ici). (shrink)

Des contributions interrogeant, depuis l'Antiquité jusqu'à la pensée contemporaine, la notion de degrés de l'être, une option théorique récurrente dans l'histoire de la métaphysique, qui permet d'accueillir la diversité des êtres en y discernant des nuances, un ordre ou des structures, mais qui implique également que certaines choses seraient davantage des êtres que d'autres. ©Electre 2023.

This paper deals with the Aristotelian notion of topical matter mentioned in a few passages of the Metaphysics and ascribed to the celestial bodies. Taking into account the metaphysical context of each occurrence of this notion, it tries to determine for what metaphysical use this notion has been developed and what impact it has on the ousiological analysis of the celestial substances. It suggests that the notion of topical matter, although intended to provide a convenient tool that makes possible a (...) metaphysical, i.e. universal study of sensible substances, by allowing to subordinate every sensible substance to similar principles, in fact prevents celestial substances from being defined as ordinary hylomorphic compounds and leads to conceive them as a particular type of substances. (shrink)

La publication par John Toland de l’Enquête sur la vertu ou le mérite de Shaftesbury semble indiquer une complicité, voire même une convergence de doctrine entre les deux penseurs. Or, cette convergence apparente masque la spécificité de chacun concernant surtout les concepts de nature et de communauté. Plus précisément, l’orientation de la nature par rapport à la communauté humaine ne se fait pas pour les mêmes raisons. Alors que Shaftesbury inclut nature et communauté dans une même perspective pour aboutir à (...) l’analyse du lien social, Toland forge un projet de connaissance théorique de la nature qui l’affranchit de la définition essentiellement pratique de toute communauté humaine en général. (shrink)

An interdisciplinary examination of the legacies of the global 1968 uprisings from the vantage point of the current crisis of neoliberal hegemony.

While the pedagogical benefits of experiential learning are well known, classroom technology is a more contentious topic. In my experience, philosophy instructors are hesitant to embrace technology in their pedagogy. A great deal of this trepidation is justified: when technology serves only to replicate existing methods without contributing to course objectives, it unnecessarily adds extra work for the instructor and can even be a distraction from learning. However, I believe, if applied appropriately, technology can be used to positively enhance the (...) philosophy classroom experience in ways that are not possible in traditional classroom settings – including new ways of experiential learning. To demonstrate this, I offer a case study of implementing virtual reality as a tool for experiential learning of philosophy. I show how having students “walk a plank” off a skyscraper in VR allowed me to exceed my course objectives for my Existentialism course in particularly effective ways that I could not have done without this technology. (shrink)

Publié en janvier 2020, cet ouvrage de Claude Langlois puise son origine dans un « sentiment d’urgence, urgence civique et toute séculière, d’apporter [sa] part de vérité » (p. 7) après la publication, le 20 août 2018, de la Lettre au peuple de Dieu du pape François. Directeur d’étude à l’École pratique des hautes études, Claude Langlois est historien et sociologue, spécialiste du catholicisme contemporain. Il s’empare du sujet de la pédophilie après avoir déjà fait une incursion croisée dans...

Name der Zeitschrift: Klio Jahrgang: 97 Heft: 1 Seiten: 389-391.

Un lieu d’accueil spécifique pour des femmes d’un quartier de Marseille a développé un dispositif social expérimental qui repose sur une approche globale et transversale des problématiques. La situation économique, sociale, culturelle de ces femmes les retranche dans la précarité et demande une réponse adaptée, qui tienne notamment compte de la dimension psychologique des difficultés qu’elles rencontrent. Elles sont pour la plupart issues de l’immigration, voire primo-arrivantes. Le Centre ressources femmes s’est entouré de partenaires de terrain spécialisés et s’est appuyé (...) sur des dispositifs qu’il a fait évoluer en fonction de la spécificité du public. La philosophie de ce dispositif global d’accompagnement repose avant tout sur le respect de la temporalité de chaque individu et de sa singularité en offrant un espace favorisant la construction identitaire dans un pays qui est culturellement étranger. (shrink)