Thérèse d’Avila a marqué de sa doctrine et de son ardeur l’Église des trois derniers siècles, au point qu’elle est devenue le modèle par excellence de la religieuse cloîtrée tout à la fois contemplative et fondatrice, écrivaine de premier rang, épistolière infatigable et maîtresse spirituelle. Suivant de près le livre de Marcelle Auclair, qui fit date dans le domaine des études thérèsiennes (La Vie de sainte Thérèse d’Avila, la dame errante de Dieu, Le Club du meilleur livre, 1953) et tirant...

The objective of the article is to understand how a happiness engineering device centered on knowledge-relationship allows for « transformational training ». The methodology is based on a survey of semi-structured interviews and on a thematic content analysis of the dissertations. It was conducted with CPE trainees and teacher trainees in the Prevention-Health-Environment course. The results analyze the types of knowledge-relations in the realization of the experimental device by the trainees and the formative dimensions associated with learning in such an (...) engineering. (shrink)

Peter Hanks and Scott Soames both defend pragmatic solutions to the problem of the unity of the proposition. According to them, what ties together Tim and baldness in the singular proposition expressed by ‘Tim is bald’ is an act of the speaker : the act of predicating baldness of Tim. But Soames construes that act as force neutral and noncommittal while, for Hanks, it is inherently assertive and committal. Hanks answers the Frege–Geach challenge by arguing that, in complex sentences, the (...) force inherent in the content of an embedded sentence is cancelled. Indrek Reiland has recently objected to Hanks’s proposal that it faces a dilemma: either force cancellation dissolves the unity of the proposition secured by the cancelled act of assertion, or Hanks’s proposal reduces to Soames’s. In this paper, I respond to Reiland by offering an analysis of force cancellation which gets rid of the alleged dilemma. The proposal is based on a set of distinctions from speech act theory : between two senses of ’force’, two types of act, and two types of context. The role of simulation in force cancellation is emphasized, and connections drawn to broader issues such as the evolution of complex language. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that that polysemy is a two-sided phenomenon. It can be reduced neither to pragmatic modulation nor to ambiguity, for it is a mixture of both. The senses of a polysemous expression result from pragmatic modulation but they are stored in memory, as the senses of an ambiguous expression are. The difference with straightforward ambiguity is that the modulation relations between the senses are transparent to the language users: the senses are felt as related – they (...) form a family of senses. In other words, whereas two homonymous expressions are different expressions, with the same phonological realization but distinct meanings, a polyseme is a single expression, i.e. a semantic as well as a phonological unit. It has one meaning, which should not be confused with the separate senses which it contributes in context. Different ways of thinking of that unitary meaning will be discussed, and consequences drawn for the debate between more or less radical versions of Contextualism. (shrink)

The objective of this article is to explain how the integration of new oderlies in geriatric organizations in Quebec must be considered as a problematic process in terms of occupational safety and health. This article is based on data from a qualitative study conducted in 2012 in two geriatric organizations in Quebec. We show how the new recruits having to respect two organizational standards: one concerning compliance with the prescribed workload; the other relates to the quality of work. We show (...) how prudent strategies hold a major role in the protection of new recruits to the risks in the organization. Finally, we present the causes playing a role in the weakening of the transmission process of these strategies. (shrink)

It has often been observed that the meaning of a word may be affected by the other words which occur in the same sentence. How are we to account for this phenomenon of 'semantic flexibility'? It is argued that semantic flexibility reduces to context-sensitivity and does not raise unsurmountable problems for standard compositional accounts. On the other hand, it would be a mistake to assume too simple a view of context-sensitivity. Two basic forms of context-sensitivity are distinguished in the paper. (...) The second form — sense modulation — shows that, in a sense, there is more in the meaning of the whole than can be derived from the meanings of the parts. (shrink)

L'idée de philosophie expérimentale révèle l'originalité de Diderot à partir de sa manière de pratiquer la philosophie. Inscrite dans une division sociale du travail intellectuel pensée à partir de Bacon, elle se tourne résolument vers les sciences expérimentales, notamment la chimie. Devenant un point de vue philosophique, celle-ci éclaire plusieurs traits centraux de la pensée diderotienne, notamment sa critique des sciences physico-mathématiques, son matérialisme et sa philosophie du vivant.

Derrida states at the beginning of Geschlecht III that at stake is the question of sexual difference, one that is referred in Heidegger’s 1953 essay on Trakl to a twofoldness that precedes the opposition of sexual duality, a duality which, according to Derrida, neutralizes sexual difference. I follow the development of what Derrida also called the “dream” of “another sexual difference,” one that would not be ruled by the opposition of the two. Derrida’s guiding interpretation in Geschlecht III is that (...) Heidegger privileges “gathering” and the reference to the “one” in this thinking of difference, and of sexual difference, thereby neutralizing difference. Drawing a contrast between difference as polysemy and difference as dissemination, I attempt in what follows to discuss Derrida’s interpretation, raising questions concerning some of his readings with respect to the motifs of dispersion, dissemination, polysemy, and gathering. (shrink)

A number of distinct (though related) issues are raised in the debate over Contextualism in the philosophy of language. My aim in this chapter for the Cambridge Handbook of Pragmatics is to disentangle them, so as to get a clearer view of the positions available (where a 'position' consists of a particular take on each of the relevant issues simultaneously).

Derrida often insists that ethics must be the experience and encounter of a certain impossible. A proposition all the more troubling, as it is proposed by Derrida in the context of a return precisely to the conditions of possibility of ethics. It will appear that returning to the possibilities of ethics implies a return to its limits, to its aporias, which are both constitutive and incapacitating, possibilizing and impossibilizing. The purpose of this paper is to begin exploring this aporetic structure (...) of ethics and to identify how it is tied to the impossible. I will pursue this inquiry by reconstituting how Derrida appropriates Heidegger's expression of "possibility of the impossible," and by reconstituting the aporias of the law, of moral decision, of responsibility, and of an ethics of hospitality as welcome of the event of otherness. (shrink)

Dans les Premiers principes métaphysiques de la science de la nature, le principe d’articulation entre métaphysique et physique apparaît obscurci par le registre amphibolique du texte de la préface. L’étude successive de trois motifs amphiboliques permet d’introduire une nouvelle interprétation de cette articulation chez Kant : le problème de la spécification catégoriale qui anime le système des principes de la première Critique surdéterminerait le rapport entre ce système des principes et les Premiers principes métaphysiques de la science de la nature. (...) Ainsi, ce rapport ne doit s’entendre ni comme une application mécanique des principes et catégories de la philosophie transcendantale, ni comme une tentative arbitraire pour accommoder la physique newtonienne à la table des catégories, mais comme une spécification dont la modalité (modélisante) est héritée des particularités systémiques du registre critique. L’apparente instabilité de cette articulation est enfin référée à la situation inédite de la modélisation (mathématique) qui triomphe définitivement en sciences naturelles avec l’émergence du paradigme newtonien. Les Premiers principes se donnent alors à lire comme l’envers métaphysique de la modélisation mathématique en physique et révèlent la métaphysique implicite corrélative à une telle modélisation physique. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with the modeling of neural systems regarded as information processing entities. I investigate the various dynamic regimes that are accessible in neural networks considered as nonlinear adaptive dynamic systems. The possibilities of obtaining steady, oscillatory or chaotic regimes are illustrated with different neural network models. Some aspects of the dependence of the dynamic regimes upon the synaptic couplings are examined. I emphasize the role that the various regimes may play to support information processing abilities. I present (...) an example where controlled transient evolutions in a neural network, are used to model the regulation of motor activities by the cerebellar cortex. (shrink)

I propose in this paper to explore Heidegger's thought of selfhood in Contributions to Philosophy through a close reading of key paragraphs. It is often assumed that after the "turning" in his thinking, when Heidegger engages in a thought of Ereignis no longer centered on human Dasein as the locus of the meaning of being, the reference to selfhood would fade away. However, a close reading of the Contributions reveals that a renewed thinking of selfhood, of what Heidegger calls "self-being" (...) , is enacted precisely at the same time that the subjectivistic understanding of the self is more radically abandoned. I attempt to delineate how Heidegger undertakes to rethink selfhood no longer from the paradigm of the ego, but from the event of Ereignis , or enowning. (shrink)

Mental files serve as individual or singular concepts. Like singular terms in the language, they refer, or are supposed to refer. What they refer to is not determined by properties which the subject takes the referent to have (i.e. by the information stored in the file), but through relations to various entities in the environment in which the file fulfills its function. Files are based on acquaintance relations, and the function of the file is to store whatever information is made (...) available through the relations in question. I offer a typology of files. The most important distinction is between proto-files and conceptual files. In contrast to proto-files, conceptual files can host not only information derived through the specific relation on which the file is based, but also information about the same object gained in some other way. In this framework identity comes into the picture twice. (i) Identity is presupposed when two pieces of information occur in the same file. Such 'presumptions of identity' ground the linguistic phenomenon of de jure coreference, which takes place when two singular terms, or two occurrences of a singular term, are associated with the same file. (ii) Judgments of identity work by linking two distinct files, thereby enabling information to flow freely between them. This corresponds to de facto coreference. (Linking is not merging ; identity judgments have the effect of merging files only when the files belong to a very specific category, that of 'encyclopedia entries' -- a type of conceptual file based on a higher-order relation rather than on a specific acquaintance relation.) In the last part of the paper I will discuss, and attempt to rebut, two objections to the mental-file account. According to the first objection, the account is circular ; according to the second objection, de jure coreference cannot be accounted for it in terms of identity of the associated mental files because de jure coreference is not a transitive relation. (shrink)

Plato’s works have been the object of countless interpretations and recuperations ever since Greek antiquity. In the context of prenazi Germany, the writer Hans F.K. Günther published a work in defence of eugenic theories (aiming to improve man through authoritarian laws), allegedly based on the work of the Athenian philosopher and entitled Platon als Hüter des Lebens (“Plato as Protector of Life”). The present article tries to set forth what is at stake in that propaganda piece, its historical context, as (...) well as the disquieting implications of such an “appropriation” of classical philosophy to purely political ends. (shrink)

Le sujet qui perçoit, ressent, se remémore, ou imagine a conscience de son activité mentale, et notamment du mode — perceptif, mnésique ou autre — de ses états. Le mode des états expérientiels va de pair avec une relation spécifique (variable selon le mode) du sujet à ce que l'état représente. Par exemple, le sujet qui se remémore se trouve (normalement) dans une certaine relation à la scène remémorée : il a perçu celle-ci dans le passé. La thèse principale de (...) l'article est que le sujet conscient d'être dans un état donné s'auto-attribue implicitement cette relation avec ce que l'état représente. Cette auto-attribution implicite (immunisée aux erreurs d'identification) constitue la présence du sujet «comme sujet » dans le contenu de ses expériences, distincte de sa présence « comme objet » lorsqu'il fait lui-même partie de la scène représentée. [English abstract] The subject who perceives, feels, remembers or imagines is conscious of his or her experiential states and, in particular, of their ‘mode'. The mode is what enables us to classify experiential states into types such as perceptions, memories, etc., quite independent of the content of the state (what is perceived, remembered, etc.). It is argued that the mode M of an experience determines that (if all goes well) a certain relation RM holds between the subject of the experience and what the experience represents. For example, the subject who remembers a scene normally stands in a certain relation to the scene in question, that of having perceived it in the past. The article's main thesis is that the subject of an experiential state implicitly self-ascribes the relevant relation to what the state represents. This implicit self-ascription (which is immune to error through misidentification) corresponds to the presence of the subject « as subject » in the content of his or her experience. (shrink)

A key issue in cognitive sciences is to understand the cognitive bases of human tool use. Answers have been provided by two competing approaches. The manipulation-based approach assumes that humans can use tools because of the ability to store sensorimotor knowledge about how to manipulate tools. By contrast, for the reasoning-based approach, human tool use is based on the ability to reason about physical object properties. Recently, Caruana and Cuccio proposed a kind of reconciliation, based on the distinction between three (...) types of abductive inference, involving a different contribution of motor and cognitive elements: Automatic abduction, abduction by selection and creative abduction. This perspective offers new interesting avenues. Nevertheless, it is also subject to several theoretical and epistemological limitations, which make it in its present form inappropriate for the study of the cognitive bases of human tool use. This article aims to discuss these limitations. (shrink)

La relation à l'ontologie et à la pensée de l'être, qui passe de la revendication au rejet, est au cœur de l'impossible rapport de Lacan à la philosophie. L'être joue un rôle décisif dans l'élaboration des catégories du symbolique, de l'imaginaire et du réel, qu'il concerne toutes les trois à des titres et à des moments divers, de même que pour nombre de signifiants majeurs du chemin de Lacan. Essentiel pour la rectification et l'innovation que comporte le retour à Freud, (...) il intéresse la spécificité de la psychanalyse dans sa pensée, son éthique, son expérience - son discours. C'est un recours précieux sinon indispensable pour la démarcation de ses fins d'avec celles de la psychologie, de la médecine et de toute thérapie sociale. Incontournable tant parce qu'il est dans nos langues que par ses élaborations philosophiques et théologiques, l'être sert à Lacan à cerner des points de l'expérience qui excèdent toute la terminologie psychanalytique ; ainsi l'amour, l'interprétation, la fin de l'analyse - le parlêtre enfin. On suivra ici une partie de ce chemin, dont chaque moment garde sa valeur, hors de tout système - il n'y a pas de système de Lacan -, localement, dans ses avancées, ses constantes et ses ruptures. (shrink)

Les relations de la machine et de la pensée sont aussi anciennes qu'énigmatiques, toujours en attente d'une solution. C'est un mythe dont s'abreuve la philosophie. Il est ici repris en fonction de notre conjoncture, la science-fiction avec Matrix, la logique et l'ordinateur avec Turing, enfin l'élaboration théorique avec le cognitivisme et la non-philosophie. Ces essais ont été élaborés dans un même esprit au sein d'une équipe dont les jeunes philosophes partagent le désir commun de renouveler le style philosophique par une (...) discipline de philo-fiction. -/- The relationship between the machine and thought is as old as it is enigmatic, always awaiting a solution. It's a myth that philosophy feeds on. Here it is revisited in the context of our current situation: science fiction with Matrix, logic and the computer with Turing, and theoretical development with cognitivism and non-philosophy. These essays have been drawn up in the same spirit by a team of young philosophers who share a common desire to renew the philosophical style through a discipline of philo-fiction. (shrink)

Le théâtre, contrairement au cinéma, serait par excellence l’art de la coprésence entre acteurs et spectateurs. Pourtant, la récente apparition de robots sur la scène vient semer un doute : l’acteur serait-il menacé d’être bientôt éclipsé par des machines qui ont « les allures de la vie sans avoir la vie »? L’humain serait-il l’objet d’une nouvelle mise en cause radicale, un siècle après Maeterlinck, Jarry et Craig? L’auteur aborde ces questions en s’appuyant sur la pièce emblématique Sayonara de Oriza (...) Hirata (2012) qui met en scène un robot humanoïde. Il analyse dans quelle mesure on peut rapprocher cette proposition scénique de l’art de la marionnette, et en quoi le devenir-acteur du robot réactualise, ou déplace, la partition entre vivant et artificiel sur la scène. (shrink)