Paying careful attention to the multiple meanings the word ‘institution’ has in French, this article traces the development of institutional psychotherapy’s clinical practice. Through a close reading of Jean Oury’s seminars and clinical writing alongside other key members of the GTPSI (Groupe de travail de psychothérapie et de sociothérapie institutionnelles or Working Group on Institutional Psychotherapy and Socio- therapy), this article argues that institutional psychotherapy’s specificity is in the way in which the clinical and the political are able to connect (...) their praxis. (shrink)

Adopting a communication as constitutive of organization (CCO) perspective on ethics and corporate social responsibility (CSR) invites us to create the conditions of a dialogue, discussion, or debate between various stakeholders, who can then try to confront their respective positions on a given issue, and possibly come to a decision regarding how a situation should be evaluated and/or responded to. As shown in this article, getting human stakeholders to voice their concerns about a specific situation is a way not only (...) to rationally confront multiple viewpoints on what should be done about it (à la Habermas) but also to allow elements of this situation to reveal themselves in a discussion. This is why any ethical decision has to experience a form of undecidability and surprisability. When beliefs and opinions can be called into question, it means that participants are ready to become attentive to what a situation might surprisingly call for. Communication is therefore a matter of ventriloquism, as human participants should also be considered the means by which elements of a situation manage to express themselves in a discussion, dictating specific courses of action over others. This concretely means that multiple voices can be heard in such a scene: not only the voices of the human stakeholders who speak to each other but also the voices of facts, principles, future generations, ecosystems, populations that are made to say things through these various turns of talk. (shrink)

Are the things of this world given to thought? Are things really meant to be known, to be taken as the objective manifestations of a transcendental conditioning power? The Western philosophical tradition, according to François Laruelle, presupposes just this transcendental constitution of the real--a presupposition that exalts philosophy itself as the designated recipient of the transcendental gift. Philosophy knows what things really are because things--all things--are given to philosophy to be known. Laruelle's trenchant essays show how this presupposition controls (...) even the ostensibly radical critiques of the philosophical tradition that have proliferated in the postmodern aftermath of Nietzsche and Heidegger. For these critiques persist in assuming that the disruptive other is in some way given to their own discourse--which shows itself thereby to be still philosophical. An effective critique of philosophy must be non-philosophical. It must, according to Laruelle, suspend the presupposition that otherness is given to be known, that thought has a fundamentally differential structure. Non-philosophy begins not with difference, not with subject and object, but with the positing of the One. From this axiomatic starting point, non-philosophy takes as its material philosophy, rethought according to the One. The non-philosophy project does not, like so much postmodern philosophy, herald the end of philosophy. It takes philosophy as an occasion to raise the question of another kind of thought--one that, instead of differentially relating to the world that it presupposes, asserts that it is ultimately, in the flesh, at One with what it can never know. Publisher's note. (shrink)

Les considérations physiologiques sont étrangères, en tant que telles, au projet de l'Ethique, et sans doute, à l'ensemble des préoccupations philosophiques de Spinoza. Au début de Ia seconde partie de l'Ethique, Spinoza précise clairement: “j'expliquerai seulement ce qui peut nous conduire comme par la main à la connaissance de l’ Arne humaine et de sa béatitude suprême”. Pourtant, le livre ne laisse pas de contenir une révision intéressante du modèle mécaniste que Descartes appliquait à l'explication du corps humain; il contient (...) surtout une hypothèse sur Ia structure organique, qui, nous le croyons, a joué un rôle de modèle pour un certain type de théorie de l'être vivant. Ce type de conception se trouve d'abord dans l'iatromécanisme de Boerhaave et de ses disciples au XVIIIe siècle, mais les séquelles en sont identifiables jusque dans Ia philosophie biologique contemporaine. (shrink)

François Recanati; IV*—Contextual Dependence and Definite Descriptions, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 87, Issue 1, 1 June 1987, Pages 57–74, h.

La philosophie bergsonnienne a rendu le monde de ses contemporains moins opaque, les aidant à lui trouver un sens. Si la France cartésienne coïncide avec les partisans de la démocratie parlementaire ancrée à gauche, celle de Bergson recrute ses plus gros bataillons dans la droite nationale, conservatrice, mais également dans une gauche antiparlementaire, révolutionnaire.

I distinguish, and discuss the relations between, five types of context-shift involving indexicals. For 'intentional' indexicals - indexicals whose value depends upon the speaker's intention - we can shift the context more or less 'at will', by manifesting one's intention to do so. For other indexicals we can shift the context through pretense. Following a number of authors, I distinguish two types of context-shifting pretense, corresponding to two sets of linguistic phenomena. The fourth type of case is that of expressions (...) which are not really indexical, but perspectival, and for which we do not need to appeal to the notion of context-shift in order to account for their shifty behaviour. The fifth category I introduce and discuss is that of 'shiftable indexicals'. Do we need it, given that we already have the other four categories? My answer is a qualified 'yes'. (shrink)

Cette note de lecture a déjà paru sur Poezibao. L'actualité éditoriale de la poésie, le 22 avril 2022. Pendant ce temps, pendant tout le bruit du monde, Benoît Gréan poursuit sa perforation poétique, et passe cette fois, avec Sonnets des satiétés, clairement de trace à empreinte, en vis-à-vis direct de la représentation du monde. Cette notion de l'impression-forte, de l'empreinte, du saisissement instantané glacé aussi, d'une puissance de langage en miroir de celle de - Brèves.

RésuméEst présentée une démonstration élémentaire et intuitive de ľ inégalité de Bell, démonstration accessible aux non‐spécialistes et en particulier aux philosophes. Cette inégalité, dont les prémisses sont dégagées, est valable pour toutes les théories à variables cachées locales. Or, la mécanique quantique la viole. Les conséquences qui on peut tirer de cette violation sont envisageées.

La métaphore est un instrument indispensable pour les analyses scientifiques. Mais elle nécessite un usage réflexif qui en précise le statut car celui-ci peut être divers et n’est pas sans effet sur la théorie comme sur diverses pratiques. Ainsi, les analystes et acteurs des transports ont usé – et probablement abusé – du recours à la physique des fluides pour leurs métaphores. Aujourd’hui, les développements de la physique, par exemple dans les domaines des fractales ou de la percolation, ouvrent des (...) perspectives nouvelles et prometteuses. Cette évolution montre aussi que les chercheurs en sciences sociales auraient intérêt à renouveler les métaphores qu’ils emploient et qui sont souvent assez archaïques. Ainsi, la référence à des espaces à n dimensions et à l’hypertexte permet de faire rebondir les analyses de Georg Simmel, bridées par le recours à une géométrie plane trop sommaire.Metaphors are indispensable tools for scientific investigation. They should be used in such a way that their status as metaphor is clear, however, for their various uses are not without consequence for theory and practice. In the area of transportation, analysts and practitioners have drawn metaphors from the physics of fluids, but recent developments in the theories of fractals and percolation offer promising perspectives. Generally speaking, as these developments suggest, social scientists stand to benefit from renewing their current metaphors, which are often quite archaic. Thus, Georg Simmel’s analyses – which are constrained by the reference to plan – stand to be revitalized by a reference to N-dimensional spaces and to hypertext. (shrink)

The advent of science brought about a radical division between the means of expression it made possible and the one it disavowed: in the centuries preceding its establishment such a break was not possible, even though it was often desired.Medical treatises of the Renaissance that analyze the plague and melancholy used categories that were not different from those used by theologians (and sometimes doctors) as far as their reference to the Devil was concerned. Since it is no less a question (...) of the imagination in one case than in the other, we can try to associate these three “objects”-three figures of misfortune-and treat them as though they belonged to the same level of expression. Such a decision is not at all arbitrary; it proceeds, completely a posteriori, from the observation of a noticeable proximity between them, aside from their diversity: it is as though they offered variations on a certain number of themes, variations requested by a logic of the imaginary that we shall try to elucidate here by showing the several categories that serve as a point of departure for the functioning of that logic. (shrink)

Should we consider irony as a good thing for democratic life? As it is portrayed in the classical texts through which we know Socrates, eirōneia appears as a humble manifestation of self-consciousn...

This book is a close reading of Jacques Lacan’s seminal essay, “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason Since Freud, ” selected for the particular light it casts on Lacan’s complex relation to linguistics, psychoanalysis, and philosophy. It clarifies the way Lacan renews or transforms the psychoanalytic field, through his diversion of Saussure’s theory of the sign, his radicalization of Freud’s fundamental concepts, and his subversion of dominant philosophical values. The authors argue, however, that Lacan’s discourse is (...) marked by a deep ambiguity: while he invents a new “language,” he nonetheless maintains the traditional metaphysical motifs of systemacity, foundation, and truth. (shrink)

This study deals with money, especially coins, and intends to circumscribe the place of coinage among cultural objects. Money cannot be described without a semiotics of culture. We shall consider the definitions of value in order to define the evaluative foundations of meaning, and discuss the recurring parallel between signs and coins. Using a theory of anthropic zones, we will then attempt to determine the conditions necessary for the creation of objects of value, which should lead to a typology of (...) the different orders of fascination. (shrink)

Independently of the generative and enunciative theories, the dynamic structuralism of the Saussurian tradition has made it possible to pose the problem of semiosis, understood as the individuation of the sign from a structural germ. At a higher level of complexity, the processes that preside over this individuation seem to also govern the composition of texts. Literary and pictorial examples make it possible to detect them; they confirm that reflection on the arts is a major area of general and comparative (...) semiotics. (shrink)

This paper investigates the influence of family control on the quality of labor relations. Using French workplace-level data, we find that family firms experience less frequent and less intense labor conflicts. Moreover, family involvement tends to offset the negative effect of labor disputes on corporate performance. We examine whether specific family patterns are conducive to better labor relations. We distinguish active from passive family control, eponymous from non-eponymous family businesses, and break down family firms into founder-controlled and descendant-controlled companies. It (...) appears that the benefits of family control are not attributable to a given type of family firm. These findings suggest that peaceful labor relationships are a peculiar attribute that families generally bring to corporations and extend our understanding of the “family effect” on organizational performance. (shrink)

The dating of the beginning of the Third Sacred War. The interpretation of the Delphic accounts revisited. The chronology proposed by CID II for the Third Sacred War is not as assured as may appear at first sight. One must keep in mind that the reconstructions proposed there constitute no more than one possibility among others. The numbering of the pylées provides an excellent example : J. Bousquet connects it to the levying of the phocidian fine in the period after (...) the Peace of Philokrates, but other readings remain possible, even preferable. Moreover, the dating of the occupation of the sanctuary to the end of the archonship of Herakleios is based on the testimony of Pausanias, on this point very much subject to caution, as well as a very slanted reading of CID II 10 and CID II 31. Only the absence of a reunion of the college under Aristoxenos in the autumn appears to constitute a certain indicator of the phocidian occupation of the sanctuary. (shrink)

Can we solve the problem of the essential indexical, and account for de se belief, by appealing to 'relativized propositions' (functions from rich indices to truth-values)? According to John Perry, we cannot. This paper offers a detailed examination and a critique of Perry's argument.