Philosophical discussions on the ways that death makes life meaningful and sacred.

Comme ses Cinq méditations sur la beauté, ce texte de François Cheng est né d'échanges avec ses amis, auxquels le lecteur est invité à devenir partie prenante. Il entendra ainsi le poète, au soir de sa vie, s'exprimer sur un sujet que beaucoup préfèrent éviter. Le voici se livrant comme il ne l'avait peut-être jamais fait, et transmettant une parole à la fois humble et hardie. Il n'a pas la prétention de délivrer un "message" sur l'après-vie, ni d'élaborer un (...) discours dogmatique, mais il témoigne d'une vision de la "vie ouverte". Une vision en mouvement ascendant qui renverse notre perception de l'existence humaine, et nous invite à envisager la vie à la lumière de notre propre mort. Celle-ci, transformant chaque vie en destin singulier, la fait participer à une grande Aventure en devenir. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread. (Jacques Anatole François Thibault).

This article is a plea for the idea of society in sociological theory. Even though the industrial national societies no longer exist, the successive crises that we have encountered show that we need a general concept to account for social life. Thus sociology should be enabled to remain a moral and political philosophy.

本书内容包括:绪论、证明对象、举证责任、审理集中化与证据适时提出主义、证据调查、质证、认定证据等。.

We provide a Kripke semantics for a STIT logic with the "next" operator. As the atemporal group STIT is undecidable and unaxiomatizable, we are interested in strict fragments of atemporal group STIT. First we prove that the satisfiability problem of a formula of the fragment made up of individual coalitions plus the grand coalition is also NEXPTIME-complete. We then generalize this result to a fragment where coalitions are in a given lattice. We also prove that if we restrict the language (...) to nested coalitions the satisfiability problem is NP-complete if the number of agents is fixed and PSPACE-complete if the number of agents is variable. Finally we embed individual STIT with the "next" operator into a fragment of atemporal group STIT. (shrink)

Review of Insensitive Semantics, by H. Cappelen and E. Lepore.

Aims and Scope -/- This volume brings together original papers by linguists and philosophers on the role of context and perspective in language and thought. Several contributions are concerned with the contextualism/relativism debate, which has loomed large in recent philosophical discussions. In a substantial introduction, the editors survey the field and map out the relevant issues and positions.

This chapter contains sections titled: How should philosophers be read? The dangers of philosophy Poverty in the apocalyptic march of history The extolling of liberty An economic thought Conclusion.

Afrosofian Knowledge and Cheikh Anta Diop wrestles with the cultural, epistemological, ethical, and geopolitical conundrums of our contemporary world. It argues that sofia is a psychological, discursive, social, and civilizational sickle constantly sharpened to weed imperial-colonial, mental, linguistic, racist, and barbaric alienation.

Hundreds of clinical trials of potential treatments and vaccines for the “coronavirus 19 disease” (COVID-19) have been set up in record time. This is a remarkable reaction to the global pandemic, but the absence of a global coordination of clinical research efforts raises serious ethical concerns. Some COVID-19 patients might carry the burden of clinical trial involvement even though their trial cannot be completed as researchers are competing for patients. A shortage of medicines can occur when existing drugs are diverted (...) for clinical trials. Research ethics committees are overburdened with multiple applications. A multitude of trials can also overstretch medical staff and risk neglecting non-COVID-19 patients. And finally, conflicting conclusions from a multitude of heterogeneous trials might lead to delays in public health decisions about life-saving issues. These challenges are made worse by the unpredictable evolution of epidemics, the active involvement of political decision-makers in scientific issues and the pressure of social media globally. While freedom to conduct research must be safeguarded, global health emergency situations would greatly benefit from effective international coordination mechanisms for clinical research. (shrink)

In my experience, conflict and other forms of being stuck or ‘stuckness’ are related to actions, behaviour or events. If we consider a narrative paradigm, they happen in the realm of the Bruner’s ‘landscape of action’. Efforts at escaping these problem-saturated experiences mostly resort to replacing these actions, habits, modes of operation or rules with a different set of rules, without first reflecting on the intentionality or ‘why’ behind the actions. Most often this only serves to perpetuate the problem. This (...) article will attempt to show that alternating between various initiatives in the ‘landscape of action’ provides only temporary respite to the problem, if any; that the intentionality behind these actions needs to be revisited and that contemplative practice facilitate such reflection on intentionality. This is therefore an exercise in reflecting on intentionality or even purpose, that is, a teleological question. This process traverses the dimensions of ‘what’, ‘how’ and ‘why’, referring to the biology of human decision-making in the process of doing so. This article posits that this reflection may be facilitated by contemplative practices such as mindfulness and reflecting on soul. (shrink)

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.

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).

The assertion that every definable set has a definable element is equivalent over to the principle, and indeed, we prove, so is the assertion merely that every Π2‐definable set has an ordinal‐definable element. Meanwhile, every model of has a forcing extension satisfying in which every Σ2‐definable set has an ordinal‐definable element. Similar results hold for and and other natural instances of.

Les philosophies de Schopenhauer et de Bergson, comme d’ailleurs celle de Nietzsche, parlent d’une réalité qui se trouverait derrière des apparences utiles à la pratique. Dans les trois cas, cette réalité est désignée en termes de volonté. On aurait donc affaire, chez Schopenhauer et chez Bergson, à deux « ontologies de la volonté ». Mais il reste à savoir ce que les deux auteurs entendent par « volonté ». Deux différences majeures doivent être signalées : pour Schopenhauer, la volonté est (...) la chose en soi. Bergson refuse la distinction kantienne entre phénomènes et chose en soi. D’autre part, pour Schopenhauer, l’expérience de la volonté est souffrance. Bergson, en revanche, la caractérise comme joie. Dans ces conditions, l’ontologie de la volonté prend une figure différente dans les deux cas. Ce sont ces deux figures que nous tentons de déterminer. (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)

Current philosophical accounts of causation suggest that the same causal assertion can have different meanings. Yet, in actual social-scientific practice, the possible meanings of some causal generalisations intended to support policy prescriptions are not always spelled out. In line with a standard referentialist approach to semantics, we propose and elaborate on four questions to systematically elucidate the meaning of causal generalisations. The analysis can be useful to a host of agents, including social scientists, policy-makers, and philosophers aiming at being socially (...) relevant. To illustrate our proposal, we analyse the complexities related to the meaning of causal generalisations in the context of a concrete case of economic research which is explicitly intended to guide public policy, namely, the OECD research on the causes of unemployment. (shrink)

This essay argues that the West could glimpse its own unthought-of by ‘de-ontologicalizing’ its thought, and that a fruitful way to do this is to draw on Chinese thought. In particular, the author develops herein the notion of between ( l’entre), which is less a locus than a dynamic passage between states or extrema. This contrasts with the (static) Western notion of Being, where a thing either is or is not. Unlike a thing, between has no being, no nature, no (...) properties. For the Greeks life was, similarly, an alternation of emptiness (desire or want) and fullness (satiety). Instead, life is in flux between those extrema. Accordingly, between is not an (ontological) intermediary but processual, like the through of the Tao. The author explores between in the Chinese conception of landscape as mountain(s)-water(s) and applies between to urban renewal, underscoring its value as a tool for the de-ontologizing of Western thought. (shrink)

A defence of the 'pragmatic' theory of anaphora (which stresses the analogy between anaphora and deixis) against an argument put forward by Gareth Evans.

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)

Albert Camus déplorait une coupure irrémédiable entre l'esprit de l'homme et un univers n'apportant aucune réponse à sa quête de sens, d'où sa révolte contre l'absurde. Cette attitude est contredite par les sagesses orientales ou ésotériques qui, depuis l'aube des temps, mènent à l'harmonie entre l'être et l'univers. L'histoire humaine comporte une extrême diversité de modes de vision de l'existence, les uns séparateurs, les autres monistes. Dans l'approche du réel, conciliant les voies rationalistes - science, philosophie, etc. - et les (...) voies qui ne font pas appel à la raison - mysticisme, arts, praxis les plus diverses - le suBréalisme nous amène à vivre de façon équilibrée et heureuse l'illusoire divorce entre les mondes "intérieur" et "extérieur". En ce sens, une révolution de la pensée scientifique occidentale marque le XXe siècle : après plusieurs millénaires d'un dualisme dont les pensées d'Aristote et de Descartes sont les plus représentatives, la science évolue vers la complexité et l'unicité, nous donnant à réaliser que tout est relié à tout dans le tout. Intégrant entre autres voies de la connaissance les enseignements de cette révolution, le suBréalisme propose ce fil d'Ariane qui nous achemine vers la vie spirituelle et un nouvel enchantement du monde. Sous la forme de dialogues éclairants et attrayants, François Tard nous invite à pratiquer une philosophie qui sollicite tous les domaines de l'esprit et non plus le seul intellect (sensations, émotions, intuitions, etc.). Dans un style limpide, il fait oeuvre d'initiation philosophique, scientifique et sémantique. Multipliant les citations de grands auteurs, il apporte aux "littéraires" aussi bien qu'aux "matheux" de nombreuses pistes de réflexion, incitant tout un chacun à travailler du cerveau droit autant que du gauche. Un livre vif, empli d'humour, à lire et relire... et faire lire par vos proches. (shrink)

Cher***, Il est temps de te rapporter le « filage », cette gestuelle que j'ai donnée durant mon séjour aux « îles d'Auvergne », en cette vitalité printanière de fin de mai. Le résultat final, en frange d'univers, est autonome, inattendu, énigmatique et incongru. La structure, arrivée ce matin, repartira sous peu. Anecdote improbable dans le paysage, l'on marche à lui, en cette montagne, et je te donne ci-dessous la scène finale, en son décor naturel : A l'entrée, l'invite : (...) L'appel s'étend loin sur la - Résidence numérique — François Villais. (shrink)

Although a reasonable understanding of corporate social responsibility exists, one dimension remains largely ignored. That is, the cultural impacts of corporations, or the bearing, at various levels of their business models, activities, and outcomes on the value systems and enduring beliefs of affected people. We introduce the notion of corporate cultural responsibility. The way corporations address CCR concerns can be reflected according to three stances: cultural destructiveness, cultural carelessness, and cultural prowess. Taken sequentially, they reflect a growing comprehension and increasingly (...) active consideration of CCR concerns by corporations. In turn, we explicitly address issues related to the complex question of determining the cultural responsibilities of corporate actors; specify key CCR-related conceptualizations; and lay a foundation for discussions, debates, and research efforts centered on CCR concerns and rationales. (shrink)

In this article, I revisit Pierre Bourdieu's concept of habitus and contrast it with Herbert Simon's notion of bounded rationality. Through a discussion of the literature of economic sociology on status and Fligstein's political-cultural approach, I argue that this concept can be a source of fresh insights into empirical problems. I find that the greater the change in the social environment, the more salient the benefits of using habitus as a tool to analyze agents' behavior.

MamaKaïom – Émergence d'une nymphe d'homo-crocodilus Performance dansée, cocon et chrysalide réalisés pour la résidence d'artistes de Saint-Ilpize – Neuvième édition Natacha Liège, Francois Villais et Franck Watel Compte tenu de l'actualité et de la prise de conscience que la nature se fragilise, la résidence se propose d'explorer un écosystème imaginaire pour illustrer le vivant du futur. Les Espèces en Voie d'Apparition sont issues de croisements humains, animaliers, minéraux et - Résidence numérique – François Villais.

Noting how an hypothesis can turn into a truth simply by being repeated, this article examines carefully the basis for the date normally given for this sermon and the frailty of the textual tradition that is the basis for the Morin edition of this sermon. After a careful analysis of the factors that might help to date it, it is assigned an uncertain date. It remains, however, plausible to think that it was delivered ad mensam Cypriani. The analysis of the (...) transmission of this sermon includes several new manuscripts, a new stemma and several general observations about its transmission. This article concludes with comments about the content and a new edition of the Latin text of the sermon. (shrink)