Those of us who take skepticism seriously typically have two relevant beliefs: (a) it’s plausible (even if false) that in order to know that I have hands I have to be able to epistemically neutralize, to some significant degree, some skeptical hypotheses, such as the brain-in-a-vat (BIV) one; and (b) it’s also plausible (even if false) that I can’t so neutralize those hypotheses. There is no reason for us to also think (c) that the BIV hypothesis, for instance, is plausible (...) or probably true. In order to take skepticism seriously it’s sufficient to hold (a) and (b); one need not hold (c). Indeed, philosophers who accept (a) and (b) never endorse (c). Show me a philosopher who suspects that he is a brain in a vat and I’ll show you someone who is deranged! That’s one thing that bothers undergraduates in philosophy. They object: why on earth do some philosophers take the BIV hypothesis to pose any threat at all to our beliefs given that those very same philosophers think that there’s no real chance that the BIV hypothesis is true? Sure, the BIV hypothesis is formally inconsistent with my belief that I have hands, so if the former is true then my belief is false. But so what? Why should that bare inconsistency matter so much? Is this strange attitude amongst philosophers the result of some logic fetish infecting the philosophical community? It is sometimes said that the skeptical hypotheses are not only inconsistent with our beliefs but are explanatory of our experiences, which is supposed to make them more of a threat. But students aren’t fooled: although the skeptical hypotheses may attempt to explain why our experience is as it is, it’s the kind of attempt appropriate for science fiction movies that are all special effects and virtually no plot. No one with any sense of reality will take the evil demon hypothesis to be even tenuously explanatory. (shrink)

Many first-time mothers (primiparous) within UK National Health Service (NHS) settings require an obstetric intervention to deliver their babies safely. While the antepartum period allows time for conversations about consent for planned interventions, such as elective caesarean section, current practice is that, in emergencies, consent is addressed in the moments before the intervention takes place. This paper explores whether there are limitations on the validity of consent offered in time-pressured and emotionally charged circumstances, specifically concerning emergency obstetric interventions. Using the (...) legal framework of the Mental Capacity Act,Montgomery v. Lanarkshire Health Board(2015) andMcCulloch v Forth Valley Health Board(2023), we argue that while women have the capacity to consent during labour, their autonomy is best supported by providing more information about instrumental delivery (ID) during the antepartum period. This conclusion is supported by some national guidelines, including those developed by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, but not all. Further, we examine the extent to which these principles are upheld in modern-day practice. Data suggest there is relatively little antepartum information provision regarding ID within NHS settings, and that primiparous women do not report a thorough understanding of ID before labour. Based on these results, and bearing in mind the pressures under which NHS obstetric services currently operate, we recommend further research into patient and clinician perceptions of the consent process for ID. Pending these results, we discuss possible modes of information delivery in future practice. (shrink)

Studies of protests against mobile phone masts typically concentrate on the potential health risks associated with mobile phones and their masts. Beck’s Risk Society has been particularly influential in informing this debate. This focus on health, however, has merely served to limit the discussion to those concerns legitimated by science conveniently ignoring other disputed issues. In contrast, this article contends that it is necessary to use a wider notion of risk to understand fully how the current political emphasis on active (...) citizenship may have contributed to the protests. It examines how neoliberal governmentality and the move to empower people are in contention with one another. The study draws upon case material from a small village protest group in United Kingdom and argues that much of the tension arises from the encouragement of the public on one hand to become active citizens but on the other to be passive consumers. (shrink)

In epistemology the nagging voice of the sceptic has always been present, whispering that 'You can't know that you have hands, or just about anything else, because for all you know your whole life is a dream.' Philosophers have recently devised ingenious ways to argue against and silence this voice, but Bryan Frances now presents a highly original argument template for generating new kinds of radical scepticism, ones that hold even if all the clever anti-sceptical fixes defeat the traditional (...) sceptic. Sharp, witty, and fun to read, Scepticism Comes Alive will be highly provocative for anyone interested in knowledge and its limits. (shrink)

Hand-lettered inspirational quotes paired with contemporary illustrations for more than a year of Motivational Mondays, You’ve Totally Got This! has got you covered. Sometimes all we need is a little nudge: this book serves as inspiration for those facing new beginnings, a sudden change, or just a whole lot to do. Great for grads, creatives, and entrepreneurs: every spread is like a greeting card, so this delightful volume serves as a stand-alone championing or as the perfect finishing touch to (...) a gift. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Fashioning the "Order of Saint Clare." A Rule illuminated by Neri da Rimini:Princeton University Library MS 83 in contextFrances Andrews (bio) and Louise Bourdua (bio)KeywordsRule of Urban IV, Clare of Assisi, Urbanist Clare nuns, Manuscript illumination, Neri da RiminiIntroduction1This interdisciplinary essay is an investigation of an illuminated, early 14th-century copy of the rule of the "Order of Saint Clare" issued by Pope Urban IV in 1263, now in Princeton. (...) It examines the unprecedented visual language adopted in a female Franciscan context to authorize their way of life, and places the manuscript in context, exploring how it relates to other early representations showing Saints Francis and Clare together and documenting the production of this and comparable early rule manuscripts, including a previously unpublished copy now in Venice.2Thousands of manuscript copies of rules of life were produced in and for late medieval religious houses and their members, good numbers of which remain extant, though these are scarce remnants of what must originally have been produced. Rules do sometimes appear in extant library inventories,3 but unlike individual books destined for personal [End Page 75] prayer or study and ultimately deposit in a conventual library, their primary purpose was as legal texts binding all who professed them.4 In their iterative function, read and reread, alone or aloud in the community, they were comparable to liturgical books, though they were not for use in church nor kept in the sacristy.5 In the rule of Urban IV for the Order of Saint Clare investigated here, chapter twenty-four required that the rule be read and explained annually by the visitator, while the final chapter emphasized that it be read once each fortnight lest the sisters neglect it.6 This sort of repetition must have ensured most nuns knew the rule by memory, having first encountered its details as novices, with no need to own the text. Copies were perhaps in the hands of the abbess, a visitator, or other monastic superior, or kept in the chapter room or refectory, ready for routine use.7 Nonetheless, wealthier women may have had a copy prepared or received one as a gift, either on entering the religious life or on becoming a superior responsible for its observance.8Princeton University Library, Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, MS 83, contains a Latin, [End Page 76] professionally made and illuminated copy of the text designed to substitute existing rules, including the 1219 Forma Vitae issued by Cardinal Hugolino and the rule of Innocent IV from 1247.9 Clare's own hard-fought for rule, approved in 1253, was initially for the San Damiano community alone and was followed in subsequent decades by a very small group of houses.10 The making of Urban IV's rule, adopted instead by hundreds of communities, has been much discussed, but the survival of this early illuminated copy has gone unnoticed outside the library catalog.11 The manuscript includes the earliest extant sequence known to us showing Clare of Assisi receiving the rule from the pope and in turn taking the profession of her sisters, images designed to legitimize the new order by building ties to its "founder" while yet acknowledging its papal origins. Among extant imagery it is pioneering. The large, illuminated initials have been recognized as painted by Nerius da Rimini and his workshop but the case has never been set out and PUL MS 83 has [End Page 77] not been included in accounts of this artist's production.12 Better known as "Neri," he is a comparatively well-documented manuscript illuminator whose signatures sometimes survive on his work, a rare practice at this date.13Historians of medieval women religious are by now familiar with books produced by women themselves.14 A beautiful manuscript, for example, containing Bonaventure's Legenda Maior of Saint Francis, the Vita beati Antonii and documents relating to the Portiuncula indulgence was written in Latin in 1337 by two sisters, Elspet von Amberk and Katerina von Purchausen, perhaps living in the Paradies convent in Diessenhofen (Switzerland).15 Other women have been identified as skilled illuminators.16 The prolific activity of... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The 2003 Meeting of the Society for Buddhist-Christian StudiesFrances S. AdeneyThe 2003 meeting of the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies was held in Atlanta, Georgia, 21-22 November 2003. This year's theme was "Overcoming Greed: Christians and Buddhists in a Consumeristic Culture." During the first session panelists Paula Cooey, Valerie Karras, and John Cobb, whose paper was read by Jay McDaniel, presented Christian views and Stephanie Kaza gave a Buddhist response. (...) The second session mirrored the first with panelists Kenneth Kraft, David Barnhill, and Judith Simmer-Brown presenting Buddhist views on the theme and Paul Knitter responded with a Christian analysis.Cooey began the discussion by outlining her thesis that overcoming greed depends on overcoming fear. She asserted that people buy out of fear thus perpetuating a system of greed. The consequences of fear support the cultural myth of upward mobility—there is no way to go but up. The exploitation of fear then produces goods benefiting those at the top of the economic system. This system also produces consequences for human rights as cultural fear leads to laws that thwart due process, for example, the Patriot Act.An alternative Christian view understands desire to be culturally produced—sin upsets the natural order; God redeems. Christian transformation requires dissent against the underlying greed that supports the cultural system.Christianity arose as a movement of dissent, a countercultural movement. That trajectory of dissent has continued through the centuries. Although early Calvinists were noted for linking personal wealth with election, the Mennonites and Anabaptists created better models for practicing dissent. Those communities are based in an economy of grace, supported by an underlying ethic of the ability to give as a gift of grace. This economy, for Christians, is mediated by Jesus of Nazareth and allows for transformation toward becoming greedy for God.Valerie Karras illumined the differences in Christian traditions by her analysis of the difference in anthropology between Eastern and Western Christian theologies. The community model of Eastern Christianity is hostile to the individualism of Western consumerism. Instead, in this model, greed is recognized as a fallen passion, the consequence of separation from God. The two aspects of greed in this view are [End Page 231] acquisitive lust: the desire for control, and desire for the physical acquisition of things.Karras used Clement of Alexandria and John Chrysostom as examples of theologians that criticized the rich and encouraged Christians to use their wealth for the poor. In this view, overcoming greed involves a spiritual process. Virtue can be cultivated by a proper use of wealth, which in itself has no moral content. It is the misuse of wealth that indicates deeper spiritual problems. Some of those spiritual problems can be alleviated by asceticism: celibacy, almsgiving, fasting, and prayer. Such exercises can provide a means to master the vices—greed, in this case, being the vice at hand.John Cobb's paper argued that a theology of consumerism is deeply embedded in our culture. That theology runs counter to traditional Western Christian teaching that consuming more deprives others. The question one must ask is, Does consumption enhance or detract from the common good? Traditional arguments that too much consumption deprives others were rendered obsolete by the industrial revolution. The new problem is how can demand keep up with production. The argument here is that increased consumption benefits others by preventing downturns in the economy.Unfortunately, Cobb argues, the spiritual costs to this pattern of consumption are tremendous. A class of exploited peasants now produces more goods, but has a better society been created? Increasing poverty in two-thirds of the world, global warming, dehumanizing advertising, and the unsustainability of keeping production at current levels press the issue. Human survival depends on changing consumption patterns. The elite must be forced to give up control and we must recover and emphasize the traditional Christian interpretation of greed as a cardinal sin.To accomplish this, Cobb recommends rejecting consumerism in our personal lives, developing local sustainability projects, and demonstrating another world possibility—another way to live that leads to human flourishing. Buddhist and Christian emphases on overcoming consumerism are complimentary and together can make possible the deep changes that are... (shrink)

As an example of Aristophanic literary criticism the portrayal of Agathon in the prologue of theThesmophoriazusaehas been rather overshadowed by the poetry contest of theFrogs. This is largely because more can be said about parody when something substantial of the author parodied has survived.1Before many of the specific difficulties of the Agathon scenes we have no alternative but to confess our ⋯πορ⋯α.On the other hand, we need not despair of understanding the general point of these scenes, and in this (...) the most helpful method is that of identifying those Aristophanic techniques which shaped them. This method has already taken us a good way forward, so that there is no need now to argue for the structural integrity of these scenes2or their thematic relevance to the play.3Accordingly, in this paper I will discuss the portrayal of Agathon in relation to typical Aristophanic techniques. My main concern, however, will be with the significance of the different conceptions of literature raised in the course of the parody, Agathon being satirized in turn as an inspired poet, a craftsman poet and an effeminate poet. I hope to show that, for Aristophanes, Agathon's effeminacy is as much a reflection of his art as of his personality. (shrink)

The second international 'Chromatiques whiteheadiennes' conference was devoted exclusively to the exegesis and contextualization of Whitehead's Science and the Modern World. In order to elucidate the meaning and significance of this epoch-making work, the Proceedings are designed to form a 'companion' volume. With one paper devoted to each of its thirteen chapters, the Proceedings aim, on the one hand, to identify the specific contribution of each chapter to Whitehead's own research program -- that is to say, to put its (...) categories into perspective by means of an internal analysis -- and, on the other hand, to identify its global impact in the history of ideas. (shrink)

Imagine that there exists a good, essentially omniscient and omnipotent being named Jove, and that there exists nothing else. No possible being is more powerful or knowledgable. Out of his goodness, Jove decides to create. Since he is all-powerful, there is nothing but the bounds of possibility to prevent him from getting what he wants. Unfortunately, as he holds before his mind the host of worlds, Jove sees that for each there is a better one. Although he can create any (...) of them, he can't create the best of them because there is no best. Faced with this predicament, Jove first sorts the worlds according to certain criteria. For example, he puts on his left worlds in which some inhabitants live lives that aren't worth living and on his right worlds in which every inhabitant's life is worth living; he puts on his left worlds in which some horrors fail to serve an outweighing good and on his right worlds in which no horror fails to serve an outweighing good. (We encourage the reader to use her own criteria.) Then he orders the right hand worlds according to their goodness and assigns to each a positive natural number, the worst of the lot receiving '1', the second worst '2', and so on. Next, he creates a very intricate device that, at the push of a button, will randomly select a number and produce the corresponding world. Jove pushes the button; the device hums and whirs and, finally, its digital display reads '777': world no. 777 comes into being. (shrink)

Since the Fall of 1993, at the Centre Interdisciplinaire de Recherche sur l'Apprentissage et le D/span>veloppement en /span>ducation of the Universit/span> du Qu/span>bec /span> Montr/span>al, two mathematicians and one philosopher have collaborated to design and develop a research project involving philosophy, mathematics and sciences. Previous observations in the classroom had led the researchers to realize that, within the school curriculum, children like some subject matters and dislike others. Most of them usually succeed in arts, physical education and language arts, but (...) many have difficulties in succeeding in mathematics. Why? On the one hand, as Matthew Lipman advocates, the school curricula are not sufficiently "meaningful" for children. On the other hand, some studies in the field of mathematics suggest that there are myths and prejudices about mathematics in primary schools and that the school system is partly responsible for this. Indeed, the school system does not invite children to express emotions in class about mathematics nor does it favor creativity. It does not allow dialogue among peers about mathematical concepts and problems, nor the construction of mathematical knowledge by the students themselves. (shrink)

While traditional seating (also known asfixed seatingorfixed classroom) remains the preferred classroom seating arrangement for teachers, a new type of seating arrangement is becoming more common in schools: the flexible classroom (also known asflexible seating). The purpose of this type of arrangement is to meet the needs of students by providing a wide variety of furniture and workspaces, to put students at the center of learning, and to allow them to make choices based on their preferences and the objectives of (...) the task at hand. This study aimed to examine the influence of flexible seating on the wellbeing and mental health of elementary school students. This article presents the results of exploratory research conducted in Quebec among Grade 5 and 6 students comparing the wellbeing and mental health of students in fixed and flexible classrooms. The study was conducted with 107 students in three Grade 5 and 6 flexible classrooms (n = 51) and three Grade 5 and 6 fixed classrooms (n = 56). It is based on a quasi-experimental, quantitative design with post-test only and a control group. The groups were matched based on natural conditions (i.e., from a convenience sample). Furthermore, the study included a gender-differentiated analysis for each group. The results showed that flexible classroom seating had a positive influence on the girls’ wellbeing and mental health. In contrast, for the boys, fixed classroom seating was most conducive to their wellbeing and mental health. However, our study has some limitations that are discussed in the article. (shrink)

This paper applies social-relational models of moral standing of robots to cases where the encounters between the robot and humans are relatively brief. Our analysis spans the spectrum of non-social robots to fully-social robots. We consider cases where the encounters are between a stranger and the robot and do not include its owner or operator. We conclude that the developers of robots that might be encountered by other people when the owner is not present cannot wash their hands of responsibility. (...) They must take care with how they develop the robot’s interface with people and take into account how that interface influences the social relationship between it and people, and, thus, the moral standing of the robot with each person it encounters. Furthermore, we claim that developers have responsibility for the impact social robots have on the quality of human social relationships. (shrink)

This volume collects nine essays published by Peter van Inwagen between 1977 and 1995. Part I features, among other things, modal skepticism with respect to ontological arguments and arguments from evil. Part II addresses certain tensions Christians may feel between modern biology, critical studies of the New Testament, and the comparative study of religions, on the one hand, and Christian orthodoxy, on the other. Part III deploys a formal logic of relative identity to model the internal consistency of the (...) orthodox doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation. In what follows, we summarize and reflect on five essays. (shrink)

Emmanuel Levinas has been Professor of Philosophy at the Sorbonne and the director of the Ecole Normale Israelite Orientale. Through such works as "Totality and Infinity" and "Otherwise than Being", he has exerted a profound influence on twentieth-century continental philosophy, providing inspiration for Derrida, Lyotard, Blanchot and Irigaray. "The Levinas Reader" collects, often for the first time in English, essays by Levinas encompassing every aspect of his thought: the early phenomenological studies written under the guidance and inspiration of Husserl and (...) Heidegger; the fully developed ethical critique of such totalizing philosophies; the pioneering texts on the moral dimension to aesthetics; the rich and subtle readings of the Talmud which are an exemplary model of an ethical, transcendental philosophy at work; the admirable meditations on current political issues. Sean Hand's introduction gives a complete overview of Levinas's work and situates each chapter within his general contribution to phenomenology, aesthetics, religion, politics and, above all, ethics. Each essay has been prefaced with a brief introduction presenting the basic issues and the necessary background, and suggesting ways to study the text further. (shrink)

This article proposes a dissection of the double strategy of France on the archipelago of the Comoros. On the one hand, metropolitan France is in the position of an occupying power on the island of Mayotte a twofold one: to prevent the demand for independence of Mayotte from reemerging, and to give its citizens the feeling that being colonized is better than being de-colonized, despite their under developed situation. The people even must come to accept that the gendarmes hunt (...) down their cousins: a series of crimes against humanity disguised as border patrols, by means of a visa developed since 1995, which is illegal under international law. (shrink)

Phenomenology is a basic philosophical movement belonging to what is called “continental philosophy.” Recently, a new phenomenology has emerged in France. In the period from Levinas and Henry to Marion and Richir, it has become evident that the phenomenon as such cannot be reduced to a mere constitution by intentional consciousness; rather, it must be considered as an event of appearing that establishes itself by itself. This fundamental insight entails important consequences: on the one hand, a new concept of (...) the subject has been elaborated; on the other hand, a new approach to effective reality and objectivity has been developed. Idealism is overcome, transcendentalism is revised and reinterpreted. These changes will certainly have an impact on the destiny of continental philosophy. (shrink)

Gallicanism is specifically related to the Catholic Church of France, and it is a set of ecclesiastical and political doctrines and practices which tried to limit the powers of the Papacy in France in general. In particular, it characterized the situation of the Catholic Church in France at certain periods. The emergence of Gallicanism as a specific idea came about in the 14th century and was first used as a term in 1810. Almost everything expressed by Gallicanism is a distinctive (...) development within the French Catholic Church. Gallicanism was mostly about the riches of the Catholic Church and administrative matters rather than a theological movement. These issues were mostly related to episcopal jurisdiction, appointments of bishops, church properties and revenues, and at the core of all these issues lay the sharing of church revenues. The French Crown began to acquire gains, especially regarding the property and financial income of the church with the weakening of the power of the Papacy. This new situation left the bishops between the popes and the kings, and prepared the ground for the development of Gallicanism in the country. However, Gallicanism did not come around as a separatist movement and did not lead to the separation of the Catholic Church of France from the Roman Catholic Church. Due to the conflicts of interests between the king, parliament and the clergy, Gallicanism could not develop into a monolithic thought or doctrine, it manifested itself in different perspectives. These manifestations have been treated as Episcopal, Parliamentary, and Royal Gallicanism in most academic studies. Each of these different Gallican ideas brought to the fore the institutions indicated in their naming and received support from them. However, all three versions of Gallicanism shared some common ideals. These are the common ideals of different Gallicanisms: (1) the independence of the king of France in worldly affairs, (2) the supremacy of an ecumenical council over the pope, and (3) the restriction of the pope's intervention in the French Catholic Church. Royal Gallicanism aimed to gather the powers snatched away from the Papacy in the hands of the king. Parliamentary Gallicanism shared similar principles with Royal Gallicanism. (shrink)

Greenline parks are typically regions of mixed agricultural,grazing, and forest lands of sufficient scenic and/orecological value to merit conservation and preservationunder a land-use management plan for land largely in privateownership. The Parcs Naturels Régionaux (PNR) are anational system of greenline parks created in France in1967 to protect agriculture and other values in less favoredareas (typically hills or low mountains) suffering depopulationand economic deprivation aggravated by the Common AgriculturalPolicy created under the European Economic Community in 1956with a major objective of self-sufficiency (...) in food production.Two developments contributing to creation of the PNR were themechanization of French agriculture and increasing environmentalawareness in France. The PNR emphasizes rural agriculturaldevelopment, conservation, and recreation, but ecologicalpreservation has increased in importance, as reflected inrecent policy changes. The national parks of the United Kingdomare a system of greenline parks slightly older than the PNR.Recent research has allowed comparative studies of the twosystems, leading to the conclusion that the British NationalParks have suffered from heavy-handed centralized planningthat has alienated local farmers and communities, while thePNR, under more local control, has neglected some of itsconservation and preservation responsibilities. However,recent policy reform promises to improve the PNR throughmore rigorous enforcement of conservation and ecologicalgoals by the central government. (shrink)

continent. 2.1 (2012): 6–21. The French philosopher and novelist Tristan Garcia was born in Toulouse in 1981. This makes him rather young to have written such an imaginative work of systematic philosophy as Forme et objet , 1 the latest entry in the MétaphysiqueS series at Presses universitaires de France. But this reference to Garcia’s youthfulness is not a form of condescension: by publishing a complete system of philosophy in the grand style, he has already done what none of us (...) in the older generation of speculative realists has done so far. His book is sophisticated, erudite, rigorous, imaginatively rich, and abundant in worldly wisdom– despite the author’s conclusion that wisdom does not exist. The quality and scope of Forme et objet took few observers by surprise, since Garcia has been treated as an emerging philosopher to watch across half a decade of Parisian oral tradition. But Garcia was not just the subject of rumor, being already well known to the French public as a writer of fiction. His debut novel, La meilleure part des hommes , 2 was awarded the 2008 Prix de Flore 3 and has already appeared in English as Hate: A Romance . 4 His follow-up novel, Mémoires de la jungle , 5 made clever use of a chimpanzee narrator. Nor was Garcia only published as a novelist before last November: his philosophical study L’Image 6 had already appeared when the author was just twenty-six, a year before he was crowned by the muses at the historic Café de Flore. And then in 2011, just months before the appearance of Forme et objet , Garcia published a widely distributed work entitled Nous, animaux et humains , 7 with its focus on Jeremy Bentham’s ideas about animals. Given this prolific and versatile track record, an optimistic scenario might envisage the young Garcia as one of those combined literary/philosophical talents who appear intermittently in France across the centuries: Jean-Paul Sartre is merely the most famous recent case. While more time is needed to see how Garcia will channel his impressive mental energies, Forme et objet displays such breadth of insight that its author has a good chance to emerge as one of the leading philosophers of his generation. If we accept Aristotle’s dictum that the peak mental age is fifty-one, then to read Garcia’s massive book is to gain some idea of what European philosophy might look like in the futuristic-sounding 2030’s. The present article is confined to Forme et objet . At 486 pages, the work is obviously daunting in size. Indeed, it is even longer than it sounds, given that many of its early sections are printed in a smaller typeface to designate them as supplemental commentary to the main flow of the argument. But while the length of the book reportedly led to delays in French publication, and will probably slow the inevitable appearance of an English translation, the length of the book should not deter interested readers– much of it results from Garcia’s teacherly writing style. Whereas Quentin Meillassoux’s prose displays an arctic economy of means, Garcia’s style is reminiscent of the repeated lessons of oral classroom proceedings. Rarely is the reader given fewer than three or four chances to master an idea before the author moves on to the next. In practice, the style feels welcoming rather than long-winded. Otherwise, the structure of Forme et objet is surprisingly simple. There is a useful Introduction of less than twenty pages. Then comes Book I: Formally , running to approximately 135 pages. Here Garcia outlines the most basic features of a thing “no matter what it is,” or n’importe quoi , an everyday phrase that Garcia shapes into a technical term. This part of the book feels at times like a more amiable version of Hegel’s Science of Logic , a parallel emphasized further by the threefold articulation of its theme: 1. Thing; 2. Thing and World; 3. Being and Understanding. This is followed by the much longer Book II: Objectively , totaling more than 300 pages. It contains sixteen essay-like meditations on specific kinds of objects—including time, animals, humans, history, gender, and death. Here each chapter rolls smoothly into the next, making this second part of the book feel more like a different work of Hegel: The Phenomenology of Spirit . But these are merely analogies. Garcia is no Hegelian, even if the book contains a few dialectical flourishes that seem to reflect his early enthusiasm for the Frankfurt School. Forme et objet ends with a six-page Coda, followed by the usual page of acknowledgments. In what follows, I will briefly summarize each of these four parts of the book before ending with some more general remarks. Before doing so, it will be useful to situate Garcia biographically (as much as I am able) and philosophically. Though Toulouse is his native city, his formative years were spent largely in Algeria, where his family has deep roots. During our sole private conversation, Garcia mentioned that his parents are professors of literature. 8 As a student of philosopher Garcia flourished so early that many of his current ideas date to his teenaged years: “There are sentences in Forme et objet that I wrote when I was seventeen,” he said in response to a question on that cold night on the Canal St.-Martin. I recalled that remark when reading his brilliant account, late in the book, of the central role of adolescence in contemporary culture. While many prodigies blow through their formal academic training without serious obstruction, Garcia’s student memories are rich in tales of isolation and struggle, though equally rich in gratitude for a half-dozen or so exceptional teachers who provided the intellectual space he needed: Meillassoux and Alain Badiou are simply two of the most prominent figures on that list. Though there are many points of agreement between Garcia’s philosophical position and my own, he not only reached his position years before reading my work, 9 he arrived along a rather different path: not through phenomenology, but via the Frankfurt School, which may be one of the reasons for his profound fascination with aesthetics. Garcia’s cultural background is as broad as one could wish: he is no less informed about punk rock and European football leagues than about the spiritualist roots of Bergson’s philosophy. Curious about everything and contemptuous towards nothing, Garcia can be expected to write insightfully on dozens of topics in the years to come. Given that his philosophy is so personally tantalizing in its agreements and disagreements with my own, and given the great internal richness of Forme et objet itself, the present review is no better than a first effort at coming to terms with the challenges posed by this minstrel from the rising generation. This is especially intriguing for older Generation X’ers like me, since confrontation with the younger generation is one of the many themes treated insightfully in Garcia’s book. 1. Introduction Garcia begins in defense of a so-called “flat ontology,” in which all things are equally things. While Roy Bhaskar 10 used this term pejoratively to refer to anti-realist philosophies that flatten everything onto an epistemic plane of human access, Manuel DeLanda 11 (an admirer of Bhaskar) reversed it into the positive principle that all realities are equally realities. Similar notions can be found in the “absistence” of Alexius Meinong, 12 the “irreduction” of Bruno Latour, 13 and my own critique 14 of the undermining/overmining pair. Also noteworthy is Levi Bryant’s use of the term “flat ontology” throughout The Democracy of Objects 15 and his earlier essay “The Ontic Principle.” 16 But for Garcia, flatness is only one face of the cosmos, and one that he ultimately declares to be rather impoverished. Even so, he always remains an advocate of a flat ontology. Insofar as everything is equally something, no matter what it is ( n’importe qui ), everything is equally a thing, equally solitary in its relation with world. This is why his book abounds in those long lists of random, ontologically equivalent entities that Ian Bogost has playfully termed “Latour Litanies.” 17 The first litany in Garcia’s book runs as follows: “We live in this world of things, where a cutting of acacia, a gene, a computer-generated image, a transplantable hand, a musical sample, a trademarked name, or a sexual service are comparable things.” (7) Yet Garcia is frankly dualistic; his flat ontology only lasts until page 159 and the end of Book I (entitled “Formally”), which deals entirely with things that are equally things. Thereafter Garcia turns his attention from things to objects, which are not flat in the least, but engage in hierarchical relations with one another. In agreement with both DeLanda and the speculative realists, Garcia proclaims that his book “proposes to put to the test a thought about things rather than a thought about our thought about things .” (8) Just as ducklings are “imprinted” (9) after hatching and treat the first creature they see as their mother, philosophers are imprinted by the idea with which they begin. Hence, philosophies that begin with human access will never truly find their way back to things. This makes Garcia rather suspicious of twentieth century philosophy, since “the twentieth century—to which in some way this work proposes to bid adieu—has been a period of theorizing modes of access to things rather than things...” (9) Among other possible benefits of the philosophy of things that Garcia proposes, it is fully able to account for thought as a special variant of things, while the reverse is not possible.(10) In Book I of Forme et objet , Garcia’s “things” are so flat, so de-determined, that he is forced to renounce some of the most basic features ascribed to things by most realists. As he tells us in his foreboding third footnote: “We will maintain that the solitude [of things] is less than unity, less than identity, and that it does not imply acceptance (any more than refusal) of the principle of non-contradiction.” (11) In a contemporary world cluttered with too many things, Garcia’s flat and formal plane provides us with some breathing room: “The formal plan of thought enables or re-enables us to cut short all accumulation—whether of knowing, experience, or action—by a simplicity, an impoverished surface...” (13) As Garcia says elsewhere in responding to a Deleuzian critic of the book, his starting point in flat ontology is designed to obstruct the claims of both analytic philosophy and Hegelianism: “Hence, this work seeks to protect each thing—real, imaginary, inconsistent, contradictory—both against Ockham’s Razor and against the Aufhebung or dialectical process.” 18 Yet contrary to the equalizing spirit of many flat ontologies, “we will add to our formal ontology of the equal, an objective ontology of the unequal.” (13) But initially, Garcia joins all flat ontologists in holding that everything is irreducible: “this irreducibility, which we will term the ‘chance’ of each thing... also marks the refusal of a positive thought that reduces things exclusively to natural things, or social things, or historical things, etc.” (15) This irreducible “chance” of a thing emerges as an important technical term in the book, always paired with its inverted brother, the “price to pay” ( prix à payer ). On pages 17-19, we find the only diagrams in the book. What they illustrate is that Garcia wishes to avoid two equally dangerous extremes. The first is the philosophy of substance, featuring the thing-in-itself as a mighty river fed by attributes as if by subordinate tributary streams. This model can be found in many of the classic thinkers of West and East alike. In it, “there is obviously a hierarchization between that which is dragged towards something other than itself, and this other which serves it as an ontological support while supporting its proper being.” (16) For Garcia, the second extreme worth avoiding is the philosophy of events: “One thus conceives trajectories of being, identified as events, facts, powers, intensities, or intentionality. These vectors of being come first, bearing and supporting being, displacing it, but without ever finding a stopping point, a buffer, an objective consistency.” (17) The first model gives us a thing too wrapped up in itself, too compact . This word “compact” (the French and the English are the same) is another technical term for Garcia. But if the “compact” model of things leads us to something more than things, the philosophy of events gives us less than things, by dissolving them into a play of vectors. Garcia’s alternative lies midway between these two extremes: Being enters the thing, being comes out of it. And a thing is nothing other than the difference between the enters and the being that comes out. Thus, the circuit of being is never halted. In the thing, there is never the thing-in-itself. And the thing is never in-itself, but outside of itself. Nonetheless, being is not eventally “pollinated” by vectors: it possesses an objecting halting-point... (19) This single idea is the key to Garcia’s book: the thing is neither a self-contained durable lump nor some sort of evental flux. Instead, the thing is the difference between its various components and its relations with its environment. Or stated differently: “the price to pay for this disposition is a circulation of being that systematically distinguishes two senses of things: that which is in the thing , and that in which the thing is , or that which encompasses it and that which it encompasses,” (19) translating comprendre here as “encompass.” 19 In a beautiful description of a piece of black slate, Garcia sums up the various minerals, qualities, and shapes that compose [ comprend ] it, and calls them “that which is in the thing,” (20) noting that this tells us nothing about “that in which [the slate] is”—namely, all the various situations in which the black slate can be found. Instead, the slate is the difference between these two: the most characteristic principle of Garcia’s philosophy. 2. Formally Book One of Forme et objet , “Formally,” is concerned with the formal equality of all things in a flat world. “Two questions mark the boundaries of reflection: of what is everything composed [ composé ], and: what do all things compose?” (27) Looking downward, we wish to know what everything is made of; looking upward, we want to know the ultimate result of the combination of all things. Here we must turn our attention to the thing n’importe quoi— no matter what it is. (30) Anything with finite qualities is obviously too specific to be relevant to global ontological questions. To an equal degree, something possessing all qualities (think of Whitehead’s God) 20 would not be n’importe quoi either, since it would still be too definite, even if incredibly vast. The same holds for contradictions, since these all differ from each other. The square circle, the non-white black white, and the non-city city are all too distinct to count as the thing no matter what it is. The n’importe quoi must be devoid of all specific qualities, including contradictory ones. In one of the more intriguing points in his book, so reminiscent of Meinong, Garcia proclaims that “the ‘no matter what it is’ is neither a reality nor an abstract construction, nor both of these at once; the ‘no matter what it is’ is simply the plane of equality of that which is real, that which is possible, that which is inexistent, that which is past, that which is impossible, that which is true, that which is false, that which is bad.”(39-40) Since everything has two faces, it would be a grievous mistake to focus on just one of them at the expense of the other, as physicalism or materialism do when reducing the world to minuscule physical underpinnings. For scientistic materialism, “it is either atoms, particles, or fields of force... which are the things.” (47-48) Moreover, “these more-than-things are accompanied by less-than-things: for example, ideas or facts of consciousness are determined by the state of matter and are not autonomous things, but manifestations reduced to secondary effects of material processes...” (48) On this point, Garcia’s position is in complete accord with my own critique of undermining and overmining. 21 Where we disagree is that Garcia is more deeply suspicious of the notion of substance, which I view as salvageable with a few needed changes, while Garcia sees this operation as hopeless: “A substance, in the history of philosophy, is the more-than-thing par excellence.” (51) Another agreement between our positions is visible when Garcia claims (correctly, in my opinion) “that it is vain to distinguish between things which are material and those which are not.” (52) Yet we also find an even more important disagreement, since for Garcia withdrawal cannot be the quality of a thing. Instead, the absence of a thing is simultaneous with it, embodied in all that is not it– the absence of the sculpture of a woman is to be found in the mold that appears at the same time as it, and thus withdrawal must be viewed as an “event” rather than as something pertaining to an object. For Garcia, nothing withdraws beyond access. Since we must distinguish between “that which is something” and “that which something is,” and since the former is identified with “no matter what it is is” and the latter with “ not no matter what it is,” we can say that “everything is thus a milieu, a fragile link between ‘no matter what it is’ and ‘ not no matter what it is.’” (62) And here we find Garcia’s critique of the thing-in-itself: “A thing is never defined en bloc . We can affirm that a thing is this or that, but that does not suffice. It is still necessary to state precisely that which is this thing .” (62) Stated differently, “something is not in itself : for that which is in the thing is not the thing, and that in which the thing is is not the thing.” (62) And here Garcia and I, facing the same evidence, draw opposite conclusions. For me, the fact that nothing can be identified with either its components or its concrete location means that the thing must be something in-itself distinct from both of these. Yet for Garcia, to be in-itself would mean to be identified with just one of these two extreme terms, and hence the thing can only be the difference between them. Garcia is equally suspicious of the classical tendency to view “unity” as a property of the thing, since in his eyes unity is too relational a property to belong to things. (65) While specific things are situated determinately with respect to other things, we are still speaking here about the thing no matter what it is, and this can be viewed only in terms of solitude, which all things share: a human being, a hand, or a chair or all equally things insofar as they are on their own , not insofar as they are one . (64) A thing is alone, and relates only to the one thing that is not another thing: world. In a striking parallel to my own argument for a partial revival of occasionalism, Garcia tells us that “the things communicate only by their solitude: it is because everything is equally on its own in the world that things can be together, enmeshed in one another.” (67) Alone in their solitude, things all relate to world, which serves as a mediator allowing them to become mixed up in one another. As we have seen, one reason that nothing can be in itself is because everything is in something else. For Garcia, “to be in something and to be something are equivalent.” (69) Stated more broadly, “being is thus the difference between the two aspects of each thing: that which is it, and that which it is.” (70) And even more vividly: “a thing is almost like a sack: there is that which one puts in the sack and that which remains outside the sack.” (70) But not quite like a sack, “since a thing is not a thin skin or film. Instead, a thing is comparable to a sack that is immaterial and without thickness: it is nothing other than the difference between that which is this thing and that which thing is, between content and container.” (71) Nothing can be in-itself because everything is two selves at once. For example, we cannot say that our self is defined by our consciousness: “Everything has a self because nothing is in itself. The self is not the quality of that which is related to itself (which is conscious, for example) or which thinks itself related to itself. Nonetheless, for an entity called ‘conscious’ to be related to itself, it is necessary that this very relation should be another thing than the self to which it is related.” (71) Consciousness cannot be the self, precisely because it is other than that of which it is conscious. Nothing is able to grasp itself. The self is “the function by which being and composition [ compréhension ] are mutually excluded...” (72) The self is “the point of shadow of everything that projects some light...” (72) The in-itself faces two opposite dangers: “For something to be in-itself is to be a self. Something which is a self flies out through one of its two sides... Stated differently, being in-itself is simply the possibility of a double failure.” (73) The in-itself can be termed compact : “There remains to us a means of thinking that which does not fully enter into the world, though without exiting from it. This means is what we call the compact.” (76) In a sense, the compact is the opposite of the world. For in the case of the world, everything enters it and it enters nothing; as for the compact, it enters the world (since it is something, after all) while nothing enters it. (77) The compact marks the presence of the impossible in the world. (78) It is not impossible, but possible only on the condition that it fails. (78) The time has come to speak of where a thing is located. “The sole condition of a thing is that of being in another thing than itself, and thus in another thing than something.” (78) A condition is “that which determines something, that which forms something, that in which something is.” (78) As for humans, “the condition of someone is his situation; my social condition is that which socially determines me, my place and my function...” (79) More generally, “to be conditioned is to find oneself reduced to that in which one is.” (79) Everything is conditioned, but nothing is reducible to this condition. To determine the condition of something is to determine in what it is. A thing is located in that which contradicts it, just as a statue exists in its mold, which is precisely that which it is not. Since the thing is finite and definite, its condition or form must be infinite and indefinite. That in which all things are is the world, which Garcia also terms “the whole.” (81) “To try to be in-itself is to attempt to remain outside the world. And indeed, to try to be in-itself is only a path of entry into the world.” (83) For Garcia, “the world is not the pre-existent container of the things it contains, a priori , nor the construction by the mind of a fictional ensemble of all things, a posteriori .” (85) Instead, the world is simultaneous with all things; the two always go together. The world cannot be a determinate world, such as the physical universe or mathematical space, since these are already too specific and limited. “Every determinate world, which is in fact a universe , is a ‘big thing’ [ grosse chose ]: it is a set, however vast, of composite things which itself embodies a thing.” (85) Every determinate world is really just a “big thing.” Stated differently, “it is nothing other than a balanced milieu between the things that compose it and the thing that it composes.” (85) We generally picture the world as a physical univer. (shrink)

ArgumentMy contribution focuses on two aspects strictly related each other. On one hand, the progressive marginalization of Volterra from Italian scientific and political life after the rise of Fascism – because of his public anti-Fascist stance, both as a senator and as a professor – until his definitive exclusion on racial grounds in 1938. On the other hand, the reactions of his French colleagues and friends to this ostracism, and the support he received from them. As it emerges (...) from several sources (Volterra's correspondence, institutional documentation, conference proceedings, etc.), it was mainly thanks to their support that he was able to escape the complete isolation and the “civil death” to which the regime condemned many of its adversaries. (shrink)

Pour mettre en evidence l'importance de l'activité de Geneviève Rodis-Lewis dans le renouveau des études cartésiennes à partir des années 1970 en France et à l'étranger, en particulier en Italie, il faut souligner son rôle dans le mouvement qui a précédé la naissance du Centre d'études cartésiennes, au sein duquel elle a favorisé les rencontres et les échanges entre les chercheurs du monde entier, pour restituer à la communauté la plus large possible une figure unique de Descartes, que les traditions (...) interprétatives antérieures avaient multipliée selon les différents aspects de l'œuvre : d'abord, le philosophe ; ensuite, le physicien ; enfin, le mathématicien. II faut aussi rendre compte du travail accompli avec rigueur et sans fléchissement par G. Rodis-Lewis, en faveur de l'établissement d'une histoire de la philosophie la plus objective possible, dans deux directions principales : l'édition de textes ; la rédaction d'essais et de monographies sur différents aspects de la philosophie moderne et ses figures centrales, telles Descartes, tout d'abord, mais aussi Malebranche, Pascal, Leibniz et d'autres figures mineures, les « petits cartésiens ». The article highlights the importance of Geneviève Rodis-Lewis's part in the renewal of Cartesian studies in France and abroad, especially in Italy, from the 1970's. It was important to reconsider G. Rodis-Lewis's role, particularly in the movement which preceded the birth of the Centre of Cartesian Studies of the Sorbonne, in which she fostered the meetings and the exchanges between researchers from all over the world in order to give back to the largest community possible a unique figure of Descartes, which former interpretative traditions had multiplied according to the different aspects of the work : first the philosopher, then the physicist, finally the mathematician. Besides, it was necessary to explain the work achieved rigorously and resolutely by G. Rodis-Lewis in favour of the establishment of a history of philosophy put forward as the most objective possible. This followed two main directions : on the one hand, the publication of texts ; on the other hand, the writing of essays and monographs on different aspects of modern philosophy and its main figures, such as Descartes foremost, but also Malebranche, Pascal, Leibniz and other minor figures the « Little Cartesians ». (shrink)

The Second World War offered an excellent opportunity for some U.S. think tanks to influence foreign-policy-making processes and get involved in transatlantic diplomacy. This study seeks to demonstrate that the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) challenged the stalemate between the U.S. and French authorities by gathering together U.S. experts and non-collaborationist French leaders. A first-hand reconstruction of this informal network is based on the unreleased Peace Aims Group’s records. This was a unique CFR exchange programme for European governments-in-exile’s representatives. (...) In the first part, a general reconstruction of Council on Foreign Relations’ planning introduces an original assessment of the meetings with some prominent French intellectuals and politicians. It is argued that these conferences can be interpreted as rare examples of wartime public diplomacy. The second part discloses new historical evidence demonstrating the participation of Jean Monnet in a Peace Aims session. This discovery proves the existence of a long-term partnership between one of the key protagonists of the European integration process and the most authoritative foreign-policy think tank working for the Roosevelt administration. Overall, the analysis of Peace Aims Group’s off-the-record discussions sheds new light on the WWII transatlantic debate on postwar Europe and France. (shrink)

According to Diderot's article "Art" in the Encyclopédie, secrecy is frequently related to guilds and refers to monopolizing practices and "routine". It appears therefore as an obstacle to innovation. But may we consider secrecy exclusively in this negative light? Studies on mining and metallurgy provide us with a different perspective, for they show how the protection of secrets from the gaze of outsiders also allowed for technical exchanges between the craftsmen themselves and thus implied a certain measure of technical openness. (...) From this point of view, it seemed interesting to look also at the urban craftsmen's practices, the so-called "Metiers jurés." A micro-historical study of guilds in a small town of mid-eighteenth century France, presented in this essay, shows that things were indeed in a state of flux. On the one hand, the very ritualistic practice of producing a chef d'aeuvre, which included even the temporary confinement of the candidate, was still in existence. Secrecy still formed a part of the qualifying process of urban artisans. On the other hand, both the ritual and the chef d'aeuvre were undergoing change, the ritual developing more slowly than its content. In the process, secrecy tended to become pure dissimulation, allowing in fact the spread of a practice like subcontracting, which was officially prohibited. (shrink)

The French medical context is characterized by institutionalization of the ethical reflection in health care facilities and an important disparity between spaces of ethical reflection. In theory, the healthcare professional may mobilise an arsenal of resources to help him in his ethical reflection. But what happens in practice? We conducted semi-structured interviews with 22 health-care professionals who did and did not have recourse to clinical ethical committees. We also implemented two focus groups with 18 professionals involved in various spaces of (...) ethical reflection in order to let them debate about a better way to organize ethical reflection in their institutional contexts. The qualitative analysis allows to us to underline the coexistence of different conceptions of ethics among health care professionals. We also observed that the participants in our study shared the experience of ethically problematic situations as roadblocks in the process of communication and decision-making. We therefore report the factors which favour or inhibit the ethical course leading to the resolution or at the very least soothing of the situation at hand. Finally, we discuss methodological issues and underline the fact that while the patient is at the heart of the professional’s ethical preoccupations, this does not imply that they are actors in decisions that concern them. (shrink)

One of a handful of truly pioneering figures in visual semiotics, Jean-Marie Floch elaborated an approach that combined an analysis of the basic perceptual qualities and compositional strategies of the image, with a study of the cultural and historical significance of its representational dimension. A key collaborator of A. J. Greimas, Floch situated his project within the theoretical framework of Paris semiotics, which he helped to develop. He positioned his visual studies of familiar cultural objects in proximity to cultural anthropology (...) and the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss. His five published monographs explore abstract painting, art photography, Russian icons, magazine advertisements, and comic books. (shrink)

From the 1980s/90s, Brazilian foreign policy adopted a more assertive agenda regarding neighboring countries in northern South America. In this context, the celebration of the Framework Agreement between Brazil and France is inserted, an institutional framework that implemented cross-border cooperation between Amapá and French Guiana. At the time, France was interested in projecting itself politically and commercially in South America. On the other hand, Brazil has also achieved success with this new agenda. However, after twenty-four years in force, cross-border (...) cooperation does not show effectiveness regarding the results expected by the collectives on both sides of the Guyano-Amapá border. This article seeks to discuss that the lack of local participation has become a contender in the development of this cooperation, which has not resulted in a political project capable of promoting the aggregation of cultural matrices that stimulate an identity of objectives. To development the reflection, non-participant observation, interviews with residents in the city of Oiapoque were used, as well as the examination of some agreements concluded between Brazil and France and the minutes of the meetings of the Joint Cross-Border Commission-CTM. The specificities that make the Guyano-Amapá border interesting to the governments of Brazil and France are found in the temporal experiences of multiple actors, unrelated to chronologies, but rather to the length of life lived. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 62.1 (2001) 59-79 [Access article in PDF] Money and Sovereignty in Early Modern France Jotham Parsons [The mint official] must above all seek integrity in the moneys, on which our features are imprinted and on which the general good depends. For what would be safe if our image were offended, and if that which a subject ought to venerate in his heart were (...) immediately violated by a sacrilegious hand? 1Early modern French commentators on money and monetary policy were fond of quoting this very late antique chancery formula; 2 it even appears in the epigraph to one unpublished commonplace book on the subject from the early seventeenth century. 3 Its popularity was no doubt due partly to the fact that classical literature contained few other theoretical statements on the practicalities of issuing money. 4 It also showed how deeply classical humanism had shaped economic thought, as it had done to all of French political culture. This was apparent as early as 1514 in Guillaume Budé's scholarly classic, De Asse et partibus ejus. 5 By 1600 these influences had ensconced themselves so firmly that economic writers found it nearly impossible to talk about money without a [End Page 59] full panoply of classical erudition. 6 In France the second half of the sixteenth century saw the rise of a specialized, expert, and increasingly systematic tradition of monetary thought. Despite its classical vocabulary, this economic literature was in many ways "modern" in its methods, ambitions, and subject. While developing an account which aspired to a scientific explanation of commercial society and of how government and money interacted, the French commentators came to a partial realization of how radically their own society differed from those which had gone before. In this respect the prevailing climate of thought about money influenced even a writer as non-technical as Michel de Montaigne.Traditionally, scholarly treatment of early modern French economic texts has focused on a relatively small range of issues and authors. One such issue, the origins of the "quantity theory of money" (with Jean Bodin as its hero), is notable for its sterility, since that concept was not and could not have been meaningful to contemporaries. 7 The origin and development of "mercantilism" or, more broadly, of "political economy" in general, has proven a more fruitful subject of inquiry. 8 Undeniably, the changing relationships among governments, merchants, and the economy were a major public issue and, in the seventeenth century, a major site of theoretical reflection on the nature of political power generally. Even so, an excessive concentration on mercantilism is dangerous, for however one defines it, it was not the first, and for a long time not the most significant, economic discourse in France. Rather, from the 1560s well into the seventeenth century, French discussions of economic issues centered on very concrete problems brought about by the government's obligation to issue and maintain a stable currency. 9 While one would search this literature in vain for the specific doctrines of modern economics, I argue that it did represent a real achievement in the early modern understanding of commerce and the state. Though they have not received their due from scholars, the writers who took part in these debates formed a large and influential school with close ties to the actual institutions of government. 10 The French monetary theorists did an enormous amount [End Page 60] to set the stage for the mercantilist era. They developed a detailed notion of monetary economics as a specialized discipline, and above all they placed money and economic policy in the context of a multi-national system of commercial states. In so doing, they sought to comprehend and control not just money but the modern state itself.Early modern money was perched uncomfortably between commodity and fiat. Bewildering varieties of coins circulated, composed of all sorts of alloys. The government assigned a face value for each coin which it authorized to circulate in the abstract accounting unit called the "money of account." 11 This value was almost always greater than... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Salonnières and the Philosophes in Old Regime France: The Authority of Aesthetic Judgment*Jolanta T. PekaczDuring the eighteenth century a significant shift occurred in the perception of the authority of aesthetic judgment in France, from a group usually referred to as “polite society” and widely considered the exclusive source of taste (goût) to various competing groups arrogating to themselves the right to judge artistic matters. 1 In the present (...) article I discuss the changing recognition of the genders as arbiters of taste, exemplified by Parisian salonnières on the one hand, and the philosophes on the other, during two eighteenth-century quarrels over the French and Italian operas: the Querelle des Bouffons in the 1750s and the controversy between Gluckistes and Piccinistes in the 1770s. I argue that by the end of the 1770s, as a result of the collapse of the old paradigm of “polite society” of which salons were a part, Parisian salon women lost the position (however illusory it might have been) which they enjoyed in the seventeenth century as arbiters of taste. While the philosophes attended feminine salons, [End Page 277] they rejected the idea of consulting salonnières on the matters of taste (and on other matters), as was previously the case, and relegated them to formal, if not merely decorative, roles of guardians of good manners and propriety, the roles accepted by salonnières.The ousting of the salonnière from aesthetic arbitration exemplified by the two operatic quarrels may be viewed as a continuation of the process of exclusion of salon women from discursive development that began in the seventeenth century, as discussed by Erica Harth in Cartesian Women: Versions and Subversions of Rational Discourse in the Old Regime (1992) and, most recently, by Joan DeJean in Ancients against Moderns: Culture Wars and the Making of a Fin de Siècle (1997). In the seventeenth century the norms of feminine bienséance (decorum, propriety) allowed a woman to establish a salon but made it impossible for a salonnière to create a space intellectually comparable to that of the French Academy. After having lost a gendered competition for intellectual space with the Academy by the 1680s, the salon, as Erica Harth put it, “proved a discursive dead end for women.”In this essay I carry through this argument into the eighteenth century and demonstrate that salon women lost a competition with the philosophes not only in the intellectual but also in the aesthetic sphere. Salonnières did not choose not to make aesthetic judgments out of respect for the exclusive right of the philosophes to make such judgments 2 but rather were silenced by the philosophes and complied in order not to violate the limits of feminine bienséance in the public sphere, that is, to survive as salonnières. The seventeenth-century ideals of feminine bienséance taken over by eighteenth-century salonnières were no longer perceived as sufficient (or legitimate) to recognize women as arbiters of taste. In fact these ideals proved to be as detrimental as a source of authority for salon women in the siècle des lumières as they were ambiguous in the grand siècle.Ironically, not only were the eighteenth-century Parisian salonnières ousted from aesthetic arbitration, but neither did they succeed in their roles as guardians of propriety and good manners for the philosophes, that is, in keeping the Enlightenment discourse civil. In both operatic quarrels the dominant genre of discourse was a pamphlet, a libelle, not a salon conversation. While during the Querelle des Bouffons the philosophes were unanimously pro-Italian, the Gluck-Piccini quarrel caused a deep split among them, followed by fratricidal fighting, which seriously undermined their authority in public matters.I. The negative connotation associated with the epithets pedant, savant, and their derivatives in seventeenth-century French treatises on honnêteté indicates [End Page 278] that the authority of judgment of “persons of quality” in matters of taste resulted from the code of bienséances in social relations. Blaise Pascal probably best summarized arguments for the superiority of an honnête person (as opposed to a professional) in the realm of aesthetics; being an... (shrink)

This article offers a comparative examination of the status of ‘interdisciplinarity’, ‘cultural studies’ and ‘queer’ in the discipline of French studies in the Anglophone world and in France. It is argued that, while the intellectual origins of both interdisciplinarity and queer theory are French, a series of disavowals and appropriations has de-gallicized them. On the one hand, the cultural hegemony of English studies in the USA and the UK has led to a colonization and anglicization of continental thought. On (...) the other, the resistance to cultural studies within the Hexagone has meant that work done in critical sexuality studies within the Anglo-American world over the past forty years is only now beginning to be felt within French-speaking contexts. In tracing this double history of dislocation, the article contextualizes the difficulty of thinking queer in properly French terms — and the importance of doing so. (shrink)

This article considers the reception of subaltern studies in France. Its two starting points are, on the one hand, the uses which were made of Gramsci’s theses on « the subaltern », depending on the various translations which were adopted and, on the other hand, the circulation within social history of the theses of e.p. Thompson (belatedly translated into French). While social history in France does not make explicit reference to the findings of subaltern studies as it first (...) emerged, it nonetheless pursued a parallel approach, at least until the end of the “1968 era”, prior to the delegitimation of Marxism in the social studies in France. The situation today is characterized by the circulation of the translations which make available the culturalist and postmodernist current within subaltern studies, by a renewed interest for subjective experience, for popular movements of revolt and for a social history “from below”. This goes along with a rereading of the work of E.P. Thompson. (shrink)

Over the past 40 years, the increase in the number of archaeological excavations of large funeral complexes in France has led to a considerable increase in the number of human remains in the State’s excavation sites. These remains are not strictly speaking part of the archaeological material but are instead considered “scientific documentation”. On the one hand, the requirements of science necessitate the mobilization of all available techniques in order to better understand the populations that have left us these (...) traces. On the other hand, material and cultural limitations necessarily lead to sampling techniques being seen as an efficient archaeological system. On the other hand, the mission of general interest that is archaeological research requires particular care be taken with these remains, sparing them from an overly managerial and short-term vision. The ethical virtues of archaeological excellence must not be forgotten; archaeological knowledge must be based on the requirement of scientific rigour. This primary requirement is questioned in particular by the choices made in the management of human remains collections. A second ethical requirement leads to questions about the legal or moral limits of the first. Should scientific rigour be limited in certain cases, particularly when the research involves human remains? Should remains be subject to a specific legal or ethical status that would distinguish them from other elements of archaeological material? This article addresses these questions through the prism of the study of the case of the perfectly preserved body of Louise de Quengo, a 17th century Breton noble discovered in 2014 in Rennes. (shrink)

In this essay, I want to begin a dialogue with the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler’s book Technics and Time. Stiegler is internationally known as the inheritor of another French philosopher whose work is currently being rediscovered worldwide: Gilbert Simondon. In Stiegler’s work, this Simondonian heritage plays itself out in the domain of continental philosophy. The thesis maintained here will be the following: there is another relation to Simondon that is possible, one that also takes up the major problems we’ve inherited (...) from the continental philosophical tradition. The double fundamental philosophical problem raised in Stiegler’s debate with Simondon is the following: A) On the one hand .. (shrink)

This paper examines the relationships between corporate governance and corporate sustainability by focusing on two main components of companies’ governance structure: boards of directors and investor relations officers. We propose an original empirical strategy based on the 120 biggest French capitalizations for the year 2013, allowing us to measure boards of directors’ independence and expertise, as well as investor relations officers’ convictions and communication on corporate sustainability. Our results show that corporate governance has an ambiguous impact on corporate sustainability because (...) of opposing forces: internal, external and intermediate forces. On the one hand, the higher the proportion of inside directors, the higher the company’s environmental and governance performance, while the higher the proportion of general experts in the board room, the lower the company’s governance performance. On the other hand, investor relations officers’ beliefs that corporate sustainability is primarily driven by investors’ ethical values appear negatively related to companies’ governance performance. In sum, corporate sustainability appears positively related to internal forces and negatively related to external forces. The results of this study demonstrate the need to carry out efforts to train BoDs and IROs to respond to corporate sustainability and to take more of a leadership role in this area. (shrink)

This paper reconstitutes and addresses critically the deontological and consequentialist arguments given by the French government to justify the denial of the national guaranteed minimum income support to young people under 25 years old. The deontological arguments express a concern for distributive justice and suggest that young people do not deserve income support. The consequentialist arguments; on the other hand; emphasise social efficiency: they draw on the alleged negative outcomes that the extension of income support to young people would (...) bring about. After analysing each argument; this paper concludes that the denial of RSA to young people is an illegitimate discrimination. It then proposes that we understand our duties towards young people through an account of prudence that reconciles both concerns of distributive justice with concerns for social efficiency and concerns for inter- and intragenerational justices. (shrink)

SummaryThe aim of this article is to shed light on the methodological relationship between the history of ideas and the history of emotions, starting from the conception of weeping in the eighteenth-century French reflection. This period was critical for the defining of the modern concept of emotion because it encompassed the development of a new aesthetic and moral code centred on the exasperation of sensitivity and an exaggerated use of tears. This study brings out, in terms of methodology, the importance (...) that the analysis of tears assumed from two points of view: on the one hand, it places the problem in a framework determined by history and culture (the object of study for the history of emotions); on the other, it recognises the unavoidable axiological and moral element that characterised crying (the object of study for the history of ideas). After a brief reconstruction of the discussion of tears in the history of emotion—from the histoire des mentalités to the ‘emotional turn’—and in the history of ideas, respectively, the article outlines some potential areas for research in an interdisciplinary perspective. (shrink)

BackgroundFrance has long been a country of immigration and in some respects may be seen to have a generous policy with respect to asylum seekers and access to health care for migrants. The French state notably provides healthcare access for undocumented migrants, through state medical aid and since 1998 has had a humanitarian policy for granting temporary residence permits for medical reason (TRPMR) to migrants. Within a context of political debate, reform and tightening immigration control we will examine this latter (...) policy focusing especially on the dilemmas that arise for physicians of migrant patients when they are requested to write medical certificates as part of a TRPMR application. In a 2017 reform the key role of making recommendations on the granting or not of permits was handed over to Ministry of the Interior health inspectors. Recommendations are made after perusal of medical certificates established by the migrant’s physician and complementary evidence.Main bodyThe writing of medical certificates by a physician would seem straightforward. This is far from the case since it raises a number of ethical dilemmas. These occur within a physician-patient relationship embedded within a social contract between the State, the physician and the migrant patient. To clarify the ethical issues arising 3 vignettes based on practice within an infectious disease unit at a large Paris hospital have been developed. The vignettes highlight ethical dilemmas in the care for migrants with tuberculosis (dilemma in defining health and disease), chronic hepatitis (dilemma between beneficence and do not harm), and HIV / AIDS (issue of deservingness). We will go on to reflect on issues of social justice and responsibility for the health of migrants within a globalized world.ConclusionsCriteria for residence permit delivery appear less than clear-cut and are interpreted in a restrictive way. Neither are the consequences of refusing a residence permit taken into account. We call for an empirical transnational ethics study involving countries implementing similar TRPMR policies. We also call for inclusion of lobbying competences into the medical undergraduate curricula, in order to breed future generations of physicians skilled in defending social justice. (shrink)

Cet article se propose d’étudier la manière dont la traduction reflète le rapport à l’identité culturelle et nationale, et à l’altérité, en prenant pour exemples les systèmes littéraires français et bulgares, à partir de la création de l’alphabet glagolitique par Constantin-Cyrille le Philosophe vers 862 et du Serment de Strasbourg de 842, jusqu’au XIXe siècle, en passant par la Renaissance, d’une part, et le Réveil national bulgare, d’autre part. Les discours des traducteurs français et bulgares servent ici de révélateur des (...) représentations qu’ils ont du statut de leur propre langue ou culture, mais aussi de celles à partir desquelles ils traduisent, ainsi que de leur manière d’appréhender « soi » et « les autres ». Un tel parcours met au jour la nécessité pour l’Europe multiculturelle de se doter d’une histoire de la traduction, afin de mieux comprendre les enjeux de la traduction à l’heure de la mondialisation.This article looks into the effects of translation on consciousness of cultural and national identity and otherness. As examples, we use the French and Bulgarian literary systems from the time of the creation of the Glagolitic alphabet by Constantine-Cyril “the Philosopher” around 862 and the “Oath of Strasbourg” pledged in 842, and up to the 19th century, including the Renaissance on the one hand and the Bulgarian National Awakening on the other. The discourses of French and Bulgarian translators are used as material revealing their representations of the status of their own language and culture, and of those they translated from, and the different ways of apprehending “self” and “others”. What transpires from this study is a need for Europe as a multicultural area to write its own history of translation, as a way of achieving a better understanding of translation as an issue in the context of globalisation. (shrink)

Historians of natural history have shown that the study of plants, animals, and minerals was a form of connoisseurship in the eighteenth century. Historians of early modern experiments have linked scientific knowledge to the manual skills of artisans. I combine these two insights, arguing that connoisseurship in the sciences meant learning to touch, not just learning to look. The focus is on gems and mineralogy in eighteenth-century France. I show, firstly, that the study of gems was linked to the connoisseurship (...) (“connoissance”) of paintings. Next, books on gems were closely related to the new mineralogical treatises that emerged in the middle of the eighteenth century. These treatises formalized a distinction between “Oriental” and “Occidental” gems that was also a distinction between hard and soft gems. The best judges of hardness were gem cutters, a group that participated in mineralogy through the culture of collecting. Finally, the knowledge of cutters contributed to the quantification of hardness in the form of the hardness scale and the scratch sclerometer. (shrink)

"I prithee, honest friend, lend me thy hand / To help me up; as for my coming down, / Let me alone, I'll look to that myself," says Thomas More to his executioner while mounting the scaffold on July 6, 1535. We are reading from Sir Thomas More, that complicated text that testifies to the collaborative nature of Elizabethan drama. Supposedly written by Anthony Munday and Henry Chettle, and benefiting from the contribution of Thomas Heywood, Thomas Dekker, and William (...) Shakespeare, the play celebrates Thomas More's sense of humor—a facet that is sometimes forgotten but which Marie-Claire Phélippeau, in her new biography of the English humanist, intentionally highlights. Phélippeau... (shrink)

The ‘man born blind restored to light’ was one of the foundational myths of the Enlightenment, according to Foucault. With ophthalmic surgery in its infancy, the fascination by the sighted with blindness and what the blind might ‘see’ after sight restoration remained largely speculative. Was being blind, as Descartes once remarked, like ‘seeing with the hands’? Did evidence from early cataract operations begin to resolve epistemological debates about the relationship between vision and touch in the newly sighted, such as the (...) famous ‘Molyneux Question’ posed by William Molyneux to John Locke? More recently, how have autobiographical accounts of blind and vision impaired writers and poets advanced the sighted public’s understanding of blind subjectivity? -/- Through an unfolding historical, philosophical and literary narrative that includes Locke, Molyneux and Berkeley in Britain, and Diderot, Voltaire and Buffon in France, this book explores how the Molyneux Question and its aftermath has influenced attitudes towards blindness by the sighted, and sensory substitution technologies for the blind and vision impaired, to this day. (shrink)

Neither the apparently cold-blooded murder of a complete stranger, the central event in The Stranger, nor Hugo's murder of Hoederer in Dirty Hands—a political assassination or crime of passion, depending on how one views it—can be considered unusual acts, in literature or in life. The topic of murder has itself created an extremely popular genre: the detective novel or "whodunit," which has become a huge industry and has aficionados everywhere, Sartre being one. In French theater, the topic of political assassination (...) has resulted in such famous plays as de Musset's Lorenzaccio (1834), which ostensibly deals with Florence in the sixteenth century and the tyrannical Alexandre de Médicis, who is assassinated by his young cousin, but is in fact "a limpid transposition of the failed revolution of July 1830." It is well known that Sartre was an admirer of Musset and Romantic theater. In 1946, Jean Cocteau, who helped with the staging of Les Mains sales (Dirty Hands), wrote L'Aigle ` deux têtes (The Two-Headed Eagle), which was inspired "by the sad life of Empress Elisabeth of Austria and her tragic death by the hand of the Franco-Italian assassin, Luigi Lucheni." Sartre himself, in Nausea, has Anny use the engraving in Michelet's Histoire de France depicting the assassination of the Duke de Guise as a perfect illustration of "privileged situations.". (shrink)

The development of art marketing as a new field of management occurs in a context of great confusion as to what constitutes the very definition of art, one aspect of this confusion being nothing else but the confusion between art and marketing itself. This confusion leads to conflicts between those who consider that art should be defined by a clear aesthetic criterion and those who accept the absence of such a criterion as a legitimate consequence of the principle of freedom (...) which applies both to the creation of the artist and to the taste of the public. This state of confusion does not seem to be experienced in the same way in France where it has tended to be considered as a symptom of crisis in the world of art and in the United States where it has raised as a dominant force in contemporary art. Hence the confusion of art and marketing varies as a function of time (as shown by the emergence of a new field of management) and of space (as shown by the comparison of the French and American cases). It will be proposed that it is possible to account for these historical fluctuation thanks to an institutional approach based on the notion of system of legitimacy. We shall propose the essentially dynamic institutional foundations of modernity leading to the proliferation of innovations which consequences are ever more difficult to anticipate as a reason why, in America, philosophers coming from the analytic tradition found it meaningful to address questions such as “What is art” (Arthur Danto) or “When is there art” (Nelson Goodman”) expressing the need to go beyond pragmatism as expressed by John Dewey’s Art as Experience to promote a positive attitude towards contemporary art, while, in France confusion between art and marketing has been commonly considered negatively as the sign of the triumph of the most radical form of rhetoric, i.e. sophism. (shrink)

The study analyzes two animated films - Japanese film Kuroneko Banzai released in 1933 and French film Nimbus Libere released in 1944 - as the examples of the anti-American military propaganda that uses famous American cartoon characters. Kuroneko Banzai tells the story of the inhabitants of one Pacific island who are attacked by vicious Mickey Mouse. The inhabitants are saved by the heroes of the Japanese tales. The film is an example of a national military training which, in one (...) class='Hi'>hand, involves the images of Japanese fairy tales characters, that is, appeals to the Japanese national tradition hidden in the Japanese tales and Japanese national symbols, but, in other hand, it contrasts the Japanese fairy tales characters, which symbolize the Japanese national tradition and connection with ancestors and deities, with American cartoon character Mickey Mouse who stands as an enemy from the West. The portrayal of such popular character like Mickey Mouse as the enemy is actually aimed at demonization of Mickey Mouse and together with him the entire American culture to oppose it to own traditional Japanese culture portrayed by the fairy tales characters. Nimbus Libere tells the story of such American cartoon characters like Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Goofy, Popeye the Sailor and Felix The Cat who bomb France. The film attempts to demonize the Anglo-American allies landed in Normandy to make ordinary Frenchmen not to help the allies. (shrink)

Gallicanism is specifically related to the Catholic Church of France, and it is a set of ecclesiastical and political doctrines and practices which tried to limit the powers of the Papacy in France in general. In particular, it characterized the situation of the Catholic Church in France at certain periods. The emergence of Gallicanism as a specific idea came about in the 14th century and was first used as a term in 1810. Almost everything expressed by Gallicanism is a distinctive (...) development within the French Catholic Church. Gallicanism was mostly about the riches of the Catholic Church and administrative matters rather than a theological movement. These issues were mostly related to episcopal jurisdiction, appointments of bishops, church properties and revenues, and at the core of all these issues lay the sharing of church revenues. The French Crown began to acquire gains, especially regarding the property and financial income of the church with the weakening of the power of the Papacy. This new situation left the bishops between the popes and the kings, and prepared the ground for the development of Gallicanism in the country. However, Gallicanism did not come around as a separatist movement and did not lead to the separation of the Catholic Church of France from the Roman Catholic Church. Due to the conflicts of interests between the king, parliament and the clergy, Gallicanism could not develop into a monolithic thought or doctrine, it manifested itself in different perspectives. These manifestations have been treated as Episcopal, Parliamentary, and Royal Gallicanism in most academic studies. Each of these different Gallican ideas brought to the fore the institutions indicated in their naming and received support from them. However, all three versions of Gallicanism shared some common ideals. These are the common ideals of different Gallicanisms: the independence of the king of France in worldly affairs, the supremacy of an ecumenical council over the pope, and the restriction of the pope's intervention in the French Catholic Church. Royal Gallicanism aimed to gather the powers snatched away from the Papacy in the hands of the king. Parliamentary Gallicanism shared similar principles with Royal Gallicanism. (shrink)

This paper deals with the question, how an abstract practice like ‘violence’ can be measured. On a methodological level, there are two possibilities: On the one hand, a quantitative approach that tries to determine homicide rates allegedly allowing comparisons over regions and time. On the other hand, there is a qualitative approach that analyses key concepts like ‘cruelty’ in order to define the limits of acceptable violence. However, both approaches have clear shortcomings. This article proposes another perspective: Using (...) the example of France in the later Middle Ages, it scrutinises contemporary ideas of violence as they were expressed in chronicles and treatises. By focussing on decidedly negative descriptions of violent acts, we can pinpoint several characteristics that show which cultural aspects were of special importance for the contemporaries, e. g. the social standing of the people involved, the context of the act itself as well as the physical integrity of the nobles’ bodies. (shrink)

Outside France the epistemology of G. Bachelard is unknown ; in France his influence is considerable, especially on philosophers like L. Althusser, M. Foucault, G. Canguilhem, J. Hyppolite, M. Serres, G. G. Granger, D. Lecourt and many others. Bachelard occupies a strategic point on the crossroads of all theoretical debates concerning science. The fact that he seems to give satisfactory answers on the problems which have risen after the breakdown of the logical-positivistic philosophy of science, justifies an exposition and evaluation (...) of his original contribution to philosophy. The author distinguishes the following items. 1. The determination of Bachelards philosophy as a scientific philosophy which is wedded to a history of the sciences, especially the natural sciences. 2. The 'systematicity' as the criterium of science against other, traditional, criteria like empiricalness, logical deducibility, correspondence with reality and so on. 3. The rectification-principle : the formation of a scientific system cannot be conceived otherwise than as the restructuring or reorganisation of the ruling system or system-sets. 4. The transformation of scientific knowledge shows many discontinuities in all its phases and branches. Bachelard calls them ruptures. 5. The translation of a theory into another, more coherent and comprehensive one, is baptised as a 'dialectisation' of the concept. By a dialectisation a system is both generalised and specified. Formal logic, which is based on identity and the principle of the excluded middle, is not able to interprete this dynamic aspect of scientific thinking. 6. Central in Bachelards philosophy is also the concept of recurrence. Each new organisation of the scientific system (global or partial) sheds new light on their history and their logical foundations. History has to be rewritten after each progress. Recurrence, however, also has systematic implications. Science always desimplifies its own evidences. 7. The scientist has to demolish the obstacles which he made himself by surcharging the content of the concepts not in use and by not assimilating them in the system. 8. Bachelards philosophy of science is both idealistic and realistic ; the phenomenology becomes phenomenotechnique under the hands and in the brains of the scientist. 9. He always denies (negativity) the earlier theories and objects by incorporating them in new relationships. 10. This constructive aspect of theory formation is the same in natural science and mathematics. Bachelard opposes the logical-positivistic idea that these are methodically dissimilar. In a critical commentary the author discusses the question of 'dialectical logic' in the sciences, in relation to some recent research in this field by I. Lakatos en Errol E. Harris. In his opinion the epistemology of Bachelard affords a creative renewal of the understanding of science, although further research is needed in many aspects. (shrink)

Johnny Hallyday was France's first rock and roll star and was honored as a national hero at his funeral, which was attended by nearly a million people. The funeral of Pierre Boulez, on the other hand received little fanfare. This book attempts to resolve this discrepancy.

Foucault's governmentality lectures at the Collège de France analyze the history of the state through the lens of governmental reason. However, these lectures largely omit consideration of the relationship between discipline and the state, prioritizing instead raison d'État and liberalism as dominant state technologies. To remedy this omission, I turn to Foucault's early studies of discipline and argue that they provide materials for the reconstruction of a genealogy of the "disciplinary state." In reconstructing this genealogy, I demonstrate that the disciplinary (...) state marks the "dark side" of the liberal state, a dark side which is, moreover, largely obscured in the governmentality lectures. I further construe the difference between this early genealogy of the state and the later governmental studies in methodological terms. At stake in this difference is the historiographic status of capitalism and social conflict. Foucault's governmentality lectures employ what I term an "idealist disavowal," thereby treating capitalism and social conflict as irrelevant to the history of the state. The early disciplinary studies, on the other hand, enact a "materialist avowal," by which these objects are avowed as central to the explanation of how and why the state develops. Finally, I argue that Foucault's governmental genealogy of the liberal state is explanatorily and analytically incomplete, while the genealogy of the disciplinary state contributes to its completion on both fronts. (shrink)

This article addresses two great global challenges of the 2020s. On one hand, the accelerating climate crisis and, on the other, the deepening crisis of representation within liberal democracies. As temperatures and water levels rise, rates of popular confidence in existing democratic institutions decline. So, what is to be done? This article discusses whether sortition – the ancient Greek practice of selecting individuals for political office through lottery – could serve to mitigate both crises simultaneously. Since the 2000s, sortition (...) has attracted growing interest among activists and academics. Recently it has been identified in countries like the UK and France as a mechanism for producing legitimate political answers to the climate challenge. However, few theoretical reflections on the potentials and perils of sortition-based climate governance have yet emerged. This article contributes to filling the gap. Based on a critique of the first successful case of sortition used to enhance national environmental policy – in Ireland in 2017–18 – we argue that sortition-based deliberation could indeed speed up meaningful climate action whilst improving the health of democratic systems. However, this positive outcome is not preordained. Success depends not only on green social movements getting behind climate sortition but also on developing flexible, context-specific designs that identify adequate solutions to a number of problems, including those of power ; expertise ; and participation. (shrink)