This article examines the neurobiological basis of the healing power attributed to shamanic practices in the Andes and Brazil in light of the pharmacology of neurotransmitters and the new technological explorations of brain functioning. The psychotropic plants used in shamanic psychiatric cures interfere selectively with the intrinsic neuromediators of the brain. Mainly they may alter: (1) the neuroendocrine functioning through the adrenergic system by controlling stressful conditions, (2) the dopaminergic system in incentive learning and emotions incorporation, (3) the serotoninergic system (...) in modulating behaviors, and mood, and (4) basic functions implied in anxiety or depression. PET scans and functional magnetic resonance imaging studies of hypnotic trance and altered states of consciousness may provide a useful model for the neurophysiological phenomena of shamanic drum-and-dance trance. The reorganization of cortical areas and the direct interconnections between the prefrontal cortex and the dopaminergic reward centers in the limbic system are of particular significance for human social judgment and symbolic processing. Those centers—including the hypothalamus and the amygdala (associated with psychosomatic equilibrium, memory, and emotion) are enhanced. This arousal may be amplified in order to induce a cathartic crisis—the shamanic trance. It is suggested that through this holistic approach the shaman empirically interferes in neurobiological dysfunctions. (shrink)

En peinture, poser la question du realisme, c'est immediatement etre confronte a la question de la diversite des styles. La facilite avec laquelle nous reconnaissons quelque chose dans une toile dite realiste depend-elle de notre plus ou moins grande familiarite avec le systeme de representation utilise, comme le soutient Nelson Goodman, ou bien d'un quelconque caractere naturel de cette representation, comme l'affirme Ernst H. Gombrich? Partant de l'histoire de la question de la mimesis, Laure Blanc-Benon examine les principaux arguments (...) de la querelle du conventionnalisme pictural et propose une theorie de la representation qui permet de defendre une forme elaboree de realisme pictural et qui renouvelle la notion problematique de ressemblance. Cette approche permet aussi de rendre compte de la perception propre aux images picturales, qu'elles soient abstraites ou figuratives; ou qu'elles se situent par-dela cette distinction, comme les toiles de Nicolas de Stael, Francis Bacon ou Francois Rouan. (shrink)

Eduardo Arroyo, Armelle Auris, François Boissonnet, Paul HENRY, Pierre-Jean LABARRIERE, MATIEU, Gilles AILLAUD, Gérad THALMANN, Nicole MATHIEU, Jacques VIMARD, Michel QUAREZ, Leonardo CREMONINI, L'atelier d'Eduardo Arryo: Le carré blanc du ring, Rue Descartes, No. 7, Logiques de l'éthique (Juin 1993), pp. 149-168.

Pendant tout le XVIII° siècle et surtout à partir de 1741, il y eut diverses tentatives pour atteindre le sommet du Mont-Blanc. Le 3 août 1787 Horace-Bénédict De Saussure parvint à la cime du fameux mont et sut donner le plus grand retentissement à cet exploit tant dans les milieux mondain que scientifique.Afin de commémorer cet évênement, Charles François Exchaquet construisit des maquettes de la Vallée de Chamonix et du Mont-Blanc qui se vendirent dans toute l'Europe. A (...) notre connaissance il n'en subsiste plus que cinq exemplaires. L'un d'entre eux est la propriété du Cabinet de Minéralogie du Musée Teyler de Haarlem, Pays-Bas. Il est en parfait état de conservation et accompagné de documents originaux dont un de la main de C. F. Exchaquet. Cette maquette donne de précieux renseignements sur la technique des plans-reliefs, qui a précédé la représentation cartographique plane.SummaryDuring the whole of the eighteenth century, and especially since 1741, various attempts have been made to climb the Mont Blanc. On 3 August 1787, Horace-Bénédict De Saussure reached the summit of the famous mountain. His achievement had an impact on society at large, as well as in the scientific community. To commemorate the event, C. F. Exchaquet built maquettes of Mont-Blanc and the Valley of Chamonix, which he sold all over Europe.To our knowledge, only five of these models have been preserved. One of them, in a perfect state, is the property of the Mineralogical Cabinet of Teyler's Museum at Haarlem, in The Netherlands. Original documentation has been preserved, including one hand-written manuscript from Exchaquet himself.The study of both documents and maquette reveals interesting information on the technique of plan-relief before the traditional use of two-dimensional cartography. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Adventures of Telemachus [1699] by François de Salignac de la Mothe-FénelonJean–Michel RacaultFrançois de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon. The Adventures of Telemachus [1699]. Translated with an introduction and notes by A. J. B. Cremer. London, Anastasis Books, 2022, 419 pp. Hardbound £24.50. Paperback £15. ISBN: 9781739798314.Fénelon’s 1699 novel The Adventures of Telemachus—or more precisely, the epic poem in prose—was one of the major bestsellers in many European (...) countries for nearly two centuries. The book inspired paintings, operas, fashions, and even wallpaper motifs. It gave birth to a literary subgenre, the “archeological novel,” such as Terrasson’s Sethos (1731) or Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s L’Arcadie (1788), in which the action is located in an antique setting. Still part of French schools’ syllabi a century ago, this book mainly owes its survival today to highly specialized academic research, stimulated from time to time when an “Agrégation” program generates new publications, papers, and conferences, as happened in 2009–10. The situation is similar in English-speaking countries, if perhaps just a bit worse: new editions are scarce and generally based more or less on revised versions of eighteenth-century translations, such as those editions by John Hawkesworth’s (1768) or Tobias Smollett’s (1776).The publication by A. J. B. Cremer of an entirely new translation, featuring a close rendering of the French text into modern English and preserving the original’s formal dignity without resorting to a pastiche of the classical language, is therefore a landmark in the history of Fénelon’s reception, and in the valuation of Telemachus particularly. This edition, while intended for the general reader, includes most of what is expected of a scholarly edition. In a comparatively short introduction, the editor recalls the essential facts about the author’s background (as a descendent of high nobility) and about his ecclesiastic career, which was compromised by both his involvement in mystical spirituality (the quarrel over Quietism) and his critical attitude toward the absolutism of Louis XIV’s régime. [End Page 140]In fact, Fénelon’s appointment as Archbishop of Cambrai (1695) was a kind of exile. In 1689, however, he was appointed tutor to Louis XIV’s seven-year-old grandson, the young Duke of Burgundy, second in the line of succession to the throne after his father (though both died prematurely). Fénelon wrote for this boy The Adventures of Telemachus as an educative fiction in the tradition of the “mirrors of Princes.” Of course, such a book was not intended for publication, and when it appeared in 1699—strangely enough, in a fully legal manner and with a printing privilege—it was against Fénelon’s will and in a very faulty form, which was corrected in later editions. An editor today therefore faces solving some highly complex textual problems, and choosing between the manuscript traditions. Cremer’s translation is based upon Jacques Le Brun’s authoritative text, published in Fénelon’s Œuvres, tome II (Paris: Gallimard, “Pléiade,” 1997).1After surveying the critical reception of Telemachus, particularly in England, starting at the text’s first publication and reaching the present time, the introduction discreetly hints at an apparent trend, among some interpretations, toward Christian allegory. If the figure of Mentor obviously “represents Fénelon” in his tutorial role, Cremer notes, this character, also an incarnation of Minerva, embodies humanity and divinity simultaneously, and thus may be seen as a “Christ-figure,” with Telemachus as his disciple and Ulysses, with his pursuit of a never-ending quest, as the symbolic form of the Divine. These observations are not entirely new; they have been formulated before by various critics. The editor himself concurs with a well-known article by André Blanc that describes Fénelon’s neo-platonician turn of mind: for Fénelon there is no contradiction between Christian revelation and the pagan fables of classical mythology, which he considers prefigurations or allegories of Christianity.This interpretation is abundantly and convincingly confirmed in the editor’s annotations. While as expected the commentaries point frequently to Greco-Latin mythology or classical literary sources... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Surfing the Sublime:Tim Winton's Breath and Eco-HeroismSteve Mentz (bio)The sublime represents an ecological problem. Breathing poses an entangled solution. Surfing, in which a human body stands upright inside a rotating barrel of unbreathable whitewater, provides a way to imagine the connection between these two things.The sublime has represented an elevated category of literary language since the classical writer Longinus's On the Sublime (~1st century CE). From the start, the (...) sublime captures grandeur and also an excess that challenges human thinking. Many of the essential Romantic and Post-Romantic tropes of the sublime that would later appear in dense philosophical accounts, from Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant to Jean-Francois Lyotard and Jacques Derrida, show themselves embryonically in Longinus's brief classical description.1 The key force of sublime style, Longinus emphasizes, is irrationality: "A lofty passage does not convince the reason of the reader, but takes him out of himself. That which is admirable ever confounds our judgment" (1.4). The conceptual violence of the sublime strains our imaginations almost to breaking, and Longinus's intuition that sublimity always sits on the far side of human comprehension becomes a central feature of this idea in literary history. Although we know very little about Longinus the author–neither his name nor the century in which he lived are certain–he fingers the particular pleasurable pain and rupture of coherence that would become the signature of the sublime in modern poetics. The problem with the sublime perspective is that it craves rupture, centers the human imagination, and refuses to make space for nonhuman collaborators. The opposite of the sublime's imaginative conquest of the world may be simple breathing, the taking of alien air into one's lungs and body, and the environmental dependence each breath marks.The philosopher Graham Harman has recently traced the sublime lineage of Burke and Kant to Lyotard, Levinas, Derrida, and other twentieth-century thinkers, in order to reject the concept as fundamentally [End Page 79] anthropocentric. Harman instead advocates for a philosophy that does not require the shaping structures of human perspective. He argues for an ecological art that engages with the world beyond the merely human perspective, "art that explores unforeseen interactions between the different parts of the external world." What Harman terms "unsublime ecology" might reasonably be described as an inhuman ecological perspective. The philosopher reminds us that the sublime has always been, both from Longinus and in Harman's reading explicitly from Kant and Burke to Lyotard and Derrida, a ju-jitsu trick in which the imagination of a (white male) subject reintegrates what it cannot fully comprehend. The list of poetic works whose language most commonly appears as exemplary of the sublime–Milton's Paradise Lost, Shelley's "Mont Blanc," Shakespeare's King Lear, Wordsworth's The Prelude–suggest that the mode appeals to poetic egoists of a particularly masculinine type.2The heroic sublime of these poets and theorists falters on the physical fact of breathing. Each day of their lives, more than 20,000 times per day, every one of these men, even stern, blind Milton dictating his prophetic poem to dutiful daughters after his revolution had failed, drew nonhuman air into and out of his lungs, exchanging oxygen and carbon dioxide. Each man's thinking continued, while their minds dwelled little on how their body's dependence on alien matter to suspire might impinge upon the heroic sense of self. Even prophets and geniuses, even Wordsworth and Derrida, depend on unconscious patterns. Even the greatest of poets breathes.That's where surfing comes in, in particular Tim Winton's 2008 surf novel Breath, which relates a minor-key epic of surfing against breathing. The novel's core figures devote themselves to intentional oxygen deprivation: our teenage narrator-hero Pikelet; his rebellious buddy Loonie; Sando, the Australian surf-seer they follow; and Sando's American one-time freestyle skier wife, Eva (note the unsubtle symbolism of her name), whose injured knee keeps her off the snow but does not prevent her from chasing sublimity through self-suffocating games that involve sex, a plastic bag, and eventually Pikelet. To court mortality by cutting... (shrink)

‘Sale.—To buy and to sell, the aim of life.’Gustave Flaubert, Dictionnaire des idées reçues.This study is not devoted either to the institutions of mutual aid, philanthropy, or charity within modern capitalism, or to the donations individuals make to them.

Les théories féministes de la reproduction ont été soumises à trois types d’objections : elles seraient soit fonctionnalistes, soit économicistes, ou biologisantes. Ces objections reposent sur un contresens concernant les notions marxistes de production et reproduction ainsi que sur une conception réifiée de la nature des sociétés capitalistes. De plus, ces objections ne sont pas capables de proposer une alternative convaincante et débouchent sur des impasses comme celles qui sont propres aux théories des systèmes double ou triple. Au contraire, le (...) concept de reproduction sociale permet de sortir de ces impasses en même temps qu’il rend possible une conception non-réductionniste du mode de production capitaliste dans laquelle le capital n’est pas conçu comme le sujet d’un processus strictement « économique ». (shrink)

Francois Recanati presents the basic features of the *indexical model* of mental files, and defends it against several interrelated objections. According to this model, mental files refer to objects in a way that is analogous to that of indexicals in language: a file refers to an object in virtue of a contextual relation between them. For instance, perception and attention provide the basis for demonstrative files. Several objections, some of them from David Papineau, concern the possibility of files to preserve (...) and add information about objects across contexts. How is it possible to think about the same object when the subject no longer is in the original context? How is it possible to think of a perceived object as already known? Can this be done without an explicit identity judgment? Recanati answers these questions by invoking mental files of non-basic kinds and by describing the cognitive dynamics in which they take part. (shrink)

To systematically answer the generalized Kretschmann objection, I propose a mean to make operational a criterion widely recognized as allowing one to decide whether the gauge symmetry of a theory is artificial or substantial. My proposition is based on the dressing field method of gauge symmetry reduction, a new simple tool from mathematical physics. This general scheme allows one in particular to straightforwardly argue that the notion of spontaneous symmetry breaking is superfluous to the empirical success of the electroweak theory. (...) Important questions regarding the context of justification of the theory then arise. (shrink)

La philosophie est aujourd'hui de retour pour éclairer les grands enjeux de cette fin de siècle. La quête du sens qu'exprime ce retour ne peut que rencontrer la figure et le parcours de Paul Ricœur : depuis les années trente, il a toujours conçu sa réflexion comme une forme d'engagement dans la Cité. Sa présence constante dans ce siècle ne sera jamais démentie. Maître à penser plus que maître penseur, ses travaux sont devenus une source majeure d'inspiration dans les domaines (...) les plus divers. François Dosse a mesuré, avec son Histoire du structuralisme, à quel point cette pensée a été ignorée dans les années soixante et soixante-dix. En historien, il réalise ici une biographie intellectuelle qui entend rendre justice à ce grand penseur dont l'œuvre se situe à la croisée de la tradition réflexive française, de la philosophie dite continentale et de la philosophie analytique, dans un constant souci d'articulation de leurs apports respectifs. Grâce à une vaste enquête auprès de 170 témoins et une étude fouillée des travaux de Paul Ricœur, l'auteur retrace la cohérence du parcours de sa pensée et ses rebondissements multiples, au gré des sollicitations de l'actualité. Outre l'œuvre elle-même, c'est dans la succession des lieux de mémoire - les camps de Poméranie orientale, le Chambon-sur-Lignon, Strasbourg, la Sorbonne, les Murs Blancs, Nanterre, Chicago... - et de ceux de ses groupes d'appartenance - le cercle de Gabriel Marcel, Christianisme social, Esprit, le laboratoire de phénoménologie... - que se dessine une identité à la fois plurielle du fait des appropriations multiples qu'elle suscite, et unitaire par la cohérence toujours préservée d'une vie de recherches. La passion qui anime cette mise en intrigue ne vise pas à ériger une nouvelle statue de commandeur. L'auteur entend simplement faire partager le don de soi de Paul Ricœur, source d'une sagesse communicative. Ce parcours est une invitation à ne pas céder au scepticisme et au cynisme, et à retrouver les voies de l'espérance par une mémoire toujours retravaillée. (shrink)

Mental files have a referential role—they serve to think about objects in the world—but they also have a meta-representational role: when ‘indexed’, they serve to represent how other subjects think about objects in the world. This additional, meta-representational function of files is invoked to shed light on the uses of empty singular terms in negative existentials and pseudo-singular attitude ascriptions. -/- For a longer version see "Empty Singular Terms in the Mental-File Framework" In Manuel Garcia-Carpintero & Genoveva Marti (eds.), Empty (...) Representations. Oxford 162-185. (shrink)

À partir d’une étude qualitative comparée en France et au Québec, nous montrons dans cet article que la phase d’intégration des nouvelles recrues aides-soignantes dans les organisations gériatriques françaises et québécoises est une phase complexe d’expérimentation du métier, où elles intègrent des normes collectives de rythmes de travail. Le collectif de travail, par la voix d’une « ancienne », juge de la capacité des nouvelles recrues à respecter ces rythmes et transmet des stratégies de régulation créées localement et indispensables pour (...) répondre aux prescriptions contradictoires. La situation actuelle d’intensification du travail vécue dans les organisations gériatriques françaises et québécoises conduit néanmoins à une fragilisation dangereuse des collectifs, voire à une individualisation du rapport aux enjeux organisationnels. Une telle individualisation peut conduire les nouvelles recrues à subir une souffrance éthique consécutive au fait d’accomplir des actes moralement condamnables pour parvenir à respecter les normes temporelles. (shrink)

Cet article esquisse un récit alternatif à celui défendant que les conceptions politiques de Lénine furent influencées principalement par Kautsky et les débats des sociaux-démocrates allemands lors du congrès d’Erfurt de 1891. Il défend au contraire que Lénine doit bien davantage aux idées développées par un mouvement socialiste préexistant en Russie même, et en particulier au modèle de marxisme forgé par Plekhanov dans les années 1880. Plekhanov élabora une réponse originale à des problèmes propres à la Russie, tels l’absence de (...) liberté politique, l’insignifiance du prolétariat industriel au regard d’une population massivement agraire, l’histoire récente du servage, et une tradition de propriété collective largement répandue dans la petite paysannerie. Il articula ces caractéristiques avec une doctrine générale de la lutte des classes et de la progression de la société du capitalisme vers le socialisme. Je suggère que Lénine a accepté la plupart des arguments de Plekhanov, et quand bien même ce dernier en viendrait lui-même à les abandonner plus tard. (shrink)

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

Dans l’œuvre de Max Weber, la sexualité renferme un vaste monde d’oppositions : entre le champ du conscient et celui de l’inconscient ; au sein du monde de l’éthique, quand la religion judaïque s’élève contre la débauche des sens et le polythéisme ; au cœur de l’économie capitaliste, quand la passion des amants ravage tout jusqu’à la « communauté des frères ». Cependant, faute de représenter un fait social, elle ne fait pas l’objet d’une théorisation de la part de Max (...) Weber qui en marque la limite en la bordant d’un côté par le champ de l’instinct, qui ne relève pas de la compréhension, et de l’autre par le solipsisme des amants, qui ouvre sur la mort. (shrink)

On a voulu rendre ici Maine de Biran au problème qui fut toujours le sien, depuis ses premières réflexions de 1793 jusqu'aux ultimes fragments de 1824: élaborer une "science de l'homme" enfin capable d'intégrer, mais sans les confondre, les diverses sciences qu'elle doit inclure pour être complète. En lieu et place de la traditionnelle division encyclopédique des savoirs, qui se prolonge jusqu'à d'Alembert et Condorcet, Biran s'attache à instaurer un partage épistémologiquement déterminé: il élabore pour ce faire une doctrine originale, (...) sa théorie des "points de vue". Véritable colonne vertébrale du birmanisme, c'est elle qui subsiste sous les multiples changements dont la doctrine est affectée, elle dont le philosophe ne se départit jamais, même lorsqu'il doute de pouvoir un jour "fermer son cercle." L'unité de cette philosophie, cherchée en vain dans des contenus, ou simplement abandonnée en décrétant infidèles à elle-même certaines parties de l'œuvre, ne saurait être trouvée que dans sa méthode. C'est du moins la thèse du présent ouvrage. (shrink)

Biological objects are often constructive dynamic systems whose structures evolve as a consequence of their internal dynamics, which in turn is affected by the overall structure. As very few tools are presently adapted to tackle constructive dynamic systems, they constitute fascinating challenges for modeling/simulation. In cell biology, the secretory process in eukaryotic cells corresponds to this type of system, as it appears to autonomously generate new structures as a result of its molecular dynamics. Here I briefly review the only documented (...) case of a membrane-bounded intracellular compartment whose very existence strictly depends on its continued functioning. Indeed, the Golgi apparatus of the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae appears at steady-state as a continuously renewed set of transitory membrane-bounded structures that self-mature, rather than as a permanent entity. On the basis of this case and of recent advances in related molecular studies, a detailed model is proposed, that encompasses the birth of a yeast Golgi element and bridges its molecular and morphogenetic aspects. This model is extended to briefly outline three evolutionary inventions, from S. cerevisiae to another yeast, Pichia pastoris, on to plant, and on to animal cells: stacking, stabilizing and aggregating the primary Golgi elements. (shrink)

L'excellent Document de la Commission biblique pontificale " L'interprétation de la Bible en Église " (1994) mentionne le philosophe protestant Paul Ricœur au rang des penseurs herméneutiques indispensables à l'intelligence de l ...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Renaissance Crisis of ExemplarityFrançois Rigolot“Every example is lame” (Tout exemple cloche), acknowledged Montaigne in the last chapter of his Essais. 1 Was this the moaning of a lone, disillusioned skeptic or the idiosyncratic formulation of a widely shared attitude of mistrust at the end of the sixteenth century? To answer this question one must first examine the epistemological status of examples at the end of the period we (...) still conventionally call the “Renaissance”; and this is the purpose of this group of papers. 2In his work on the notion of exemplum in early modern France and Italy John D. Lyons helped restore the concept of exemplarity to its central place in the history of rhetoric. 3 From Aristotle’s paradeigmata—simple case stories at the orator’s disposal (Rhetoric 1.2. 1356b)—to Montaigne’s “lame” exemples—contingent instances unfit for demonstrative purposes (Essais III, 13, 1070)—the rhetorical impulse has followed strangely circuitous ways. Part of the confusion is probably due to the transformation of technical language under the pressure of common usage. Throughout the early modern period, while the Latin word exemplum continued to refer to rhetorical practice (an illustrative anecdote with a moral point), its vernacular derivatives (esempio, ejemplo, exemple, etc.) generally had a broader, looser, and less didactic meaning, as the emphasis was displaced to the “narrative” aspect of instances, regardless of their intentionality. In other words, although examples were often used to illustrate a didactic point, they differed from exempla inasmuch as they were not always meant to serve a demonstrative purpose.Of course, to the extent that choosing an example necessarily involves some form of selective process from a larger quantity of material, every instance is [End Page 557] bound to entertain a metonymic relation with a greater whole. But, etymologically, an example (essample, in Old French spelling) is a sample, one thing merely alleged to resemble another one, not a demonstrative tool. Yet in his Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues (London, 1611), Randle Cotgrave gave polysemous English equivalents for exemple and exemplaire:Exemple: 1) An example, sample, patterne, or president [sic] to follow; 2) a copie, or counterpane of a writing; 3) one thing alledged to prove, or inforce another that resembles it.Exemplaire: 1) A patterne, sample, or sampler; 2) an example, president [sic] or precedent, for others to follow, or to take heed by; 3) also, the copie, or counterpane of a writing. 4There is an odd mixture of demonstrative and non-demonstrative connotations. The two seemingly interchangeable words receive tripartite definitions, with the three meanings of exemple corresponding to the three of exemplaire.In Renaissance humanistic oratory the evocation of examples was often a simple matter of style. For better elocutory purposes public speakers were encouraged to use graphic case stories to make their speeches more appealing and enjoyable, but orators also used what they called exemplars (Latin exemplaria) to provide their audience with models of conduct to imitate. Worthiness was the ultimate criterion for exemplarity. Cato and Socrates were living symbols of moral determination and courage. They became powerful exemplars of ancient “virtue,” or moral fortitude (Latin virtus; Italian virtù). In the selective process of arguments (inventio), they were chosen because they exemplified a specific attitude or line of conduct: they were, by definition, exemplary examples. 5In the Renaissance the uplifting reading of ancient exemplars was closely related to the doctrine of imitatio, the sacrosanct recourse to inherited cultural models. At the same time the appeal of mimesis, characterized by the actual experience of the real world in reaction to scholastic insularity, greatly problematized the reception of ancient models. Whereas a long-held reverence for the imitative power of traditional exempla offered compelling patterns of moral conduct, the new attractiveness of a more “natural” mimetic discourse [End Page 558] tended to turn the study of models away from duplication. 6 In the face of the inexhaustible diversity and unpredictability of human actions, how can we choose a proper model after which to pattern our own behavior? This is one of the many questions raised by the humanist’s disenchantment with imitative symbols of moral conduct.In recent years the concept... (shrink)

Because reference is not transparent, coreference is not transparent either: it is possible for the subject to refer to the same individual twice without knowing that the two acts of reference target the same individual. That happens whenever the subject associates two distinct yet coreferential files with two token singular terms. The subject may not know that the two files corefer, so her ascribing contradictory properties to the same object does not threaten her rationality. But if the subject deploys the (...) same file twice, in association with both of the singular terms, she is bound to know that she is referring to the same entity twice. (shrink)

History is the child of narrative. It is not defined by an object of study, but rather by a type of narration. To say that history studies time means no more than that it arranges all of its objects of study in a temporal framework: to make history is to tell a story.