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

This is an English translation of the French editor's preface to The Evolution of the Problem of Freedom, which is the first course Bergson taught as the chair in the “History of Modern Philosophy” at the Coll è ge de France.

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

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

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)

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)

Comment écrire sur Bataille sans s’épargner et se mettre soi-même hors jeu sinon en entrant dans le jeu de ce qu’on appellera, en un sens majeur, la parodie ? Dans ce retour, dans cet éternel retour des pensées et des mots – dans cette déconstruction créatrice qu’est la réécriture – Bataille n’y entra-t-il pas lui même en écrivant sur Nietzsche ?

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

Le livre d’E. Begemann reprend le texte d’une thèse soutenue à Erfurt en 2011. Il aborde la question du destin dans l’ensemble de l’œuvre de Cicéron, c’est-à-dire non seulement dans la réflexion proprement philosophique de l’auteur, mais également dans les discours et dans la correspondance. D’où, passée l’introduction (chapitre 1) qui pose les principes de la démarche, une division de l’ouvrage en trois parties principales. La première (chapitre 2) examine la question dans la « triade théolo...

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

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

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

In the controversy that arose between Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Georg Ernst Stahl following the publication of the latter’s Theoria medica vera, both theoreticians strove to distance themselves from what they took to be the classical conception of the vegetative soul, while relating and partly reducing their opponent’s doctrine to it. I shall first attempt to establish their respective meanings for such a soul and the reasons why they would challenge the relevance of that notion for physiology. I shall then (...) try to show how they nevertheless integrated explanatory functions equivalent to those attributed to that metaphysical entity into the theoretical frameworks they proposed and favoured. As a consequence of alternative interpretations of this kind, eighteenth-century physiologists will tend to link vegetative life either with “organic mechanism” or with various kinds of “vital principle,” akin to Stahl’s anima. (shrink)

Response to Predelli's contribution in the proceedings of the Granada workshop.

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

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

Le sujet abordé dans cet ouvrage n’avait guère retenu l’attention des historiens de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, y compris de ceux qui l’abordent sous l’angle de l’histoire culturelle. Or il se révèle phénomène de grande ampleur. Tiré d’un mémoire de master préparé à l’université Paris I sous la direction de Denis Peschanski, le volume livre sur ces bals clandestins une monographie inscrite dans le territoire relativement modeste du département des Côtes du Nord, ce que son titre ne laisse pas...

Auxiliaries are usually studied in the late Republic or the Imperial period. Despite this emphasis in modern research, auxiliaries were employed in substantial numbers during the third and second centuries BCE. Auxiliaries did make a crucial contribution to the Roman war effort in the Middle Republic, providing a substantial part of Rome’s military manpower. These troops were most often financed by the community providing them, allowing the Roman state to save a great deal of money if similar numbers of Roman (...) citizens had been deployed instead. This enabled the Roman state to significantly bolster its ability to project military power without having to implement additional financing mechanisms. Along with the use of auxiliaries, the suspension of tributum after the third Macedonian War seemed to have followed a policy of decreasing the burden of financing war for Roman assidui. (shrink)