Although developmental biology is an institutionalized discipline, no unambiguous account of what development is and when it stops has so far been provided. In this article, I focus on two sets of developmental molecular mechanisms, namely those underlying the heterochronic pathway in C. elegans and those involving Hox genes in vertebrates, to suggest a conceptual account of animal development. I point out that, in these animals, the early stages of life exhibit salient mechanistic features, in particular in the way mechanisms (...) of genetic regulation occur in the organism. Indeed, these stages are characterized by sequential and irreversible changes in gene expression taking place throughout the organism. A general definition of animal development based on these distinctive features implies that, at least for some animal species, development does not go on throughout the life of the animal, contrary to what has recently been claimed by some biologists and philosophers. Instead, in such species, development encompasses various events occurring sequentially at the beginning of life. (shrink)

This article focuses on a specific genre, the report of a university council meeting. It aims to relate the specific features of the text to the body whose minutes it is, and to the institution within which it is produced. To this end, we are analysing a corpus of reports from the University of Nanterre between 1971 and 1973, precisely at the time when the university as we know it was created following the Faure Law. As the archives also revealed (...) the presence of some drafts, it was possible to combine the historical approach with a genetic one, revealing the principles guiding the drafting of these texts. In this way, we have shown that the reports, through the way in which they negotiate the constraints that weigh on their drafting and fulfil their function of 'taking the place' (“tenant lieu”), deliver a certain representation of the council, which the drafts, through their reflexive dimension, make it possible to materialise. (shrink)

This article provides a summary of current knowledge about memory illusions. The memory illusions described here focus on the recall of imagined events that have never actually occurred. The purpose is to review theoretical ideas and empirical evidence about the reality-monitoring processes involved in memory illusions. Reality monitoring means deciding whether the memory has been perceptually derived or been self-generated (thought or imagined). A few key findings from the literature have been reported in this paper and these focus on internal (...) source-monitoring judgments which distinguish perceptual events from imagined events. Finally, the experimental paradigms used to shed light on processes occurring in the failure of reality monitoring in healthy subjects may be extended to an examination of the causes and the prevention of hallucinations in patients. (shrink)

When one contrasts pain with the classic five senses, discussions generally focus on vision, which is taken as the paradigmatic example of perception. An intentionalist might argue that if the phenomenal difference between feeling and seeing bodily disturbances cannot be explained at the level of the content, it can be so at the level of the mode of presentation, and more particularly at the level of the structure of the spatial phenomenology of pain. Here I will argue that the spatial (...) phenomenology of pain shares some key features with touch by contrast to sight, but these similarities should not make us neglect major differences between these two types of bodily sensations. I shall then draw the consequences of these differences for the awareness of one’s body as one’s own. In brief, to fix the boundaries of the body that one experiences as one’s own, one must answer two questions: where does the body stop, and the rest of world start? and what matters for self-preservation? I will suggest that touch primarily answers the first question, whereas pain primarily answers the second question. (shrink)

Religious ritual in ancient Greece regularly incorporated music, so much so that certain instruments or vocal genres frequently became associated with the religious veneration of specific gods. The Attic cult of Pan and the Nymphs should also be included among this group: though little is often known about the specific ritual practices, the literary and visual evidence associated with the cults make repeated reference to music performed on the panpipes—and to auditory and sensory stimuli more generally—as a prominent feature of (...) the worship of these gods. I consider the Vari Cave, sacred to Pan and the Nymphs, together with the surviving marble votive reliefs from that space, to explore the sounds and sensations associated with the veneration of the rural gods. I argue that the sensory experience offered by the cave and the images within it would have enhanced the worshiper's experience of the ritual and the gods for whom they were performed. In this way, visual and auditory perceptions blurred together to create a powerful experience of the divine. (shrink)

Connue sous le titre d’« Invective contre le roi Jean », la Lettre céleste conservée dans le manuscrit Cotton Vespasian E. III de la British Library peut être datée du début de la décennie 1250. Elle se présente comme une critique du roi Henri III, des prélats et des grands du royaume d’Angleterre et de leurs officiers, tout en commémorant la figure du prédicateur et prophète Pierre de Wakefield, supplicié en 1213 sur l’ordre de Jean sans Terre. L’édition du texte (...) est accompagnée d’une traduction annotée et précédée d’une introduction historique et littéraire. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Comme Elle Respire:Memory of Breath, Breath of MemoryFrédérique Berthet (bio)Translated by David F. Bell (bio)La poésie est un système de respiration, c'est fait pour mieux respirer.[Poetry is a respiration system, it's made for breathing better.]—Erri De Luca- Stop!- What?- I can hear you breathing!...- Stop!- Breathing?- Yes!—Paul Thomas AndersonLittle paper-fish cutouts have been placed on the ground, on the carpet.We're in the reassuring '70s stylishness of a doctor's office. (...) The carpet is soft and glistens like in interior decoration magazines, it's with it, in. We couldn't care less about what Dyson vacuum cleaners and "purifiers" boast they can eliminate several decades later: acarids, those microscopic domestic arthropods, human parasites (notably), and airborne vectors of infectious disease (colds, coughs, respiratory distress). No, in the spring of 1975, innocently and self-satisfyingly, the urbane doctor flaunts the opulent carpet with curly pile in his luxury apartment with its state-of-the-art waiting room.In this grand interior of a medical office, a man in a white coat plies his important trade. For example, that day a little girl is re-learning how to breathe. One might think that exhaling and inhaling is learned for life—je t'aime comme je respire, elle parle comme elle respire, il ment comme il respire1—from the very first cry at birth. But in fact, sometimes in life breathing gets stuck between the nasal cavity and the bronchial tubes, between the respiratory tract and the lungs. Progressively, imperceptibly, the organism is short of air, a malicious infection spreads and impairs [End Page 92] alveolar diffusion to the point of respiratory exhaustion: Is it serious, doctor? We must act quickly, very quickly. How to liquify what stopped up the system one day to the point of blocking it—the doctors know what to do.This doctor undertook long, arduous and learned studies. He knows functionally how a living being breathes, how a child lives organically. He can also re-teach the little girl what she no longer knows how to do: inhale, exhale using the full volume of the thoracic cage, regulating the ventilatory flow, solidifying the invisible membranes. In the child's family, everyone knows (and knows how to do) important things, but no one undertook extensive studies, much less studies of the aerial exchanges in the human body. This special knowledge possessed by the doctor (unless special means something else unspoken that would explain why this specific doctor was chosen rather than any other) surrounds him with a padding of respect that creates (and the little girl feels this) a sort of protective continuum between him and the walls within which he sees her, where he practices his kind of calm and slow urbane medicine. It's far from the formidable hospital she has just left, with its spherical apparatus next to the bed aspirating the red and yellow pleural liquid, the "treatment room" where the surgeon, the "butcher" as the nurses call him among themselves, manipulated the drain without anesthesia, with no regard for the child's suffering. The doctor, and his place in the elevated tower, even though they are not to be confused, make for a cozy reception space in which one is comfortable, even in passing.This doctor—who is, in truth, a massage-physiotherapist—is located in a designer high-rise building with a façade decorated by white, pointed features that manifest a will toward an architectural act. On the ground floor, the entrance hall is finished in dark-veined, clear brown marble, and the entry threshold between the exterior and interior is marked by large transparent glass panes that must be manipulated with care. The entrance hall has an intimidating sonority and a useless cold nudity from which one escapes in an elevator where one is surrounded by mirrors and gold buttons and in which one speeds upward silently toward floors, clouds.The designer high-rise is located at the outskirts, the outskirts of a city of recent Olympic stature, where several years earlier Olympic athletes were welcomed and trained to increase their respiratory capacity and... (shrink)

One of the assets of the simulation theory, as defended by Alvin Goldman in many papers and in his book Simulating Minds, is its ability to explain egocentric bias, and more generally the priority of first‐person mindreading over third‐person mindreading (ascription of mental states to other people). This chapter argues, on the contrary, that the simulationist framework enables confusions between self and others that go both ways: taking one's beliefs for the other's beliefs (egocentric bias) and vice versa, taking the (...) other's beliefs for one's beliefs (altercentric bias). It sees how the risk of such confusion may be disadvantageous from an evolutionary perspective, questioning thus the evolutionary plausibility of the simulation theory. Egocentric errors have been taken as evidence of the priority of first‐person mindreading over third‐person mindreading, which seems in line with the simulation theory. Recent findings on altercentric bias have opened a new promising way to investigate the cognitive basis of third‐person mindreading. (shrink)

Theories of embodied cognition abound in the literature, but it is often unclear how to understand them. We offer several interpretations of embodiment, the most interesting being the thesis that mental representations in bodily formats (B-formats) have an important role in cognition. Potential B-formats include motoric, somatosensory, affective and interoceptive formats. The literature on mirroring and related phenomena provides support for a limited-scope version of embodied social cognition under the B-format interpretation. It is questionable, however, whether such a thesis can (...) be extended. We show the limits of embodiment in social cognition. (shrink)

The present discussion derives from a larger research project that concerns the medieval Latin translation of Averroes’ Middle Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics. The translation was carried out by Hermann the German in Toledo in 1240. I am concerned here specifically with nine passages that are distributed over three chapters of the Commentary in which the Latin translation is sprinkled with transliterations based on Greek and Arabic terms. These transliterations, which are not glosses, can be understood on several levels, and (...) these, in turn, raise questions about the boundary between transliteration proper and translation that borrows from the source language a term which is then integrated into the Latin lexicon in the form of a calque or ‘loan translation’. Examining these transliterations makes it possible, first, to show that the translator does not follow a uniform method throughout the text, which could imply the existence of several translators or several collaborators with disti... (shrink)

L’intervention de l’écrivain Thomas Clerc dans l’exposition de Pierre Huyghe au Centre Pompidou en 2013, conçue comme une performance revisitée de L’écrivain public (1995) de Huyghe, interroge le statut de l’auteur-performeur et celui de témoin doublé du statut de spectateur dans la personne de l’écrivain écrivant au cœur d’une exposition dont il fait lui-même partie. Nous interrogeons le déplacement de la fonction de l’écrivain public dans celui du traducteur de sensations et d’émotions propres à un lieu d’art, en situation d’immersion. (...) Faut-il lire ce qui fait événement en un seul et même acte sous la plume de l’écrivain comme autant de traces venant inquiéter le réel dans un travail d’enquête sur le temps d’exposition? Nous questionnons la fonction d’interprète et d’acteur d’une œuvre exposée à travers la figure de l’écrivain à l’œuvre. (shrink)

C’est un vieux court-métrage en noir et blanc qui ne cesse de tressauter dans ma tête depuis mon adolescence. Cela débute généralement à l’aube, entre deux sommeils. Le film se termine par une scène en apparence banale : quelques secondes où l’on voit deux hommes se serrer la main. L’image est un peu floue du fait que la scène est filmée par une mémoire émue. * Quelques rapides traits pour situer l’événement. Les deux hommes vivent sur des continents séparés. L’un (...) est en Europe ; l’autre, en .. (shrink)

Recluses, ermites ou engagées dans le monde, les saintes travesties sont nombreuses jusqu’à la fin du Moyen Âge. Ayant valeur de transgression et/ou d’initiation, le travestissement permet à Thècle, Pélagie, Marguerite, Marine ou Eugénie de redéfinir non seulement la notion de virginité mais d’affirmer une sainteté au nom d’une intégrité qui dérange les catégories sexuées et renverse les notions de genre. D’autres, comme Galla, Paula ou Wilgeforte, délivrent de l’antagonisme des sexes. Et toutes, jusqu’à Jeanne d’Arc, bouleversent la destinée des (...) femmes en perturbant l’ordre temporel des hommes. Ainsi apparaît la conquête d’un nouveau corps à travers la mission chrétienne et l’expérience mystique, qui déjoue la nature de femme et les vertus masculines. (shrink)

In ‘Putnam’s Paradox’, Lewis defended global descriptivism and reference magnetism. According to Schwarz [2014], Lewis didn’t mean what he said there, and really held neither position. We present evidence from Lewis’s correspondence and publications which shows conclusively that Lewis endorsed both.

The philosophical world is indebted to Alvin Goldman for a number of reasons, and among them, his defense of the relevance of cognitive science for philosophy of mind. In Simulating minds, Goldman discusses with great care and subtlety a wide variety of experimental results related to mindreading from cognitive neuroscience, cognitive psychology, social psychology and developmental psychology. No philosopher has done more to display the resourcefulness of mental simulation. I am sympathetic with much of the general direction of Goldman’s theory. (...) I agree with him that mindreading is not a single system based on a single mechanism. And I admire his attempt to bring together the cognitive neuroscientific discovery of mirror system phenomena and the philosophical account of pretense within a unique theoretical framework of mental simulation. To do so, Goldman distinguishes two types of mindreading, respectively, based on low-level and high-level simulation. Yet, I wonder in what sense they are really two distinct processes. Here, I will confine myself largely to spelling out a series of points that take issue with the distinction between low-level and high-level mindreading. (shrink)

A new model of bioturbation has been developed to describe short term sediment reworking induced by macrobenthic communities. The design of the model had to consider the mixing processes, firstly, at the organism level, and secondly, at community level. This paper describes the mixing mode of the four types of bioturbators defined by the authors: the biodiffusors, the upward-conveyors, the downward-conveyors and the regenerators. The mathematical formulation of these sub-models consists of ordinary differential equations. They take into account the size (...) of the bioturbated zone, the output fluxes to the water column, tracer decay, physical mixing due to local currents and the type and intensity of the bioturbation processes. These sub-models make it possible to describe correctly the mixing events that have occurred in cores with each type of bioturbator. They also provide the basis for general bioturbation model, that will take into account the respective degrees of involvement of (i) the different bioturbation processes and their characteristics, (ii) the interference between the different processes, and (iii) make possible to predict the particle reworking in order to include it in studies of organic matter in early diagenesis. (shrink)

In a recent contribution to this journal, Arjaliès (J Bus Ethics 92:57—78, 2010) suggests that the emergence of socially responsible investment (SRI) in France can be best described as a social movement with a collective identity that aimed to challenge the dominant logic of the financial market. Such an account is at odds with a body of empirical studies that approaches SRI in the French context as a process of market creation led by loosely coordinated actors with contradictory and conflicting (...) interests and values, who have mainly complied with—rather than opposed—the existing dominant financial logic of the asset-management field. In this comment, we build on this prior research to contest Arjaliès' perspective on both theoretical and empirical grounds, with the aim of highlighting the shortcomings of conflating social movements and other forms of collective actions in understanding the building of new markets in organization theory and SRI studies. We contend that in mistaking for social movement forms of collective actions that underpin the emergence of markets, scholars of organization theory may confuse distinct mechanisms in their explanation of SRI emergence across countries, overlook the complex dynamics and interactions of markets and social movements, and, most importantly, fail to evaluate the real political significance of SRI as an empirical phenomenon. We propose that future research on SRI distinguishes carefully "social-movement research as a theoretical framework" from "social movement as an empirical phenomenon" in order to avoid such drawbacks while benefiting from recent advances in social-movement research. (shrink)

The Marx of Communism and the Marx of Structuralism. The article addresses the issue of the response within the French Communist Party to the structuralist and anti-humanist reading of Marx which Althusser formulated in the period leading up to May 1968. While structuralism was regarded by some as a marker of the avant-garde, to a number of communist intellectuals, and in particular those closest to the party leadership, it amounted to a “a philosophy of hopelessness”. e article thus examines the (...) context in which Althusser was declared to be heterodox in the early months of 1966, in particular at the convention of philosophers held in Choisy and at the meeting of the Communist Party central committee in Argenteuil. (shrink)

Pour la théorie des média 1, les média techniques – par opposition au médium symbolique qu’est l’écriture, sont déjà porteurs d’une des caractéristiques fondamentales de l’époque informatique : la possibilité de manipulation de la dimension temporelle du réel. En tant que médium, l’ordinateur ne constitue pas la rupture qu’implique le concept de révolution. Au contraire, la théorie des média et l’archéologie des média invitent à reconsidérer la distinction entre « anciens » et « nouveaux » média et à interroger les (...) formes mêmes de la temporalité. (shrink)

Dans les traités italiens du XVIe siècle consacrés au mérite, à la dignité et excellence des femmes, le mot « censure » ne figure pas nommément, mais si le terme est anachronique, la notion qu'il recouvre ne l'est peut-être pas, comme semblent le suggérer les comparaisons de la valeur féminine à un soleil obscurci ou masqué par des nuages, ou bien à de l'or enfoui dans la terre. Ces images d'occultation, d'ensevelissement, d'étouffement pourraient être des métaphores d'une censure que ..

En limitant leur sujet au Paris de la fin du XIXe siècle au début du XXIe siècle, Catherine Gonnard et Élisabeth Lebovici montrent non seulement que le XXe siècle est le siècle où les femmes prennent place dans l’histoire de l’art, mais que l’histoire de leur visibilité ne suit pas le découpage des courants artistiques conçus par l’histoire de l’art. On pourrait regretter que le cadre géographique ne soit pas plus élargi dans la deuxième moitié du siècle, alors que New (...) York l’emporte sur Pari... (shrink)

Improvisational theater is a booming theatrical practice, applying in many fields. Its effects on cognitive and behavioral processes are beginning to be demonstrated, despite scientific publications that are still rare, particularly about language. This study aimed to evaluate the effects of improv on adolescent narrative skills. Twenty-seven middle school students were recruited and divided into two groups: an IMPRO group, composed of novice and intermediate improvisers, and a CONTROL group, composed of middle school students doing theater. The evaluation took place (...) in two experimental times spaces 3 months apart. It consisted in the creation of a written narrative resulting from previously observed images. We used quantitative criteria to carry out the analysis of this story, according to the methodologies of PELEA and EVALEO. We showed an effect of the improv on coherence, which suggests that the practice of improv introduces teenagers to improve the narrative skills and the planification of a story, unlike written theater. (shrink)

Cet article s’intéresse aux conditions de constitution d’un corpus d’écrits sociaux du point de vue de l’analyse de discours (AD) et s’interroge sur la résolution des difficultés liées à sa contextualisation et à son exploration automatique. Nous serons ainsi amenées à proposer une approche multidimensionnelle de la co(n)textualité, qui opère des va-et-vient entre les formes linguistiques et les extérieurs des textes.

Le Venezuela de la fin de la période coloniale se distingue sur bien des points des autres régions d’Amérique espagnole : une prospérité économique flatteuse fondée sur le commerce du cacao et que confirment les réformes bourboniennes de la fin du siècle ; une configuration sociale contrastée mais extrêmement fluide et une aristocratie créole, les mantuanos, dont le discours et les généalogies sociales sont repris à leur compte par les autres groupes sociaux émergents, notamment par le monde des pardos (métis) (...) ; mais également l’une des révolutions d’Indépendance les plus violentes du continent. Les sensibilités métisses vont de pair avec une mémoire partagée, au quotidien ou lors d’événements bien particuliers tels que visitas ou procès. D’autant qu’un autre élément contribue à faire de cette société métisse une société en mouvement : les femmes, quel que soit leur statut social ou ethnique. Transgressions des normes sociales et morales par les aristocrates mantuanas, revendications des pardas se voulant nobles et défendant leur « honneur » : se situant dans la perspective de l’histoire des sensibilités, cette étude tentera de faire le point sur ce métissage des représentations, ainsi que sur la subversion du modèle culturel hispanique qui en découle dans les pratiques effectives. (shrink)