Avant-propos.--Saint Thomas d'Aquin, sa mission intellectuelle.--Saint Augustin, éducateur idéal.--La physionomie de Saint Français d'Assise.--Un grand coeur, Saint Albert le Grand.--Les thomistes et saint Augustin.

Dans ces entretiens avec Gadamer, réalisés par Carsten Dutt, c’est la présence d’une intelligence accomplie qui retient l’attention du lecteur. Aussi peuvent-ils être une adéquate introduction à l’herméneutique gadamérienne, en ce qu’ils abordent respectivement les thèses centrales de Vérité et méthode dans le premier entretien, ensuite celles relatives à l’esthétique et à la philosophie pratique dans les second et troisième entretiens. Ce qui suscite cependant l’intérêt du lecteur plus avisé, c’est la précision avec laquelle Gadamer rectifie les plus classiques interprétations (...) que lui soumet C. Dutt, et qui demeurent à la base ou au cœur des objections actuelles dans ces domaines. Ainsi l’unité de la pensée de Gadamer, réaffirmée avec la distance de la maturité, est des plus tangibles. Unité qui redit son intuition fondamentale: «Quiconque comprend quelque chose s’y comprend soi-même» ; en laquelle s’exprime tout l’enjeu de la compréhension, tant pour les sciences de l’esprit et leur nécessaire dialogue avec la tradition, que dans la profondeur de «l’expérience esthétique», ou pour une philosophie pratique consciente des solidarités existantes. Compréhension qui advient dans le dialogue, seul garant d’une véritable entente. (shrink)

Si Sartre connut son lot de scandales, aucun ne fut comparable à celui qui éclata un mois avant sa mort. En cause, son ultime publication : L'Espoir maintenant. Une série d'entretiens que l'on a qualifiée d'abus de faiblesse et de "détournement de vieillard"... Ces échanges étaient en réalité l'aboutissement de dix ans de travail et le fruit d'une amitié inattendue qui engendra une collaboration intellectuelle passionnante. Tout commence dans un café de Saint-Germain, le jour où Sartre rencontre un jeune (...) homme mystérieux de 25 ans, de quarante ans son cadet, doté d'un charisme hors du commun, apatride, clandestin, sans-papiers, et chef incontesté d'un mouvement révolutionnaire radical. Il s'appelle Benny Lévy. Mais c'est sous son nom de guerre qu'il fut craint, admiré et décrié : "Pierre Victor". Entre le 15 avril 1970 et la mort de Sartre le 15 avril 1980, les deux hommes ne se quitteront plus. C'est l'élucidation du mystère persistant de cette relation qui fonde ce récit, à la fois essai critique, biographique et enquête philosophique, qui s'appuie sur une documentation riche et partiellement inédite. Une réflexion profonde sur l'universalité de l'œuvre sartrienne et ses engendrements, sans épargner les contradictions intimes de son auteur et celles de son temps."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

L’exposé que je souhaite présenter repose sur les présupposés suivants, que je ne peux qu’indiquer. J’admets à titre provisoire l’hypothèse des sciences physiques selon laquelle les objets physiques et l’univers physique peuvent être analysés en un complexe de corpuscules physiques. Je suppose que les objets de l’expérience immédiate [158] existent en relation avec les individus biologiques et sociaux...

This paper explores the meaning attributed to the national group as an entry point into how boundaries between the in-group and the out-group are formed. To do so, it focuses on the representation of the past of the group, taken as a symbolic resource able to produce a raison d’être for national groups, and does so within a dialogical framework. Using the transcripts of the French parliamentary debates on immigration from 2006, it proposes a qualitative analysis of collective narratives of (...) the past along three axes: 1) what meaning do they give to the nation, 2) how is such a meaning produced, and 3) how do the stories told by different groups reply or relate to one another. By identifying the main narratives found in the data and how they relate to each other – within and between groups – it proposes to see collective memory as itself the product of symbolisation processes and, therefore, as a cultural tool especially powerful to produce meaning about the present. This paper also argues that collective memory is a situated construction negotiated with – or contested by – others, made possible by the presence of common historical benchmarks to which different meanings may however be attributed. Finally, it proposes to understand “immigration talk” as potentially the product of the identity questions faced by the national group, rather than the other way around. (shrink)

It is a commonly held assumption among cultural, social, and political psychologists that imagining the future of societies we live in has the potential to change how we think and act in the world. However little research has been devoted to whether this effect exists in collective imaginations, of social groups, communities and nations, for instance. This book explores the part that imagination and creativity play in the construction of collective futures, and the diversity of outlets in which these are (...) presented, from fiction and cultural symbols to science and technology. The authors discuss this effect in social phenomena such as in intergroup conflict and social change, and focus on several cases studies to illustrate how the imagination of collective futures can guide social and political action. This book brings together theoretical and empirical contributions from cultural, social, and political psychology to offer insight into our constant imagination of the societies in which we live. (shrink)

Past research has identified a number of asymmetries based on moral judgments. Beliefs about what a person values, whether a person is happy, whether a person has shown weakness of will, and whether a person deserves praise or blame seem to depend critically on whether participants themselves find the agent's behavior to be morally good or bad. To date, however, the origins of these asymmetries remain unknown. The present studies examine whether beliefs about an agent's “true self” explain these observed (...) asymmetries based on moral judgment. Using the identical materials from previous studies in this area, a series of five experiments indicate that people show a general tendency to conclude that deep inside every individual there is a “true self” calling him or her to behave in ways that are morally virtuous. In turn, this belief causes people to hold different intuitions about what the agent values, whether the agent is happy, whether he or she has shown weakness of will, and whether he or she deserves praise or blame. These results not only help to answer important questions about how people attribute various mental states to others; they also contribute to important theoretical debates regarding how moral values may shape our beliefs about phenomena that, on the surface, appear to be decidedly non-moral in nature. (shrink)

George Karamanolis breaks new ground in the study of later ancient philosophy by examining the interplay of the two main schools of thought, Platonism and Aristotelianism, from the first century BC to the third century AD. Arguing against prevailing scholarly assumption, he argues that the Platonists turned to Aristotle only in order to elucidate Plato's doctrines and to reconstruct Plato's philosophy, and that they did not hesitate to criticize Aristotle when judging him to be at odds with Plato. Karamanolis (...) offers much food for thought to ancient philosophers and classicists. (shrink)

"The Traffic in Culture takes us along exciting new avenues in the investigation of art and society, global encounter, and the marketing of culture. These essays will become required reading to scholars in fields as diverse as art history, anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies."--Suzanne Preston Blier, Harvard University "These essays break new ground in charting out a critical ethnography of art. They address the complexities of cultural difference while ceasing to respect the boundary between 'Western' and 'non-Western' art which has (...) defined the scope of the anthropology of art for too long. This is contemporary critical anthropology at its best."--Nicholas Thomas, Australian National University. (shrink)

The present studies investigated children’s and adults’ intuitive beliefs about the physical nature of essences. Adults and children (ranging in age from 6 to 10 years old) were asked to reason about two different ways of determining an unknown object’s category: taking a tiny internal sample from any part of the object (distributed view of essence), or taking a sample from one specific region (localized view of essence). Results from three studies indicated that adults strongly endorsed the distributed view, and (...) children showed a developmental shift from a localized to distributed view with increasing age. These results suggest that even children go beyond mere placeholder notions of essence, committing to conceptual frameworks of how essences might be physically instantiated. (shrink)

The authors of this article are previous or current members of the Clinical Ethics Consultation Affairs (CECA) Committee, a standing committee of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities (ASBH). The committee is composed of seasoned healthcare ethics consultants (HCECs), and it is charged with developing and disseminating education materials for HCECs and ethics committees. The purpose of this article is to describe the educational research and development processes behind our teaching materials, which culminated in a case studies book called (...) A Case-Based Study Guide for Addressing Patient-Centered Ethical Issues in Health Care (hereafter, the Study Guide). In this article, we also enumerate how the Study Guide could be used in teaching and learning, and we identify areas that are ripe for future work. (shrink)

This paper describes the important role of our deep immersions in philosophy in the development of our phenomenological-contextualist approach to psychoanalysis. Influenced most particularly by the phenomenological movement, our collaborative dialogue over more than four decades has led us to a shared commitment to reflection upon the philosophical underpinnings and constitutive contexts of origin of all our theoretical ideas. The growth of our thinking follows an endlessly recurring phenomenological circle joining theoretical perspectives with the inquirers from whose emotional worlds they (...) arise. (shrink)

First published in English in 1968, Kierkegaard's Authorship begins with a brief account of the life and meaning of Kierkegaard and concludes with the brief treatment of his relation to multifaceted existentialism. By reviewing the total authorship and by making available much of the fruit of widespread research, this work throws into relief Kierkegaard's central purposes and makes it possible to avoid some of the dubious interpretations which have grown out of more narrowly selective study. This critical introduction and guide (...) is especially important because Kierkegaard's style was deliberately indirect and distorted and even more because half of the works are actually antagonistic to Kierkegaard's own views. By the pseudonymous works he intended to lead into truth through a process of frustration, provoking the reader into existence. In another sense, the body of the book is also a biography for, in a degree perhaps without parallel in world history, the library which he created was his deed and life. This is an important read for scholars and researchers of Philosophy specially existentialism. (shrink)

The concept of authenticity is central to how people value many different types of objects and yet there is considerable disagreement about how individuals evaluate authenticity or how the concept itself should be defined. This paper attempts to reconcile previous approaches by proposing a novel view of authenticity. Specifically, I draw upon past research on psychological essentialism and propose that when people evaluate the authenticity of objects, they do so by evaluating the extent to which the object embodies or reflects (...) a valued essence. I suggest that this explanation of authenticity provides an overarching framework that describes how people evaluate object authenticity across a variety of contexts and I report the results of three experiments that directly test the predictions made by this explanation. (shrink)

This article shows how, in recent works of cultural analysis, the concept of ‘assemblage’ has been been derived from key sources of theory and put to work to provide a structure-like surrogate to express certain prominent values of a modernist sensibility in the discourse of description and analysis. Assemblage is a sort of anti-structural concept that permits the researcher to speak of emergence, heterogeneity, the decentred and the ephemeral in nonetheless ordered social life. There are other related concepts, like collage, (...) which have been used to give these values substance in research, but currently assemblage is enjoying a popularity perhaps because of the continuing fascination of the work of Deleuze and Guattari. (shrink)

Remarkably accessible, Affective Intelligence and Political Judgment urges social scientists to move beyond the idealistic notion of the purely rational citizen to form a more complete, realistic model that includes the emotional side of ...

The problem with approximation is to find principled grounds for preferring any one over the indefinitely many alternative approximations in equal agreement with observation. From the outset of his efforts on orbital motion Newton’s goal was to show that Kepler’s orbits had a physical standing that the various comparably accurate alternatives lacked. What made this goal difficult was his conclusion, almost from the outset, that the actual motions are too complicated for any representation of them ever to be anything but (...) an approximation. This paper reviews Newton’s efforts, and some of those following his, to turn this very complexity into evidence that Keplerian motion is nonetheless a physical, not merely numerical, approximation. By his and their example those efforts provided a more discriminating way than has generally been recognized to distinguish physical from merely numerical approximations. (shrink)

Stephen Schulhofer's book, Unwanted Sex: The Culture of Intimidation and the Failure of Law, provides a carefully constructed and powerful case for rape-law reform. His effort is distinctive in three ways: (1) it takes the basic question of reform to be the moral one of determining which sexual interactions ought to be the subject of the criminal law, (2) it takes the right of sexual autonomy to serve as the basis for any successful legal reform, and (3) it makes a (...) philosophically sophisticated case for his own reform proposal. Schulhofer's efforts should be of great interest to philosophers, especially feminist legal philosophers, interested in questions that bear direct relevance to the relationships between autonomy, coercion, and consent as constrained by the requirements of due process. His careful and scrupulously fair discussion of influential reform recommendations set the stage for his own position (discussed in section VII), a critical evaluation thereof (sections VII and VIII), and sympathetic recommendations in VIII and IX. Of special value here is Schulhofer's attempt to extend his analysis of coerced consent to include certain "offers" made in contexts (e.g., the workplace) characterized by significant power differentials between persons. Section IX offers suggestions, generally friendly to Schulhofer's overall reform proposals, for identifying wrongful sexual interactions occurring in certain institutional or professional contexts. (shrink)

This edition provides texts from the full range of Berkeley's contributions to philosophy, and sets them in their historical and philosophical contexts.

If a political theory of ownership is to be acceptable, it must rationally prescribe one system or model of ownership as opposed to others. Such a prescription would be rational only if strong normative arguments could be mounted to show it more desirable than its competitors. Thus, the prefatory work for such a theory would consist in the construction of viable models of ownership from which a sound choice could be made. This project would, however, be successful only if originating (...) from coherent, evaluatively neutral analyses of the concept of ownership and other related ideas. The point of this essay is to do this prefatory work. (shrink)