As the work of thinkers such as Michel Foucault, François Jacob, Louis Althusser, and Pierre Bourdieu demonstrates, Georges Canguilhem has exerted tremendous influence on the philosophy of science and French philosophy more generally. In Knowledge of Life, a book that spans twenty years of his essays and lectures, Canguilhem offers a series of epistemological histories that seek to establish and clarify the stakes, ambiguities, and emergence of philosophical and biological concepts that defined the rise of modern biology. How do (...) transformations in biology and modern medicine shape conceptions of life? How do philosophical concepts feed into biological ideas and experimental practices, and how are they themselves transformed? How does knowledge "undo the experience of life so as to help man remake what life has made without him, in him or outside of him?" Knowledge of Life is Canguilhem's effort to explain how the movements of knowledge and life come to rest upon each other. Published at the dawn of the genetic revolution and still pertinent today, the book tackles the history of cell theory, the conceptual moves toward and away from mechanical understandings of the organism, the persistence of vitalism, and the nature of normality in science and its objects. (shrink)

The idea of nature in medical theory and practice -- Diseases -- Health: popular concept and philosophical question -- Is a pedagogy of healing possible? -- The problem of regulation in the organism and in society.

The organizational justice literature and the family business literature have developed independently, which limits our understanding of fairness and justice in the family business workplace. So far, the concepts of justice and fairness have been used interchangeably in the family business literature, as if objective measures that aim to increase justice in the workplace will automatically translate into fairness perceptions among family business employees. By integrating the organizational justice literature and the family business literature, we first differentiate between the two (...) concepts of justice and fairness and argue that a utilitarian conceptualization of justice may come into direct conflict with fairness perceptions in the family business workplace. Second, we shed light on the importance of incorporating socioemotional goals, particularly those that reveal a bright side of socioemotional wealth, into rules and regulations designed to increase justice in the workplace, which, we argue, contributes to increasing fairness perceptions among employees and to building and maintaining an ethical family business workplace. Theoretical and practical contributions are discussed at the end of the paper. (shrink)

Nietzsches Hermeneutik lässt die attische Tragödie zu einem kosmischen Geschehen werden dank der ontologischen Deutung, die sie ihr verleiht. Das tragische Schauspiel offenbart in seiner artistischen Symbolik den Grundcharakter der Welt und des Lebens, der von den ästhetischen Seinsmächten Dionysos und Apollo getragen wird, die, obgleich gegensätzlicher Natur, in ihrem Bestehen aufeinander angewiesen sind und sich gegenseitig steigern. Die durch die Schönheit trotz allen Leidens erzeugte Rechtfertigung menschlicher Existenz erreicht in der griechischen Tragödie somit ihren Höhepunkt. Sofern die Zuschauer zum (...) Miterleben stark genug sind, werden ihre Kräfte noch gemehrt. Aus alldem ergibt sich der Ausdruck einer lebensbejahenden Einstellung, die ganz das Gegenteil der Willensverneinung darstellt, zu der nach Schopenhauer die tragische Kunst überleiten soll. (shrink)

Commentary on Galen Strawson's 'Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism'.

The central point of Raffman’s discussion is to distinguish the perception, knowledge, and effability of the standard chromatic “categorical” pitch events from what she calls “nuance” pitch events—events whose individuation is more fine-grained than C-events, and which seem to resist reliable, psychologically available categorization. Thus, two pitches a quarter-tone apart may be classified as the same C-event, even though they are different N-events. Experimental evidence suggests that whereas people are quite good at recall and discrimination of C-events, they are considerably (...) poorer with respect to N-events, and this, according to Raffman, is due to the availability of “schemas,” or conceptual “cubby-holes,” in the former but not the latter case. But this is not to say that people aren’t aware of N-events: a good deal of musical pleasure turns on appreciation of such N-events as vibrato, slides, and pitch coloration. The point is merely that “it is overwhelmingly unlikely that we have, or could have, interval schemas as fine-grained as the N-pitches and N-intervals we can hear”. (shrink)

Cet ouvrage est une réédition numérique d’un livre paru au XXe siècle, désormais indisponible dans son format d’origine.

La notion de personne connaît deux principaux domaines d’application linguistiques : un domaine grammatical, celui de la catégorie grammaticale de la personne (1re, 2e et 3e personnes) et un domaine sémantique, celui du lexique, où le nom personne sert à désigner un individu de l’espèce humaine. Les deux se trouvent reliés par le fait que les deux premières personnes « grammaticales » du singulier je et tu ne peuvent être que des personnes « sémantiques ». Mais de quelles « personnes»s’agit-il? (...) Autrement dit, qui est je? Qui est tu? Qui est il / elle? Le but de notre article est de montrer que la réponse énonciative classique en termes de locuteur et d’interlocuteur (ou d’allocutaire) s’avère insuffisante et que, pour expliquer leur fonctionnement, il faut prendre en compte leur rôle dans l’énoncé, leur caractère de réflexif d’énonciation (token-reflexive) et la subjectivité (pensée de se) inhérente à je. (shrink)