From his very earliest writings, art was always important for Georges Bataille. Rather than something static, art, for Bataille, always involves an experience and an exigency towards freedom and even the impossible. It was apparent from the very form of Bataille’s art review Documents, which juxtaposed heterogeneous images, texts and topics, that art was intended as an experience. Bataille found in Andalusia the kind of art that triggers an exigency, an excess or a form of ecstasy in the viewer (...) or the participant, from the paintings of Picasso to flamenco performances. Art that evokes the potency for interior uprising is given form in the various figures of fleeting spirits, such as the will-o’-the-wisp or the genie called duende, as described by Lorca in “Play and Theory of the Duende” and illustrated in Calderón’s La dama duende [The Phantom Lady]. Bataille, who was moved by a performance he had witnessed at the Moulin Rouge, compared the spirited dance of the performers to the will-o’-the-wisps, the spirits that suddenly appear to unsuspecting wanderers, luring them off their path. Born in the marshes where the dead are buried, will-o’-the-wisps flare up, evoking an exigency in whoever beholds them. Thus, the will-o’-the-wisp or the duende exemplifies the potency of images, their flaring and fading away, and their ability to move us. (shrink)

Georges Rey presents a much-needed philosophical defense of Noam Chomsky's famous view of human language, as an internal, innate computational system. But he also offers a critical examination of problematic developments of this view, to do with innateness, ontology, intentionality, and other issues of interdisciplinary interest.

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)

I live — if I choose to see things this way- — among a curious race that sees earth, its chance events and the vast interconnectedness of animals, mammals, ...

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

INTRODUCTION This book is a systematic study of the problem of perception and knowledge. I intend to analyze the problem, to expound and criticize the most ...

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

Ce célèbre texte de Marx, rédigé en 1845, est un des plus petits documents philosophiques : soixante-cinq lignes, distribuées en onze «thèses», dont la plus longue compte treize lignes et la plus brève, une ligne et demie.À quoi attribuer sa fortune? Il en va de ces notes comme des aphorismes de Nietzsche ou des -carnets de Valéry : le regard étranger découvre, dans l'apparente spontanéité de l'écriture, dans sa déconcertante concision, sa propre disponibilité et comme une invite à la libre (...) coproduction du sens.Marx, en réalité, règle ses comptes avec ce qu'il appelle sa «conscience philosophique d'autrefois ». Il refuse désormais de se contenter du rôle de spectateur.Il voit dans ce qu'il regarde autour de lui, des besoins et des projets, du travail et de l'imagination, qui renvoient à une économie, à une culture, à une histoire, c'est-à-dire à une société déterminée.Ce livre nous fait pénétrer au sein du laboratoire de Marx, au moment où il engage une révolution théorique qui n'a pas fini de faire parler d'elle, ainsi qu'en témoigne le retentissant, perdurable et quasi obsessionnel écho de la 11e thèse sur Feuerbach : « Les philosophes ont seulement interprété différemment le monde, ce qui importe, c'est de le changer. »La suite est connue, l'œuvre sera poursuivie sous le signe, pour l'essentiel, de la « critique de l'économie politique », du Manifeste du Parti communiste et du Capital, du 18 Brumaire et de La guerre civile en France. À noter que cet avenir-là, nous le connaissons, mais pas Marx... (shrink)

A searing personal record of spiritual and communal crisis, wherein the death of god announces the beginning of friendship.

This contribution deals with taking up the challenge of sustainable development through human centred systems which aim at the creation and repatriation of global quality in each society, and which are seen to operate as a whole, on a local, regional or even a planetary scale. The paper argues that, particularly in a field such as information, communication, environment, technological processes and innovations, which have structurally revolutionised first of all manufacturing but also education and daily living at the same time. (...) However, producing new pathogenous structures require, by necessity, a political ecology in order to relate these fields to new figures of meditation/mediance and crossbreeding built up by associative networks. PRELUDE'S experience, as an international networking programme of scientists pursuing with other social factors objectives of codevelopments (in response to the failure of bad development in the North and in the South), and its contribution to the theme Global Perspective 2010 of the CE-FAST Programme suggest the actual relevance and, turning to the future, the decisive function of associative networks as a way of approaching more efficiently, because of their flexibility, complex, highly heterogeneous situations to be tackled in a systemic and global fashion. In complementing institutions and established companies these networks give their new performances and efficacity to institute, and so doing displace acquired balances, and increase their capacity to innovate. (shrink)