Révulsé par une société qu’il juge débile et décervelante, le personnage de ce livre assume sa réputation d’hurluberlu : « Comme le monde serait ennuyeux si on se contentait de le prendre au pied de la lettre! J’ai toujours pensé qu’il fallait dépayser les choses pour se dépayser soi-même. » Il le fait ardemment, avec la conscience ironique et aiguë d’être ce qu’il est, un rêveur philosophe en rupture avec les routines sociales. Pendant quelque temps, il vit sur le toit (...) d’un immeuble parisien où il installe un matelas mousse, un duvet, un réchaud à gaz et quelques livres dans une caisse en guise de bibliothèque. « Ma parole, je crus bien avoir trouvé ma vraie place dans cette vie. » Sa compagne Janina, son ami dadaïste Getty, le professeur Schuzmeyer directeur d’une clinique psychiatrique, et divers personnages de rencontre dont le pittoresque alimente sa bonne humeur, lui fournissent la clé de sa philosophie : « Un individu qui ne revendique pas sa nature profonde de clown est perdu pour moi. Car il y a pire que le clown, il y a l’homme sans lucidité intérieure ». (shrink)

In der Reihe Deutsche Literatur erscheinen Studien und Quellen der germanistischen Literaturwissenschaft vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart. Es handelt sich um philologisch grundlegende Arbeiten, die das Fach in seiner ganzen methodischen und thematischen Breite abdecken und literaturgeschichtliche Analysen mit theoretischer Reflexion auf hohem Niveau verbinden. Die Ausgaben im Rahmen der Reihe stellen ambitionierte, innovative Editionsvorhaben dar. Komparatistische Perspektiven auf die deutschsprachige Literatur sind ausdr cklich erw nscht. Herausgegeben wird die Reihe von zwei ausgewiesenen Vertreterinnen ihres Faches, die den analytischen Anspruch (...) der Reihe ebenso repr sentieren wie ihre literaturgeschichtliche Vielfalt: Prof. Dr. Beate Kellner ist Professorin f r Deutsche Literatur und Kultur des Mittelalters (Medi vistik) und derzeit Vizepr sidentin der Ludwig Maximilians-Universit t M nchen. Prof. Dr. Claudia Stockinger ist Professorin f r Neuere deutsche Literatur an der Georg-August-Universit t G ttingen. (shrink)

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)

Recalling several profound disagreements about business ethics as it is currently discussed in Western societies, I emphasize the need for business ethics as an academic discipline that constitutes the “backbone” for both teaching business ethics and improving business practice (section 1). Then I outline a conceptual framework of business ethics that promotes a “bottom-up” approach (section 2). This “problem-and action-oriented” conception appears to be fruitful in terms of both practical relevance and theoretical understanding. Finally, I argue for (section 3) the (...) relevance of discussing goals at all levels of human action (i.e., individuals, organizations, systems) as well as the indispensability of human rights, and propose Amartya Sen's “goal-rights-system” approach as a normative-ethical framework for business ethics that integrates these two fundamental aspects. (shrink)

This is a reminiscence and short biographical sketch of the late philosopher and cognitive scientist Jerry Fodor. It includes a summary of his main proposals about the mind: his “Language of Thought” hypothesis; his rejection of analyticity and conceptual role semantics; his “mad dog nativism”; his proposal of mental modules and—by contrast—his skepticism about a computational theory of central cognition; his anti‐reductionist, but still physicalist, views about psychology; and, lastly, his attacks on selectionism. I conclude with some discussion of his (...) idiosyncratic style and of his aesthetic and other interests. An appendix provides some memorable quotes. (shrink)

C'est dans l'esprit des travaux d'Octave Hamelin que se situent ces Etudes de philosophie grecque: l'activite propre de l'historien de la philosophie s'y manifeste comme une reconstruction des pensees du dedans, a partir d'une minutieuse preparation historique. Ces essais donnent une idee assez precise de l'ampleur des travaux de Georges Rodier dans le domaine de la philosophie grecque: le volume s'ouvre en effet sur une etude approfondie de la figure emblematique qu'est Socrate, envisage ensuite de maniere chronologique certains aspects (...) des pensees d'Antisthene, de Platon, d'Aristote et du systeme stoicien, avant de s'achever sur une etude de la pensee de Plotin, notamment dans la perspective singuliere de son influence dans la genese du systeme leibnizien. C'est ainsi que des questions aussi determinantes que celles de la nature et de l'evolution de la dialectique platonicienne, des preuves de l'immortalite de l'ame dans le Phedon, de la composition de la Physique d'Aristote, de la notion de substance dans la Metaphysique se trouvent ici abordees et jointes a des exposes argumentes de la morale aristotelicienne ou stoicienne. (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, ...

“Intentional content,” as I understand it, is whatever serves as the object of “propositional” attitude verbs, such as “think,” “judge,” “represent,” “prefer” (whether or not these objects are “propositions”). These verbs are standardly used to pick out the intentional states invoked to explain the states and behavior of people and many animals. I shall take the “normativity of the intentional,” or “Normativism,” to be the claim that any adequate theory of intentional states involves considerations of value not essentially involved in (...) the natural sciences. Thus, according to Normativism, whether or not someone thinks that fish sleep, or even can represent fish at all, depends upon making a judgment about the person’s goodness or rationality, of a sort that would not be involved in merely determining whether or not fish in fact sleep. (shrink)

Dans Les Métamorphoses du cercle, ouvrage incontournable de l'histoire des idées, Georges Poulet propose une analyse lumineuse et pénétrante des variations innombrables de la figure du cercle à travers les penseurs et poètes depuis la Renaissance. Le cercle apparaît alors comme une métaphore fondamentale qui de tout temps servit aux hommes à penser le inonde et la vie tout court. Sa simplicité et sa perfection en font la première de ces formes privilégiées qui se retrouvent au fond de toutes (...) les croyances et qui servent de principe de structure à tous les esprits. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Introduction Chomsky's Commitment to CRTT Prospects and Problems of CRTT Technical Notions? Does Chomsky Need Intentionality? Chomsky's Dilemma.

This paper is a personal dialogue of maneuvering the landscape of scholarship in the United States as a nurse faculty. The principal thesis of this paper is that a discursive shift from margins to mainstream literature has occurred within nursing discourse during the past 20 years as the result of a growing body of work by nurse philosophers. I utilize my own work in nursing philosophy as an exemplar and provide a narrative situated in a feminist‐critical paradigm. This paper: (1) (...) presents a historical background through a critical‐feminist lens of the discursive shift using my own work and lived experiences as exemplars; (2) examines a contemporary mainstream ‘authoritative’ text as an exemplar of this discursive shift and (3) proposes both potential positive intersections and threats in the future development of nursing philosophy resulting from this discursive shift. (shrink)

Georges Zainaty. BIBLIOGRAPHIE Ahlwardt : Die Handschriften - Verzeichnisse Der Koniglichen Bibliothek zu Berlin. Sechszehnter Band. Verzeichniss der arabischen Handschriften Vierter Band VIII Buch, Die Philosophie. Berlin A. Asher ...

The existence of monsters throws doubt on life's ability to teach us order. This doubt is immediate, no matter for how long a time we have had confidence, no matter how accustomed we have been to see honeysuckle grow on honeysuckle vines, tadpoles become frogs, mares suckle colts, and in general to see like engender like. It is sufficient that this confidence be shaken once by a morphological variation, by a single equivocal appearance, for a radical fear to possess us. (...) Perhaps, fear, you will say; but why radical? Because we are living beings, real effects of the laws of life, and in our turn future causes of life. A failure on the part of life concerns us doubly: a failure could affect us, and we could cause a failure. It is only because we men are living beings that a morphological failure is, in our eyes, a monster. Suppose we were pure reason, a pure intellectual machine for observing, calculating, and accounting—inert, and indifferent to the objects that give rise to thought: in that case the monster would simply be that which was different from the ordinary, of an order other than the most probable order. (shrink)

David Hume's _Treatise on Human Nature_ and _Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding_ are amongst the most widely-studies texts on philosophy. _Hume's Epistemology and Metaphysics: An Introduction_ presents in a clear, concise and accessible manner the key themes of these texts. Georges Dicker clarifies Hume's views on meaning, knowledge, causality, and sense perception step by step and provides us with a sharp picture of how philosophical thinking has been influenced by Hume. Accessible to anyone coming to Hume for the first time, (...) _Hume's Epistemology and Metaphysics_ is an indispensible guide to Hume's philosophical thinking. (shrink)

Fodor and LePore's attack on conceptual role semantics relies on Quine's attack on the traditional analytic/synthetic and a priori/a posteriori distinctions, which in turn consists of four arguments: an attack on truth by convention; an appeal to revisability; a claim of confirmation holism; and a charge of explanatory vacuity. Once the different merits of these arguments are sorted out, their proper target can be seen to be not the Traditional Distinctions, but an implicit assumption about their superficial availability that we (...) have abundant reason to reject. Once we reject it, we can see how issues of the absorbtion of conventions, the revisability of belief, and confirmation holism are compatible with the Traditional Distinctions, and that Quine's discussion only serves to camouflage the question of whether some confirmation relations are constitutive of meaning and knowable a priori. (shrink)

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)

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)

This article is a review of the literature on the subject of how nurses who provide palliative care are affected by ethical issues. Few publications focus directly on the moral experience of palliative care nurses, so the review was expanded to include the moral problems experienced by nurses in the care of the terminally ill patients. The concepts are first defined, and then the moral attitudes of nurses, the threats to their moral integrity, the moral problems that are perceived by (...) nurses, and the emotional consequences of these moral problems are considered in turn. The results show that the moral behaviour of nurses, which is theoretically grounded in commitment to care and to the patient, appears to be shaped by specific processes that lead to engagement or to mental and behavioural disengagement in morally difficult situations. Nurses often appear to fail to recognize the moral dimensions of the problems they experience and also to lack the skills they need to resolve moral problems adequately. Although the findings show that several elements that are beyond the control of nurses, owing to their lack of autonomy and authority, influence their moral experience, intrinsic factors such as feelings of insecurity and powerlessness have a profound effect on nurses’ perceptions and attitudes in the face of moral problems. The moral problems perceived by these nurses are related to end-of-life issues, communication with patients, the suffering of patients, and the appropriateness of the medical treatment. (shrink)

This richly complex book, one of the most challenging and rewarding works of twentie -century literature, is generally considered Gurdjieff's masterpiece.

Pessimisme et Individualisme vaut la lecture parce qu'on y trouve réexposée la thématique classique de son auteur : le corps fournit la grande raison ; tout est affaire de sensibilité ; la métaphysique procède de la physiologie ; l'émotivité nourrit la théorie ; le social vit de la négation des individualités ; la résistance des individualités toujours en péril est nécessaire, pour autant, elle est condamnée à l'échec car le collectif triomphe en permanence : l'héroïsme suppose de ne pas se (...) soumettre, de s'insoumettre, de refuser ; la tâche du philosophe consiste, autant que faire se peut, à rendre la vie possible loin des entreprises grégaires. Michel ONFRAY. (shrink)

I argue that, pace Chomsky (2000, 2003), standard theories of linguistic competence are committed to taking talk of representations seriously, in particular, to recognizing that the “of x” clause that invariably follows “representation” is a way of specifying that representation’s intentional content. One reason to insist upon intentional content in such cases is that the “x” in “of x” may not exist (as in "of Zeus"). This issue is especially relevant to linguistics since, recapitulating considerations raised by many linguists, I (...) go on to argue that most of the SLEs themselves seldom, if ever exist: it is doubtful there are many, if any, tokens of them in space and time; indeed, their existence is by and large inessential to the needs of either communication or serious linguistic theory. All that linguistic theory requires to be real in this regard are the representations, presumably entokened in people’s brains, understood, however, in terms of their intentional contents. (shrink)

In recent years, corporate environmental policies have become urgently needed, demanded by influential environmentalist groups and launched by an increasing number of companies. Those demands and efforts, however, often lack an ethical underpinning. This paper deals with some basic ethical issues and outlines three perspectives for further investigation: (1) How can we take into account ethical pluralism that characterizes most contemporary societies?; (2) What is the content of environmental ethics viewed from a Christian perspective, taken as an example of various (...) existent doctrines in the pluralistic world?; and (3) What relevance may this "Christian environmental stewardship" have for the understanding of corporate environmental responsibility? (shrink)