Could there have been nothing? is the first book-length study of metaphysical nihilism - the claim that there could have been no concrete objects. It critically analyses the debate around nihilism and related questions about the metaphysics of possible worlds, concrete objects and ontological dependence.

This book is an account of the important influence on the development of mathematical logic of Charles S. Peirce and his student O.H. Mitchell, through the work of Ernst Schroder, Leopold Lowenheim, and Thoralf Skolem. As far as we know, this book is the first work delineating this line of influence on modern mathematical logic.

Cilia are unique eukaryotic organelles and exhibit remarkable conservation across evolution. Nevertheless, very different types of configurations are encountered, raising the question of their evolution. Cilia are constructed by intraflagellar transport (IFT), the movement of large protein complexes or trains that deliver cilia components to the distal tip for assembly. Recent data revealed that IFT trains are restricted to some but not all nine doublet microtubules in the protist Trypanosoma brucei. Here, we propose that restricted positioning of IFT trains could (...) offer potent options for cilia to evolve towards more complex (addition of new structural elements like in spermatozoa) or simpler configuration (loss of some elements like in primary cilia), and therefore be a driver of cilia diversification. We present two hypotheses to explain how IFT trains could be restricted to some doublets, either by a triage process taking place at the basal body level or by the development of molecular differences between ciliary microtubules. (shrink)

This paper aims to contribute to intercorporeal ethics studies by enlarging their political understanding. Intercorporeal ethics revolve around the idea that, within organizations, our embodied interaction with each other is a conduit to enact genuine ethical relations of autonomy, mutual recognition, respect, care and responsibility. However, how intercorporeality can also be a means for organizations to shape and control their members’ ethical relationships in pursuit of corporate interests remains to be examined. We explore this political perspective on intercorporeality by combining (...) insights from Merleau-Ponty and Nussbaum. We analyze how the deployment of a lean management program in a financial institution produces unethical relations of objectification between employees by influencing their embodied interactions. Our study thus enlarges the political understanding of intercorporeality by showing the processes through which the embodied experience of one another is conditioned not only by our corporeal sensibility but also by managerial prescriptions. This provides a more nuanced understanding of intercorporeality as a basis to counter control and domination in organizations. (shrink)

The author divides this work into three parts entitled: analytical therapy; yoga; and a comparison.

Many groups of closely related species have reticulate phylogenies. Recent genomic analyses are showing this in many insects and vertebrates, as well as in microbes and plants. In microbes, lateral gene transfer is the dominant process that spoils strictly tree‐like phylogenies, but in multicellular eukaryotes hybridization and introgression among related species is probably more important. Because many species, including the ancestors of ancient major lineages, seem to evolve rapidly in adaptive radiations, some sexual compatibility may exist among them. Introgression and (...) reticulation can thereby affect all parts of the tree of life, not just the recent species at the tips. Our understanding of adaptive evolution, speciation, phylogenetics, and comparative biology must adapt to these mostly recent findings. Introgression has important practical implications as well, not least for the management of genetically modified organisms in pest and disease control. (shrink)

Cet article se propose de réinterroger les relations entre le régime d’historicité « présentiste » et le régime de patrimonialité contemporain à partir de l’étude du conflit patrimonial en cours autour de l’ancien couvent Reille, situé dans le 14 e arrondissement de Paris, en attente d’un réemploi et/ou d’un projet immobilier. Cette friche est étudiée comme révélatrice de la fragilité et des apories temporelles de « l’omnipatrimonialisation », qui se caractérise par une dissociation inédite de la reconnaissance et de la (...) protection patrimoniales, par une diversification des processus de patrimonialisation et même par une nécessaire patrimonialisation par réemploi. La brèche du temps ouverte par la défonctionnalisation du couvent se trouve prolongée et élargie par un processus de patrimonialisation multiforme, mené notamment par les riverains mobilisés, et instaure, à l’occasion de la révision du plan local d’urbanisme de la Ville de Paris, un temps d’attente fructueux, propice à l’éla... (shrink)

Working Feminism looks at key concepts and debates within feminist theory and puts them to work concretely in relation to the real problems faced by Filipina ...

As part of a research conducted in the field of professional didactics for the design of video-based training for saddlers, we mobilize an iterative and collaborative analysis protocol with professionals. We compare the effects produced during a debate between experts mediated by the researcher, based sometimes on a confrontation with video traces of the activity, sometimes on the temporary diagrams of a conceptual structure of the situation. Using the argumentative trilogue analysis framework, we show how these methodologies are able to (...) foster the expression of a process of conceptualization depending on whether professionals are confronted with lived images or concep-tualizations produced by the researcher. (shrink)

A printed record of the symposium held in 1971 that was sponsored by the University of California's medical campus in San Francisco and the City and County of San Francisco to examine man's destiny and moral development.

Among Marxists and Communists, Louis Althusser has long had a reputation for theoreticism and scientism, the factors most often cited to explain the eclipse of his work since the 1960’s. According to the standard account, the distinguishing characteristic and major flaw of his work is that it brings everything back to knowledge. In this essay, I interrogate this understanding of Althusser by reconsidering two cornerstones of Althusserian theory that seem most to exemplify his extreme privileging of epistemology: the symptom and (...) the interpellation theory of ideology. I argue not that taking them to work on the epistemological level is wrong but rather incomplete; there exists a not quite acknowledged beyond of knowledge and interpellation in Althusser, which takes the form of a traumaticnarrative of history, enjoyment, and desire. The production of knowledge in Althusser unfolds as a pathos-laden story, which on one level gestures toward the turbulent world history in which he developed his theory: primarily WW II and the post-war Stalinist revelations, along with the conflicts it provoked in the Communist Party, and the French Communist Party in particular. Although not the subject of extended analysis, these events haunt Althusser’s texts in the form of allusions and the surprisingly violent figurative language with which Althusser discusses theoretical labor. I contend that they call to be analyzed as a kind of return of the repressed, best approached through Slavoj Žižek’s psychoanalytically inflected theory of ideology. (shrink)

L’époque contemporaine est dominée par l’injonction à « produire du lien social », laissant supposer que le lien social est en crise, qu’il s’est perdu, à tout le moins s’est affaibli, morcelé et diversifié, sous le coup de l’individualisme, de l’accroissement des inégalités, de la perte des sentiments collectifs et d’une forme de consensus moral. L’urgence sanitaire dans laquelle nous sommes plongés nous exhorte soudainement au confinement généralisé en faisant résonner le concept nouveau de...

Pierre des Noyers, secretary of Queen of Poland Louise-Marie Gonzaga, is known for his role as a messenger, envoy, court journalist and sometimes propagandist. His work as an unofficial diplomat for the Queen and ambassador for France is less famous though no less interesting. Even though he was already quite involved in these time-consuming tasks, Pierre des Noyers also acted as a scientific intermediary for the quite curious Queen Louise-Marie of Poland. He maintained contacts with many scholars from France and (...) Italy. He could nurture this network thanks to his position as an informal diplomat at the court of the Queen and his dedication to science in general. Even by discarding his most official and political letters, his known correspondence amounts to several hundred letters written in a period of around 50 years to various friends and scholars. Roberval, Gassendi, Boulliau, Hevelius or Pascal are among these contacts and he plays for most of them the role of a scientific intermediary sharing with them observations, books and anecdotes. His letters are filled with astronomical observations, prodigies and prophecies. Des Noyers was also a practitioner of science. Having possessed a rather large collection of scientific instruments he always sought the improved ones and his daily life was marked by scientific studies. He wrote meteorological bulletins for Academia del Cimento in Florence, studied the measurement of time, observed the sun and showed interest in the inner workings of the human body. This article will delve further into more scientific aspects of Pierre des Noyers’s life, both at the court of Louise-Marie and outside. The first part presents a rough overview of the secretary’s contacts in the scientific environment of 17th Century France and how they were used to connect scholars from Poland with this environment. The second part of this work presents Pierre des Noyers’s practice of science as a tool to understand the world and for which utmost diligence in measurement and practice is required. The last part focuses on des Noyers’s application of this scientific method in two, now pseudo-scientific fields: astrology and divination. (shrink)

The study of metaphysical possibility involves two central questions: What are possible worlds? Is there an empty possible world? In looking at the first question we consider the different accounts of possible worlds—Lewisian realism, ersatzism, etc. In looking at the second question we consider the discussions of metaphysical nihilism, the modal ontological arguments, etc. In this paper I am drawing these two questions together in order to show how the position we hold on one of these issues affects the position (...) we should hold on the other. (shrink)

Historians and philosophers of science agree that Darwin had an understanding of species which led to a workable theory of their origins. To Darwin species did not differ essentially from ‘varieties’ within species, but were distinguishable in that they had developed gaps in formerly continuous morphological variation. Similar ideas can be defended today after updating them with modern population genetics. Why then, in the 1930s and 1940s, did Dobzhansky, Mayr and others argue that Darwin failed to understand species and speciation? (...) Mayr and Dobzhansky argued that reproductively isolated species were more distinct and ‘real’ than Darwin had proposed. Believing species to be inherently cohesive, Mayr inferred that speciation normally required geographic isolation, an argument that he believed, incorrectly, Darwin had failed to appreciate. Also, before the sociobiology revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, biologists often argued that traits beneficial to whole populations would spread. Reproductive isolation was thus seen as an adaptive trait to prevent disintegration of species. Finally, molecular genetic markers did not exist, and so a presumed biological function of species, reproductive isolation, seemed to delimit cryptic species better than character-based criteria like Darwin’s. Today, abundant genetic markers are available and widely used to delimit species, for example using assignment tests: genetics has replaced a Darwinian reliance on morphology for detecting gaps between species. In the 150th anniversary of The Origin of Species , we appear to be returning to more Darwinian views on species, and to a fuller appreciation of what Darwin meant. (shrink)

In the theoretical description of prospect theory, distinct sets of parameters can control the curvature of the value function and the shape of the probability weighting function. There is one for the gain domain and one for the loss domain. However, in most estimations, behaviour over losses is assumed to perfectly reflect behaviour over gains, through a unique set of parameters. We examine the consequences of relaxing this simplifying assumption in the context of Tanaka et al.’s (Am Econ Rev 100(1):557–571, (...) 2010) risk-elicitation procedure based on multiple price lists. We show that subjects’ behaviour for gains is mostly reflected for losses at the aggregate and individual levels, and is consistent with the distinctive prospect theory fourfold pattern. Reflection is only partial as the mean curvature of the value function is slightly less convex for losses than it is concave for gains. These results are robust to a high-stake context. However, we demonstrate that assuming reflection can have huge consequences on loss-aversion measures. Incidentally, we also highlight the existence of a strong, negative and persistent pure loss-frame effect on elicited loss aversion. We recommend that future practitioners and modellers are particularly cautious about the loss-aversion values they obtain or use because these are especially sensitive to parametric assumptions and framing. (shrink)

This article examines the relationship between spirituality and politics. The author states her frustration at spirituality which is deployed against ethics in the service of politics, this she believes is inherent in many discourses and practices of spirituality. The article asks us to look again at many of the liberation theologies not because they are believed to be wrong, simply disappointing, that is to say they seem to end in concrete identities rather than pushing the very boundaries of meaning and (...) identity themselves. The article calls for spirituality that does not split us off from this world and thus from our creativity and the potential subversive possibilities that lie within it. (shrink)

This selection of essays represents a continuous and coherent developing work which integrates philosophical (abstract) and political (concrete) concerns. The essays draw on an extensive knowledge of and familiarity with 20th-century European philosophy.

Ces remarques sont suscitées par la lecture de l’article de Philippe Perrot. Comme lui nous récusons la dévaluation dont l’écrit, par rapport à la parole, est souvent l’objet. Mais nous pensons qu’il n’est pas nécessaire pour cela de penser « contre Platon ». Il convient toutefois de cesser de confondre « dialogue socratique » et « dialogue platonicien ». L’écriture, en ce qu’elle appelle la lecture, rend possible une forme nouvelle de dialogue : le dialogue de l’âme avec elle-même.

La survenue d’une maladie grave chez l’enfant vient percuter et modifier de manière considérable les liens intrafamiliaux. C’est à partir du moment inaugural de l’annonce diagnostique, dans un échange de regards avec ses parents, que l’enfant prendra conscience de la gravité de sa maladie. C’est aussi en fonction de la réaction à venir de ses parents, au fil de l’évolution de la maladie et au gré des traitements, que l’enfant va lui-même, en tant que sujet porteur de sa propre histoire, (...) éprouver les effets psychiques de cette maladie et lui conférer un sens particulier. D’un point de vue de psychologue exerçant en oncologie pédiatrique, il s’agit ici d’éclairer les enjeux psychiques liés à l’irruption d’un cancer chez l’enfant en portant une attention particulière sur la manière dont cet événement éprouvant est vécu par ses parents et dont on peut en retrouver les effets dans le discours de l’enfant. La possibilité pour l’enfant de dire ce qu’il perçoit dans le regard meurtri de ses parents porté sur lui nous semble contribuer à l’appropriation de l’épreuve de la maladie, voire au dépassement de celle-ci. (shrink)

In Ancient Greece, the relation between war and peace used to have an ambiguous meaning. War was considered as a normal state and peace was seen only as an exception or a temporary truce during a long lasting conflict. But peace and political stability were also valued: the aim of war was never the total annihilation of the opponent. Besides this opposition, there was a balance between war and peace during these times and this conception, inherited from the heroic times, (...) lasted until the beginning of the Peloponnesian War. This event redefined the relation between war and peace. The meaning of conflict moved from polemos, as codified conflict between cities, to stasis, as civil war. War was less perceived as something positive and more people valued peace and stability. Plato’s political thought was developed in this context as a potential answer to this redefinition of conflict as well as the threat of an excessive and radical conception of war. However, Plato had to face an exigent challenge. No political regime was able to establish peace anymore, so Plato needed to create a brand new political system to solve the problems raised by the Peloponnesian War. The goal of this paper will be to present Plato’s response to these political challenges by showing that his response is deeply innovative for his time but also profoundly rooted in a traditional conception of conflict that was already obsolete when he wrote his masterpieces. (shrink)

Mental health is reaching a crisis point due to the ramifications of COVID-19. In an attempt to curb the spread of the virus and circumvent health systems from being overwhelmed, governments have imposed regulations such as lockdown restrictions and home confinement. These restrictions, while effective for infection control, have contributed to poorer lifestyle behaviors. Currently, Positive Psychology and Lifestyle Medicine are two distinct but complimentary disciplines that offer an array of evidence-based approaches for promoting mental health and well-being across a (...) universal population. However, these strategies for improving mental health are typically used in isolation. This perspective calls for a new paradigm shift to create and rollout well-designed interdisciplinary universal multicomponent mental health interventions that integrates the benefits of both disciplines, and uses innovative digital mental health solutions to achieve scalability and accessibility within the limitations and beyond the COVID-19 lockdown and restrictions. (shrink)

Here we reconsider teachers’ changing subjectivities as autonomous agents whose practices acknowledge risk as an essential element in intellectual inquiry. We seek alternative descriptions to the limiting language of teachers’ current practices within the primacy of the market. We are convinced by Levinas’s claim that ethics is the first philosophy with its concomitant responsibility for the Other. This provides a valuable point of departure and our understanding of its relevance is expanded by Biesta and Todd. This perspective allows interruption of (...) the global reform ensemble with its reductionist understandings of teachers’ subjectivities within concerns for a ‘visible pedagogy’ and performativity. We illustrate how this global policy imperative is reworked in policies in the Republic of Ireland and share reflexive insights from our tutoring of teachers studying for a Master’s degree in Education. We show that teachers’ autonomy, which we understand as the capacity of teachers to facilitate risk and make ethically informed local judgements, is severely restricted by imposed standards, codes and laws to which there is tightly policed adherence. Instead we describe teachers’ practices occurring within an Invisible Pedagogy, which is not concerned with totalising and limited performativity but instead, explores risks associated with existential possibilities beyond commodification. (shrink)

Gwénael Murphy est spécialiste de l’histoire des religieuses et des couvents pendant la Révolution française. Ayant rencontré de nombreuses épouses maltraitées réfugiées dans des couvents dans les sources consultées, il a décidé de consacrer ses recherches à l’histoire des rapports conflictuels entre hommes et femmes dans le cadre conjugal. L’ouvrage publié est le résultat de dix-huit années de recherches. L’auteur place sa réflexion dans le temps long, en analysant des sources issues des xvi...

Neste artigo, discutiremos os limites do modelo de estabilização empregado nas operações da Organização das Nações Unidas para construção da paz de longo prazo. Nosso argumento é que a estratégia política da estabilização, por ser baseada no uso robusto da força para combater grupos armados e apoiar governos no restabelecimento da autoridade estatal, acaba perdendo de vista os esforços de resolução dos conflitos, o que, no limite, contribui para o prolongamento da violência. Metodologicamente, o artigo se baseia no estudo do (...) caso do combate ao grupo armado M23 pela MONUSCO na RDC, por meio da análise de dados e documentos que nos permitam avaliar dois aspectos principais: (i) os níveis de violência armada; e (ii) a condução de um processo político de resolução do conflito. (shrink)

Cet article a déjà paru dans Espacetemps.net en avril 2013. Nous remercions Sandra Mallet de nous avoir autorisé à le republier ici. Résumé : Qu'apportent les politiques temporelles et les Bureaux des Temps dans les façons de penser l'urbanisme? Apparus en France à la fin des années 1990, l'originalité et l'intérêt de leur démarche repose sur leur volonté d'intégrer la pluralité des rythmes urbains dans l'aménagement des territoires. La prise en compte de cette pluralité s'exprime dans les actions sous (...) - Géographie – Nouvel article. (shrink)

Cet article a déjà paru dans Justice spatiale-Spatial Justice, n° 6, juin 2014. Nous remercions Sandra Mallet de nous avoir autorisé à le reproduire ici. Le processus de néolibéralisation joue un rôle prépondérant dans la restructuration des rythmes collectifs. Un temps linéaire s'impose, redéfinissant les rythmes et provoquant un effacement des temps « secondaires », traditionnellement hors du travail et de la production. Le modèle d'une ville en continu fonctionnant 24h/24, 7j/7, interroge, ce qui - Géographie – Nouvel article.

Does a concurrent cognitive task affect the dynamics of bimanual rhythmic coordination? In‐phase coordination was performed under manipulations of phase detuning and movement frequency and either singly or in combination with an arithmetic task. Predicted direction‐specific shifts in stable relative phase from 0° due to detuning and movement frequency were amplified by the cognitive task. Nonlinear cross‐recurrence analysis suggested that this cognitive influence on the locations of the stable points or attractors of coordination entailed a magnification of attractor noise without (...) a reduction in attractor strength. An approximation to these findings was achieved through parameter changes in a motion equation in relative phase. Results are discussed in terms of dual‐task performance as limited resources, dynamics rather than chronometrics, and reparameterization rather than degradation. (shrink)

Prisoners sometimes die in prison, either due to natural illness, violence, suicide, or a result of imprisonment. The purpose of this study is to understand deaths in custody using qualitative methodology and to argue for a comprehensive definition of death in custody that acknowledges deaths related to the prison environment. Interviews were conducted with 33 experts, who primarily work as lawyers or forensic doctors with national and/or international organisations. Responses were coded and analysed qualitatively. Defining deaths in custody according to (...) the place of death was deemed problematic. Experts favoured a dynamic approach emphasising the link between the detention environment and occurrence of death rather than the actual place of death. Causes of deaths and different patterns of deaths were discussed, indicating that many of these deaths are preventable. Lack of an internationally recognised standard definition of death in custody is a major concern. Key aspects such as place, time, and causes of death as well as relation to the prison environment should be debated and incorporated into the definition. Systematic identification of violence within prison institutions is critical and efforts are needed to prevent unnecessary deaths in prison and to protect vulnerable prisoners. (shrink)