This essay places Foucault's work into a philosophical context, recognizing that Foucault is difficult to place and demonstrates that Foucault remains in the Kantian tradition of philosophy, even if he sits at the margins of that tradition. For Kant, the forms of intuition—space and time—are the a priori conditions of the possibility of human experience and knowledge. For Foucault, the a priori conditions are political space and historical time. Foucault sees political space as central to understanding both the subject and (...) objects of medicine, psychiatry, and the social sciences. Through this analysis one can see that medicine's metaphysics is a metaphysics of efficient causation, where medicine's objects are subjected to mechanisms of efficient control. (shrink)

RésuméCet article a été inspiré par l'opposition qui semble exister entre les deux grands courants animant l'œuvre de M. Bachelard.Les auteurs rappellent la différence existant entre une organisation predicative et une organisation dialectique de la connaissance. La connaissance objective est de structure dialectique. Il en résulte que l'évolution de cette connaissance s'accompagne d'un processus obligé de dévalorisation et de revalorisation relative de ses formes antérieures.Ce même processus rend aussi compte des rapports de la pensée poétique et de la pensée objective (...) et scientifique.Dans cette perspective, l'unité d'inspiration de l'œuvre de M. Bachelard est parfaitement évidente. — F. et J.‐P. G. (shrink)

In the mid-1970s, the biomedical model of medicine gave way to the biopsychosocial model of medicine; it was billed as a more comprehensive and compassionate model of medicine. After more than a century of disentangling medicine from religion, the medicine and spirituality movement is attempting to bring religion and spirituality back into medicine. It is doing so under a biopsychosociospiritual model. I unpack one model for allowing religion back into medicine called the RCOPE. RCOPE is an instrument designed to categorize (...) religion and spirituality as psychological coping mechanisms. I explore how such instruments are related to the history of statistical measurement and demonstrate the political impetus that governs such enterprises. The biopsychosociospiritual medicine is billed as a more holistic and comprehensive model. This new model of medicine offers total care. However, I demonstrate how this total care becomes totalizing, indeed totalitarian, admitting religion and spirituality back into the fold of medicine under a new secularized medical control. (shrink)

Nathaniel J.P. Barron offers the first book length account in English of Ernst Bloch's contribution to a Marxist philosophy of language. It is ambitious both in situating Bloch's ideas in the broader Marxist engagement with language as it currently exists, and in using Bloch's utopian categories to challenge that engagement. In particular, Barron reads Voloshinov's insights into language through Bloch's categories, and argues that Bloch advances on Voloshinov by offering an understanding of the social materiality of language which is more (...) useful for challenging fascist forms of utterance. (shrink)

In the framework of population dynamics, we start from the logistic equation describing the evolution of one species with limited food supply. A split device allows us to consider the population as two sub-populations x and y evolving analogously. The dynamical system has a one-parameter family of equilibria which is structurally unstable. Then small perturbations of the system (describing functional or ethological differentiations between the sub-species) lead in general to a new system involving a fast and a slow dynamics with (...) a finite number of equilibria. In simple situations where the differentiation is clearly either an advantage or an inconvenience for one of the subspecies, the stable equilibrium amounts to extinction of the disadvantaged subspecies (elementary Darwinism). Oppositely more complex differentiations (involving both advantages and inconveniences) often lead to stable equilibria with well-defined non zero proportions of the sub-populations (preservation of the biodiversity). Other examples are concerned with symbiosis-like differentiations, leading to preservation, whereas the opposite case (mutual nuisances) has an unstable equilibrium and lead to extinction of one or the other subspecies according to the initial conditions. The case of a scission into three subspecies is more rich in consequences. In certain cases, predator-prey relations lead to auto-organization phenomena with stable diversity-preserving diversity. Cases of instability are also possible, leading to orbits tending towards a poly-cycle.This implies some kind of pseudo-extinction: this amounts to “pseudo-periodic-like” orbits with “pseudo-periods” larger and larger, tending to infinity; each pseudo-period contains parts where one of the sub-populations practically vanish. Other non-linear perturbations lead to stable orbits. (shrink)

A structure is locally finite if every finitely generated substructure is finite; local sentences are universal sentences all models of which are locally finite. The stretching theorem for local sentences expresses a remarkable reflection phenomenon between the finite and the infinite models of local sentences. This result in part requires strong axioms to be proved; it was studied by the second named author, in a paper of this Journal, volume 53. Here we correct and extend this paper; in particular we (...) show that the stretching theorem implies the existence of inaccessible cardinals, and has precisely the consistency strength of Mahlo cardinals of finite order. And we present a sequel due to the first named author: (i) decidability of the spectrum $\operatorname{Sp}(\varphi)$ of a local sentence φ, below ω ω ; where $\operatorname{Sp}(\varphi)$ is the set of ordinals α such that φ has a model of order type α (ii) proof that $\operatorname{beth}_\omega = \sup\{\operatorname{Sp}(\varphi): \varphi \text{local sentence with a bounded spectrum}\}$ (iii) existence of a local sentence φ such that $\operatorname{Sp}(\varphi)$ contains all infinite ordinals except the inaccessible cardinals. (shrink)

Of the early Roman historians who wrote in Greek, A. Postumius Albinus was not necessarily alone in realizing that his Greek was not the best Greek; while, on the other hand, Cato and those who followed the new fashion of writing in Latin would have resented, we may assume, could they have foreknown, the statement of Q,. Catulus in Cicero's De Oratore that they had no literary or rather ‘oratorical’ merit; though Cato might have approved Catulus' caustic comment on Roman (...) historical writing, ‘Satis est non esse mendacem’. That an historian should not, consciously and deliberately, lie all second-century historians would no doubt have agreed; and they would have endorsed Polybius' condemnation of masquerading as history in a story whose falseness was self-evident, because it assumed, on the part of the young sons of senators at Rome, a gravitas such as no young boy could possibly possess. (shrink)