Originally published in 1958.The history of Morley College provides an illuminating case-history of the growth and spread of adult education in the second half of the nineteenth and early years of the twentieth centuries. Morley College is unique in that it was one of the first of such institutions to proclaim and inculcate absolute sex and class equality. It has always been guided by democratic principles in the sense that the students have been encouraged to play a definite part in (...) the administration of the college – an ethos which continues to this day. (shrink)

The notion of a properly functioning human nature as a moral standard is a tenet of Western culture and is at the core Western humanism, Christian moral teaching, and natural law theory. Although these traditions recognize that the virtue of justice is exercised by giving one’s neighbor his due, they did not explore a person’s legitimate claims to goods in a modern theory of human rights. Enlightenment thinkers, as materialists and atheists, theorized that human rights are not related to God (...) or human nature but are privileges granted by government. Jacques Maritain developed theories of natural law and human rights. Maritain’s theory of human rights, employing a Thomistic methodology and founded on God and nature, is applicable to contemporary disputes, such as claims to a right to “same-sex” marriage. (shrink)

Jacques the Fatalist is Diderot's answer to the problem of existence. Where are Jacques and his Master going? Are they simply occupying space, living mechanically until they die, believing erroneously that they are in charge of their Destiny? In the introduction to this brilliant new translation, David Coward explains the philosophical basis of Diderot's fascination with Fate and shows why Jacques the Fatalist pioneers techniques of fiction which, two centuries on, novelists still regard as experimental.

Comte rendu de l'ouvrage de Jacques Derrida "Le problème de la genèse dans la philosophie de Husserl", Collection Épiméthée, Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 1990, 292 p.

L'hymne est, par excellence, le genre litteraire par lequel s'est operee la fusion entre christianisme et hellenisme, et d'ou paganisme et monotheisme se cotoient. Il revenait a Synesios de Cyrene, ce chretien platonisant, de participer a cette synthese: ne dans l'antique colonie grecque de Cyrene aux alentours de 370, il recoit tout d'abord une culture classique, selon le gout de l'epoque, avant de se tourner, sans pour autant renier l'hellenisme et la philosophie, vers le christianisme. A l'heure ou le monotheisme (...) commence a supplanter le polytheisme, ou Byzance prend le pas sur Rome, Synesios tente de creer un lien entre les deux traditions, notamment par le biais de son action politique, comme l'ambassade a Constantinople. La presente edition regroupe en un volume, les 9 hymnes de Synesios auxquels est ajoute l'hymne 10, sans doute apocryphe. La longue introduction presente la periode historique, riche, complexe, et trop peu connue, ainsi que l'auteur. Une notice generale fait le point sur le texte lui-meme, le genre de l'hymne et la tradition manuscrite. Chaque hymne est en outre precede d'une breve notice analysant la composition, la metrique et proposant de judicieuses pistes de lecture. Des notes accompagnent le texte et sont developpees, en fin d'ouvrage, par des notes complementaires. Le livre est encore enrichi par un Index verborum. (shrink)

This book brings together contributions from leading researchers in the field of agent-based modelling and simulation. This approach has grown out of some recent and innovative ideas in the social sciences, computer sciences, life sciences, physics and game theory. It is proving helpful in understanding complexity in many domains. The opportunities it offers to explore the experimental approach to social and human behaviour is proving of theoretical and empirical value across a wide range of fields. With contributions from researchers whose (...) work has served to define this new field such as Nigel Gilbert, Robert Axtell (in economics and social science) and Jacques Ferber (in multi-agent systems), as well as practitioners who are working at the cutting edge of the new domain, this collection of essays has been assembled by two of its leading exponents: Frédéric Amblard and Denis Phan. The research, case studies and theoretical approaches discussed in this book are designed to introduce beginners and experts alike to the current state of play in this new and exciting field of social science. (shrink)

This volume brings together contributions from leading researchers in the field of agent-based modelling and simulation. This approach has grown out of some recent and innovative ideas in the social sciences, computer sciences, life sciences, physics and game theory. It is proving helpful in understanding complexity in many domains. The opportunities it offers to explore the experimental approach to social and human behaviour is proving of theoretical and empirical value across a wide range of fields. With contributions from researchers whose (...) work has served to define this new field such as Nigel Gilbert, Robert Axtell (in economics and social science) and Jacques Ferber (in multi-agent systems), as well as practitioners who are working at the cutting edge of the new domain, this collection of essays has been assembled by two of its leading exponents: Frédéric Amblard and Denis Phan. The research, case studies and theoretical approaches discussed in this book are designed to introduce beginners and experts alike to the current state of play in this new and exciting field of social science. (shrink)

Article en hommage à Jacques English dans lequel je propose une réflexion générale sur le thème des objets intentionnels en examinant un aspect de la solution proposée par Husserl dans son manuscrit de 1894 sur les objets intentionnels qui concerne le statut ontologique des objets de pensée et leur temporalité. J’aborde cette question par le biais de l’individuation des contenus intentionnels et leur temporalité dans les manuscrits de Bernau publiés dans le volume XXXIII des Husserliana . Je m’intéresse en (...) particulier au sens que prend le principium individuationis dans la cinquième partie de ces manuscrits de Husserl qui s'intitule «De la phénoménologie de l’individuation : la temporalité des objets d’expérience, des objets imaginaires et des objets idéaux». (shrink)

Once in a while stunning new ideas that energize a scholarly discipline — or even wreck it altogether — come from the outside. The most influential philosopher of science in the last generation was not a philosopher at all, but an historian and physicist, Thomas Kuhn. Ernst Gombrich, an art historian, has deeply informed the philosophy of art, as the linguist Noam Chomsky has affected the philosophy of language. And Jacques Derrida continues to cast his stupefying spell over many (...) a literature department, even if most philosophers remain unimpressed. (shrink)

Remarques critiques sur l'ouvrage de Christiane Chauviré, Sandra Laugier, Jean-Jacques Rosat, Wittgenstein : les mots de l’esprit. Paris, Vrin, 2001,.

As moral standards, natural law and the notion of properly functioning human nature have persisted in Western cultures from the dawn of civilization. Medieval Christians developed it in their theologies. However, Enlightenment criticism of medieval thought undermined the credibility of natural law and its authority for modern man. Jacques Maritain developed a rational foundation for natural law and sought to provide objectivity to natural law precepts. His theory also reestablishes the divine authority of natural law for a world without (...) faith. Maritain locates the primary disclosure of natural law in the conscience’s moral reflection in a controversial act of pre-conceptual or non-conceptual knowledge called connatural knowledge. (shrink)

A model of reality is called separable if the state of a composite system is equal to the union of the states of its parts, located in different regions of space. Spekkens has argued that it is trivial to reproduce the predictions of quantum mechanics using a separable ontological model, provided one allows for arbitrary violations of ‘dynamical locality’. However, since dynamical locality is strictly weaker than local causality, this leaves open the question of whether an ontological model for quantum (...) mechanics can be both separable and dynamically local. We answer this question in the affirmative, using an ontological model based on previous work by Deutsch and Hayden. Although the original formulation of the model avoids Bell’s theorem by denying that measurements result in single, definite outcomes, we show that the model can alternatively be cast in the framework of ontological models, where Bell’s theorem does apply. We find that the resulting model violates local causality, but satisfies both separability and dynamical locality, making it a candidate for the ‘most local’ ontological model of quantum mechanics. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Truth MattersOnce in a while stunning new ideas that energize a scholarly discipline—or even wreck it altogether—come from the outside. The most influential philosopher of science in the last generation was not a philosopher at all, but an historian and physicist, Thomas Kuhn. Ernst Gombrich, an art historian, has deeply informed the philosophy of art, as the linguist Noam Chomsky has affected the philosophy of language. And Jacques (...) Derrida continues to cast his stupefying spell over many a literature department, even if most philosophers remain unimpressed.In a minor but spectacular way (how else to describe an event first encountered on the front page of the New York Times?), Alan Sokal has barged in on this honorable tradition. As a physicist, he successfully placed a barely-coherent, factually ludicrous, jargon-ridden article in a major journal of cultural studies.When we caught up with Sokal’s hoax, our initial reaction was sympathy for the hapless editors of Social Text. They weren’t the first journal editors to be landed with a contribution that went sour (though the only other episodes we could recall were plagiarism, not parody). However, when one of these chaps, Stanley Aronowitz, reacted in the Times by calling Sokal “ill-read and half-educated” (May 18, 1996), editorial fellow-feeling began to evaporate. And when Stanley Fish, executive director of the Duke University Press, which publishes Social Text, launched a bitter counterattack on Sokal three days later, it was hard not to regard Fish’s indignation, as E. D. Hirsch described it in a subsequent letter to the Times, as “the indignation of Tartuffe on being exposed.” [End Page 299]After some tedious preliminaries, Fish accused Sokal of failing to understand that the sociology of science is an enterprise “distinct” from science, “with objects of study, criteria, and goals all its own.” Sokal knows this, naturally, as he had already made clear in his Lingua Franca article on the hoax, and as he explains again in his afterword in this issue of our journal. But Fish went on to a more sweeping generalization. Imagining Sokal believed that cultural studies threaten the stability or integrity of the sciences, Fish said not to worry: “A research project that takes the practice of science as an object of study is not a threat to that practice because, committed to its own goals and protocols, it doesn’t reach into, and therefore doesn’t pose a danger to, the goals and protocols it studies.”With this account of a well-ordered academic world, Fish inadvertently reveals what some see as a serious failing of cultural studies and postmodern theory: it poses a threat to absolutely nothing. Leave science aside for a moment, and consider a sociology of, say, astrology, or medicine, or the fashion industry. Could we envision a proper sociology of astrology which posed no danger to “the goals and protocols” in using planetary/zodiacal patterns to predict the future or retrodict the characters of subjects? Hardly; it’s the business of the sociology of any human activity to identify and question the intellectual claims and practical ambitions of that enterprise. And that is exactly what Alan Sokal did: he invented a clever test of the intellectual rigor of cultural studies in general and its version of poststructuralist sociology of science in particular. He then subjected Social Text—and implicitly in many minds the intellectual standards of the field it represents—to the test. It failed.Sokal’s methodology was not unique; it can be applied in different ways to many other disciplines. If you want to evaluate, for example, the intellectual pretensions of astrologers there is a fine way to do it; it essentially adapts the double-blind placebo procedure used in drug research, another celebrated testing methodology. Allow a group of astrologers to agree on a set of character readings based on accurate birth charts. Give these back, shuffled, with identifying information stripped off, to the subjects of the astrological readings. If the subjects can pick out their own readings from character descriptions alone (descriptions created by astrologers on the basis of birth information only, without meeting the subjects in question), then astrology must possess... (shrink)

What emerges as the overarching theme in the extensive work of the Dutch philosopher Cornelis Verhoeven is our relationship to reality. Being appealed to by thousands of things in our existence makes us realize that we cannot avoid reality. The most meaningful forms of reality are symbols, which lead us, through radical astonishment and contemplation to the metaphysical insight that something exists rather than nothing. This renders Verhoeven sceptical as the weakness of our ability to know and understand hampers our (...) vision of hard reality, and also ironical because so many forms of speaking and writing display a reality which is being taken for granted. Thinking symbolically, metaphysical reflection and scepsis towards thoughdess assumptions are the instruments of a contemplation which, in Verhoeven's work, leave room for the lyrical prevalence of reality. In his later writings he gradually and more insistently draws attention to the theme of truth, while at the same time not denying our epistemological incapacity towards understanding and explaining reality. (shrink)

In his essay “La judéité dans la musique,” Richard Wagner’s horrid portrayal of a Jew by way of physical, economical, linguistic and musical description exposed his anti-Semitic convictions. Much of this aspect has either been forgotten or softened, however, when evoking Wagner, it is in fact the relationship between his anti-Semitism and his work that is the most problematic. This paper proposes to consider three symbolic forms through which this reticence is expressed by looking at the the theoretical writings, opera (...) booklets and their music. Using the Beckmesser character in Les Maîtres Chanteurs de Nuremberg, although Beckmesser is not introduced as a Jew but rather a good German bourgeois, one cannot deny the allegory positioning him as a Jew. First element of demonstration: the analogical resemblance between Beckmesser and the Viennese music critic Eduard Hanslick to whom Wagner accused of hiding his Jewishness. Second element: it has already been proven that Beckmesser’s serenade sung during the second act to the Master Singers was a mockery of a Jewish prayer. Third element: in Cosima’s, Wagner’s wife, diary she explains that this particular piece generated at that time a strong reaction by the Jewish community in Vienna, thus supporting the claim that his antisemitism was already known and problematic to his contemporaries. (shrink)

Cette traduction complète des Vies et doctrines des philosophes illustres de Diogène Laërce, sous la direction de M.-O. Goulet-Cazé, représente ce qu'il convient d'appeler un événement éditorial. Faut-il le rappeler, Diogène Laërce, en dépit de sa notoriété et de son utilité pour l'étude de la philosophie ancienne, reste un auteur peu traduit et peu édité. Pour s'en tenir à l'époque moderne et aux traductions complètes, le lecteur francophone n'avait guère à sa disposition, jusqu'ici, que les traductions de Zévort et de (...) Genaille. La première remonte au milieu du XIXre siècle. La seconde, de 1933, suit l'édition de Cobet, et se révèle très insatisfaisante. Bref, deux traductions inutilisables, en regard des critères de scientificité actuellement en vigueur. C'est donc avec le plus vif intérêt qu'il convient d'accueillir cette nouvelle traduction. Parmi ses nombreuses et incontestables qualités, on remarquera, au premier chef, que l'éditrice a su s'entourer de spécialistes de tout premier ordre. Citons les noms de Luc Brisson, de Michel Narcy, de Jacques Brunschwig et de Jean-François Balaudé, auteur d'une traduction remarquée des trois lettres et des Maximes capitales d'Épicure. (shrink)

Daha önce Jean-Luc Nancy gibi isimlerle de röportajlar yayımlamış olan Le Philosophoire'ın 2000 yılında yayımlanan bu on üçüncü sayısında, Paris VII Denis Diderot Üniversitesi'nde akademisyen olan Nicolas Poirier, bu defa röportajlarına Jacques Rancière'i ekliyor. Röportajın öne çıkan özelliklerinden birisi, ve belki de en önemlisi, Rancière'in başta Michel Foucault ve Cornelius Castoriadis olmak üzere; Pierre Bourdieu, Jean-Claude Passeron, Gilles Deleuze gibi Fransız filozofları, ve yine İtalyan filozof Antonio Negri'yi, iktidar, halk, özneleşme, kendilik teknikleri, polis ve politika kavramlarına yaklaşımları bakımından (...) (çoğunlukla da eleştirerek) analiz ediyor olması. Rancière, eleştirilerini, özellikle Cahil Hoca'dan (Le Maître Ignorant) beridir izini sürdüğü "entelektüel özgürleşme" meselesiyle bağlantılı olarak ele alırken okul, pedagoji, eğitim, öğretmen, bilgi aktarımı ve öğretmenin sembolik konumu gibi kavramları, çağın güncel siyasi meseleleri ışığında ele alıyor. (shrink)

In 1766 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in exile from France and Switzerland, came to England, where he made the acquaintance of Margaret Cavendish Harley Bentinck, Duchess of Portland. The two began to botanise together and to exchange letters about botany. These letters contain salient statements about Rousseau's views on natural theology, gardens, botanical texts and exotic botany. This exchange entailed not only discussions about plant identifications and other botanical matters, but most important, reciprocal gifts of books and specimens in the manner (...) of gentlemanly scientific correspondence of the period. Rousseau volunteered his services as the Duchess's ‘herborist’ or plant collector, and collected specimens and seeds in her behalf; these were destined for her own extensive herbaria and other natural history collections. Rousseau, who elsewhere denied female talent for science, admired the Duchess's knowledge of natural history, acknowledging his own as inferior. Their correspondence ended when the Duchess sent him the Herbarium amboinense of Georg Rumpf (Rumphius), an important work of exotic botany. Rousseau considered exotic botany to be the antithesis of the domination-free nature from which he derived solace and inspiration. (shrink)

In this paper I examine two theories of democracy that can be found in contemporary French philosophy. Both Cornelius Castoriadis and Jacques Rancière offer a critique of modern democracy with the purpose of refounding it. The ‘refoundation narratives’ they propose are both based on an account of the origins of democracy in ancient Greece. According to Castoriadis, ancient democracy is grounded in a ‘magma’ of ‘social imaginary significations’ in which ‘autonomy’ is considered the correct response to Being defined as (...) an insurmountable ‘Chaos’. On the contrary, modern democracy defines Being as a determinacy and consequently fails to grasp the notion of autonomy. According to Rancière, the origins of democracy are to be found in the invasion of the public space by ‘those without a part’ who consequently have no title to govern. The problem with the ‘domesticated’ modern democracy is that it denies the existence of Otherness; that is, of non-citizens excluded from the public space. Therefore it appears incapable of letting the ‘dis-agreement’ manifest itself and consequently incapable of transforming the ‘police’ order. After examining the meaning of both theories, I attempt to elucidate the difficulties encountered by each author in the attainment of his goal, which is that of refounding modern democracy. (shrink)

The central character of Denis Villeneuve's 2016 film Arrival, Dr. Louise Banks, is a linguist tasked with deciphering a logographic alien language in time to avert a seemingly impending global war. I argue that the alien heptapods' logographs exemplify the understanding of language advanced by Jacques Derrida in seminal texts such as Of Grammatology, while also engaging some of the themes concerning time and gift-giving that he develops in later, more explicitly political works. Derrida argues that written signifiers, (...) rather than being a mere vehicle for representing speech, confer their own, supplemental meaning onto communication. Furthermore, he emphasizes that writing is not bound by the same linear temporality as spoken utterances, inasmuch as it is inscribed in a format which allows it to be revisited repeatedly. The significance of this disruption of linear temporality becomes clear in Derrida's later works such as Specters of Marx and On Cosmopolitanism, where he describes such disruption as a necessary condition for the type of political change he believes is needed in the world. The ability to experience time in a nonlinear fashion allows Banks to prevent the looming war, in an illustration of the connection that Derrida draws between time, violence, and politics. However, it also puts humanity in the heptapods' debt, thus exemplifying the paradox of genuine gift-giving that Derrida claims is impossible. Despite the complex ethical questions it invokes, however, the unique nature of the gift in Arrival signals that this gift might be a genuinely altruistic offering after all. (shrink)

The article investigates the philosophical foundations and details of Mary Wollstonecraft's criticism of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's views on the education and nature of women. I argue that Wollstonecraft's criticism must not be understood as a constructionist critique of biological reductionism. The first section analyzes the differences between Wollstonecraft's and Rousseau's views on the possibility of a true civilization and shows how these differences connect to their respective conceptions of moral psychology. The section shows that Wollstonecraft's disagreement with Rousseau's views on (...) women was rooted in a broad scope of philosophical disagreement. The second section focuses on Rousseau's concept of nature, and I argue that Rousseau was neither a biological determinist nor a functionalist who denied that nature had any normative significance. The section ends with a discussion of Wollstonecraft's criticism of Rousseau's application of the distinction between the natural and the artificial. The third section focuses on Wollstonecraft's critique of Rousseau's claim that there are different standards for the perfectibility of men and women. The article concludes with a critical discussion of the claim that Aristotle would have provided Wollstonecraft with the philosophical tools she needed for her criticism of Rousseau. (shrink)

Body and image are crucial to the elaboration of both Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophy andClaire Denis’s work in cinema. Nancy’s short book about the body, Corpus ,though it may initially have appeared as a minor work in his œuvre, has since been shown,and notably since the intervention of Jacques Derrida, as the cornerstone of much ofNancy’s late thought. As Derrida demonstrates, Nancy’s interest in the body turnsaround the crucial trope of touch which comes to stand, in his philosophy, as (...) the marker ofthe most fundamental limits that shape our understanding of and interaction with theworld: between inside and outside, subject and object, matter and meaning. As such, theconcept of touch frequently recurs in the discussion of art works, where the inscription of amaterial trace coincides with, or touches upon an evanescent sense. Nancy’s discussions ofartistic meaning have frequently centred around images – both painterly and filmic – asthe phenomena whereby the real, in manifesting its presence, is granted a certain sense.1Claire Denis, in common with the vast majority of live-action filmmakers, necessarily dealsin images and bodies – images of bodies – but her frequent refusal to provide thetraditional cinematic signifiers of psychological depth often means that the spectator isbrought up short before the strangeness of these bodies as bodies, which in turn opens upan interrogation as to the sense of her images. The mutual fascination that exists betweenNancy and Denis is well established, demonstrated by Nancy’s detailed, published engagements with Denis’s films – Beau travail , Trouble Every Day , L’Intrus – as well as by Denis’s short film portrait of the philosopher – Vers Nancy –and her cryptic appropriation of his text L’Intrus . But their engagement witheach other’s work appears in the image of Nancy’s somewhat abstract conception of touch:an approaching and withdrawing, a momentary proximity to the other that serves as muchto consolidate the stable identity of the one as it does to share in the identity of the other.Mirroring this intermittent relationship, this article will seek not to over-state theinterpenetration of the two œuvres, but merely to sketch some points of contact betweenthem, turning notably around the fascinating, but perhaps ultimately untouchable figureof the wound. (shrink)

Writings by Negri on the brief thaw in the cold winter of neoliberalism, Thatcherism, Reaganomics, and counterrevolution. Automation and information technology have transformed the organization of labor to such an extent that the processes of exploitation have moved beyond the labor class and now work upon society as a whole. If this displacement has destroyed the political primacy of the labor class, it has not, however, eliminated exploitation; rather, it has broadened it, implanting it within the given conditions of the (...) most diverse spheres of society. —from The Winter Is Over In late 1995, in opposition to the conservative agenda of Jacques Chirac and his prime minister Alain Juppé and their proposed widespread welfare cuts, French students rose up against their government; public sector workers, together with all the major trade unions, went on strike. When railway workers and Paris Metro personnel joined in the protests, France's public transportation system came to a halt. These extensive social upheavals, the likes of which had not been seen in France since 1968, found widespread public support and fuelled the creation of many political organizations. Chirac backed down from restructuring the public retirement system. Antonio Negri's The Winter is Over comes out of the glimmer of optimism created by the events of 1995, when the long, cold season of neoliberalism, Thatcherism, Reaganomics, reaction, and counterrevolution appeared to have run its course. Published in Italian in 1996, The Winter is Over brings together a series of articles, speeches, and other documents written by Negri between 1989 and 1995 at the threshold of this thaw. It offers a revealing and wide-reaching account of those years of change and brink-of-change, focusing on such topics as the networks of social production, the decline of “limp thought,” the end of applied socialism, the Gulf War, and, finally, Italy's transition to its so-called “Second Republic,” as seen by an exile. (shrink)

Automation and information technology have transformed the organization of labor to such an extent that the processes of exploitation have moved beyond the labor class and now work upon society as a whole. If this displacement has destroyed the political primacy of the labor class, it has not, however, eliminated exploitation; rather, it has broadened it, implanting it within the given conditions of the most diverse spheres of society. -- from The Winter Is Over In late 1995, in opposition to (...) the conservative agenda of Jacques Chirac and his prime minister Alain Juppé and their proposed widespread welfare cuts, French students rose up against their government; public sector workers, together with all the major trade unions, went on strike. When railway workers and Paris Metro personnel joined in the protests, France's public transportation system came to a halt. These extensive social upheavals, the likes of which had not been seen in France since 1968, found widespread public support and fuelled the creation of many political organizations. Chirac backed down from restructuring the public retirement system. Antonio Negri's _T_he Winter is Over comes out of the glimmer of optimism created by the events of 1995, when the long, cold season of neoliberalism, Thatcherism, Reaganomics, reaction, and counterrevolution appeared to have run its course. Published in Italian in 1996, _The Winter is Over_ brings together a series of articles, speeches, and other documents written by Negri between 1989 and 1995 at the threshold of this thaw. It offers a revealing and wide-reaching account of those years of change and brink-of-change, focusing on such topics as the networks of social production, the decline of "limp thought," the end of applied socialism, the Gulf War, and, finally, Italy's transition to its so-called "Second Republic," as seen by an exile. (shrink)

Prenant comme point de départ les sculptures qui ornent la façade de l’Assemblée nationale du Québec, notamment celles de Marie de l’Incarnation, Jean-Jacques Olier et François de Laval, cet article dégage les fondements augustiniens et pseudo-dionysiens de la spiritualité de la Nouvelle-France. En nous basant sur les comptes rendus de la vie en Nouvelle-France et sur les manuels qui y furent utilisés, nous cherchons à déterminer le type d’augustinisme qui fut enseigné au Séminaire de Québec et au Grand Séminaire (...) de Montréal. Nous notons le passage d’une ecclésiologie gallicane à une conception ultramontaine ainsi que l’importance prise par la théologie politique du Cardinal de Bérulle. La révolution copernicienne réalisée par ce hiérarque dionysien entraîna une nouvelle interprétation du sacrifice du Christ et du rôle du prêtre. Les implications institutionnelles et ascétiques d’une telle orientation apparaissent plus clairement en Nouvelle-France que dans la métropole. Nous concluons par des considérations sur la nature de l’Église catholique issue de ce mouvement, le rôle qu’elle joua dans le Québec d’après la conquête et l’impact de cette situation sur la détermination des pouvoirs fédéraux et provinciaux dans la constitution canadienne. L’Église du Québec a montré non seulement le succès que pouvait avoir un catholicisme clérical et centralisé, appuyé sur l’institution du séminaire, mais aussi ses limites. (shrink)

The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901–81) left a legacy of thought that increasingly commands the attention of American scholars and critics. His provocative essays and wide-ranging seminars and lectures attempted, with remarkable success, to bridge the supposedly unbridgeable gap between the humanities and modern science. For some time his influence has shadowed the theoretical work being done in philosophy, psychology, anthropology, women’s studies, and literature. In Lacan and the Human Sciences eight eminent scholars examine how ideas entered these fields, how (...) well they were understood and adapted, and what fruit they have produced. The editor, Alexandre Leupin, whose introduction reveals the underpinnings of Lacan’s thought, views the book as a blueprint for overcoming the present impasses of scientific and humanistic discourses and their imaginary contradictions. The essays demonstrate the interdisciplinary nature of Lacanian psychoanalysis. The relevance of his work to epistemology is considered by Jean-Claude Milner, François Regnault, and Ellie Ragland-Sullivan; to anthropology, by Jean-Joseph Goux; to feminist studies, by Jane Gallop; and to literature, by Dennis Porter and Denis Hollier. The result is a book that points to a new and more pertinent way of dealing, on one hand, with the problems of epistemology and, on the other, with the question of literary theory in the humanities. (shrink)

Jean-Luc Nancy élabore, depuis quelques années, une philosophie première où le concept d’« être-avec » occupe une place centrale. Celui-ci a suscité son lot d'interprétations. Une des critiques faite à l’encontre du concept est articulée selon l’angle éthique, plus particulièrement en ce qui a trait à la pluralité. En effet, en amalgamant « être » et « avec », Nancy annihilerait, comme Heidegger, la nécessaire pluralité de la vie en commun. C’est ce débat que nous voulons ici commenter. Nous commencerons (...) en explicitant le concept d’être-avec chez Nancy. Dans un deuxième temps, nous développerons les arguments de ceux qui reprochent à Nancy de ne pas avoir réussi à faire droit à la pluralité. Pour nous aider à y voir plus clair, nous utiliserons les travaux de Franco Volpi et de Jacques Taminiaux qui ont analysé les causes de ce déni heideggérien de la pluralité. Nous présenterons leur investigation dans la troisième section. Enfin, nous montrerons que l’être-avec nancéen, bien loin de dénier la pluralité, lui donne toute son ampleur. (shrink)

What is Life? This is the question asked by Denis Noble in this very personal and at times deeply lyrical book. Noble is a renowned physiologist and systems biologist, and he argues that the genome is not life itself: to understand what life is, we must view it at a variety of different levels, all interacting with each other in a complex web. It is that emergent web, full of feedback between levels, from the gene to the wider environment, (...) that is life. (shrink)

This article suggests that the problem of Christianity’s involvement in the world of politics may be described as taking the form of a dialectic of Christian politics. This means that while the transcendent essence of Christianity is apolitical, the presence of the Christian message in the immanent world always brings with it political consequences and makes Christendom a part of political life. The dialectic is presented with reference to the thought of two key contemporary Christian thinkers: Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) and (...) Jacques Maritain (1882-1973). Both recognized the dialectical tension inherent in Christianity, but each found a different solution to this problem: whereas Kierkegaard denies Christianity any possibility of political involvement, Maritain concludes that such involvement is necessary for proper Christian existence in the world. The goal of this article is to uncover, on the basis of their considerations, a third, positive solution to the dialectic of Christian politics—a model that would demonstrate how the elements of the Christian ideal (transcendence) could be transferred to the temporal world (immanence), morally improving the latter without becoming falsified in it. (shrink)

What are the processes, from conception to adulthood, that enable a single cell to grow into a sentient adult? Neuroconstructivism is a pioneering 2 volume work that sets out a whole new framework for considering the complex topic of development, integrating data from cognitive studies, computational work, and neuroimaging.

In evolutionary biology changes in population structure are explained by citing trait fitness distribution. I distinguish three interpretations of fitness explanations—the Two‐Factor Model, the Single‐Factor Model, and the Statistical Interpretation—and argue for the last of these. These interpretations differ in their degrees of causal commitment. The first two hold that trait fitness distribution causes population change. Trait fitness explanations, according to these interpretations, are causal explanations. The last maintains that trait fitness distribution correlates with population change but does not cause (...) it. My defense of the Statistical Interpretation relies on a distinctive feature of causation. Causes conform to the Sure Thing Principle. Trait fitness distributions, I argue, do not. *Received July 2009; revised October 2009. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Philosophy/Institute for the History, Philosophy of Science and Technology, University of Toronto, Victoria College, 91 Charles Street West, Toronto, ON M5S 1K7, Canada; e‐mail: denis[email protected]. (shrink)

This essay traces the history of Jacques Derrida's engagement with the question of the animal and the methodology Derrida follows in his 2008 The Animal That Therefore I Am . As Derrida demonstrates, the history of philosophy is marked from its inception by an attempt to draw a single, indivisible line between humans and all other animals by attributing some capacity to humans (e.g., language, culture, mourning, a relationship to death) and denying it to animals. Derrida thus begins by (...) questioning the supposed fact that animals do not have such and such a capacity or attribute but then quickly turns to questioning the principle by which philosophers have claimed that humans do . In all his work on the animal, therefore, Derrida questions the confidence with which humans attribute certain capacities to themselves while denying them to animals, all in the name of a pervasive and yet repressed violence against the animal world. (shrink)

This article explores the question of truth in the work of Jacques Derrida and Alain Badiou. Specifically, it investigates Badiou’s claim that deconstruction is a form of sophistry. Badiou positions himself against Derrida in preference for a philosophy committed to Truth, Being and the event. The sophist, in contrast to the philosopher, denies the existence of truths and the category of truth. Despite this hostility, Badiou argues that the two must coexist. Badiou also explores the relationship between existence and (...) inexistence insofar as différence represents what Badiou labels the passion of Inexistance. The article concludes with how the two philosophers envision the place of truth in the future of philosophy: the flash of an event which punctures a hole in knowledge (Badiou) or the necessity of embracing the deconstructive nature of truth, language and knowledge (Derrida). (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Little theoretical attention has been paid to the question of what obligations corporations and other business enterprises have to the four billion people living at the base of the global economic pyramid. This article makes several theoretical contributions to this topic. First, it is argued that corporations are properly understood as agents of global justice. Second, the legitimacy of global governance institutions and the legitimacy of corporations and other business enterprises are distinguished. Third, it is argued that a deliberative democracy (...) model of corporate legitimacy defended by theorists of political CSR is unsatisfactory. Fourth, it is argued that a Rawlsian theoretical framework fails to provide a satisfactory account of the obligations of corporations regarding global justice. Finally, an ethical conception of CSR grounded in an appropriately modest set of duties tied to corporate relationships is then defended. This position is cosmopolitan in scope and grounded in overlapping arguments for human rights. (shrink)