On reproche fréquemment aux plaidoiries de ralentir le temps du procès et de ne pas avoir de vraie utilité. En réalité, conclusions écrites et observations orales sont complémentaires. Une justice accessible et à l’écoute suppose un temps d’échange adapté à la nature du procès, à la complexité de l’affaire et aux enjeux du dossier. Un juge actif pendant la phase orale permet aussi de rassurer le justiciable sur la prise en considération de son dossier. Dans le souci d’une bonne administration (...) de la justice, il existe différentes manières de rétablir une forme d’harmonie entre l’écrit et l’oral. À toutes les étapes du procès, en première instance, en appel et devant le juge de cassation, la boîte à outils est, désormais, bien achalandée pour faire du sur-mesure. ll reste à en faire la promotion et se saisir pleinement de ces outils. (shrink)

The Gods of our Ancient World are migrating toward the South. Pushed back by supermarkets, television shows and the rights of man divorced from himself, they have ended up taking refuge in the last Christian region that faces Islam: in Andalusia that is one of their last lands of asylum. They have left traces of their passage in our museums upon which we construct pyramids in order to feign our veneration for them. Now and then they accompany the silence of (...) a symphony to the rhythm of the high priest's baton. However, in the South they are alive. Accommodating themselves to the din of household appliances and of tourism, they appear sometimes in all the splendor of the Midi during the passage of the virgins of peace and bleeding christs. But most frequently they hide in the midst of the Andulusian festival, under the flanks of the fighting bulls or in taverns that are filled with raucous songs. Be it that they intrude upon a play in order to transform it into a ritual; be it that they honor art and sensuality in their celebrations — they choose for their appearances the blurred boundary between the world of the sacred and of the profane. (shrink)

Si on veut penser le pouvoir à partir de l'exclusion des femmes, à partir de leur situation dans le politique, l'examen des images dont elles font l'objet en tant que groupe dominé offre, semble-t-il une perspective intéressante. Penser le pouvoir à partir des images de femmes (dans les films, les romans, les journaux, mais aussi les discours), c'est tenter de voir ce qu'elles disent de la conception et de la représentation traditionnelles du pouvoir, puisqu'elles aboutissent, permette...

On the occasion of Peru’s Independence, the champions of the Creole nation elevated the Inca State Indian to the status of a respectable ancestor, thus eliminating the Amerindian historicity of the population. The archaeological remains provide support to an indigenist ideology that ignores the sociological Indian, considered to be ontologically inferior. Today, these Inca vestiges contribute to the construction of the national narrative: the Inca solar cult is thus reinvented on the site of Sacsayhuaman. To what extent can the work (...) of archaeologists serve to corroborate partisan ideologies? The presidents of the Peruvian and Bolivian Republics were inducted as pre-Hispanic rulers, the first on the Inca site of Machu Picchu, the second at the Tiwanaku Sun gate. To what extent can the vestiges of a civilization be instrumentalized by politics? The Inca sites are now assailed by New Age mystics from the United States and Europe under the leadership of local neo-shamans. They are indeed reputed to carry positive “energy”, one that is exploited by mystical tourism agencies. To what extent can the heritage of the nation, maintained by public services, be the object of private profits, ideologies that may be sectarian and possibly irreparable damages? In the culture of traditional Andean communities, the pre-Hispanic ruins had a classificatory and symbolic function. This function disappears when the setting of a myth is replaced by a historical site. How can we respect the indigenous perception of archaeological remains? These are the ethical questions that this article seeks to raise on the basis of specific and concrete cases of archaeological sites on which the author has carried out excavations. (shrink)

Au résumé de la thèse de Gilligan et Snider déjà présenté dans les articles précédents, l’autrice ajoute que femmes et hommes ainsi différenciées reconnaissent chacun·e leur vulnérabilité et celle de l’autre, ce qui les met sur la voie de l’égalité. Le film Atlantique de Mati Diop offre une belle illustration de cette théorie. On y voit les jeunes femmes reprendre à leur compte la revendication de dignité de leurs amis morts en mer dans le drame de l’émigration.

Les juridictions consulaires constituaient d’anciennes juridictions d’exception françaises, créées aux Temps modernes. Les juridictions d’exception – qui avaient une attribution de compétence spécialement déterminée – étaient nombreuses sous l’Ancien Régime, mais les juridictions consulaires ont été les seules à survivre à la Révolution, qui les a rebaptisées en «tribunaux de commerce». En effet, il s’agissait de juridictions originales par leur origine (elles ont été créées sous l’impulsion des marchands et négociants qui voulaient soustraire la connaissance de leurs litiges aux juridictions (...) royales de droit commun), leur composition (les juges consulaires étaient des marchands et négociants élus par leurs pairs), leur fonctionnement (rapides et gratuites, elles se différenciaient des juridictions royales de droit commun, dont la procédure était notoirement lourde et chère, les juges étant en partie rémunérés par les plaideurs) et le droit appliqué (le droit commercial, né d’usages créés par la pratique et qui n’avait été que partiellement codifié par l’ordonnance de 1673). (shrink)

An Enduring Suffering. Changes in the Female Body and the Creation of a Pharmaceuticals Industry Imaginary. The article discusses the findings of a survey concerning the psychodynamics of work which was undertaken among employees in the pharmaceuticals industry. The survey sought to probe the psychological effects following from the closing-down of their company. The evocation of the bodies of their female fellowemployees who had suffered certain masculinising modifications, and of the premature death which was the fate of some, played a (...) central role in the evocation of the current suffering of those who had earlier been their colleagues. The placenta, the scientific material with which they worked, thus became collated with the anxiety-laden fantasies of the two woman researchers. The author of the article therefore addresses the status of the researcher’s body in the interpretation of her findings, and the place of fantasy, and the creation of an imaginary, in a protocol of research and action involving the socialisation of an actual trauma in a milieu where cases of the contamination of bodies are both secret and random. Gender mutation thus fulfils a metonymic function, insofar as it is the sole visible manifestation of the violation, whether real or imagined, of bodily integrity. (shrink)

En este trabajo intentamos meditar la concepción de tiempo en la teoría de sucesión ecológica de Margalef. En un modelo clásico de sucesión ecológica, las poblaciones se suceden unas a otras. Cada fase de esa sucesión “en tanto fase temporal” está meramente yuxtapuesta a las demás fases. Es el tiempo cronométrico, el tiempo como “medida” del reloj. El tiempo es aquí algo absoluto, independiente del proceso como en Newton. Esto no ocurre en el modelo de Margalef. Él piensa el ecosistema (...) como un proceso de transferencia de energía y acumulación de información. Por esto, en el proceso dinámico del ecosistema existen diversas fases determinadas por la dinámica intrínseca del sistema. Cada ecosistema posee así su tiempo propio. (shrink)

This book engages with what are widely recognized as the two core dimensions of emotion. When we are afraid, glad or disappointed, we feel a certain way; moreover, our emotion is intentional or directed at something: we are afraid of something, glad or disappointed about something. Connecting with a vital strand of recent philosophical thinking, I conceive of these two aspects of emotion as unified. Examining different possible ways of developing the view that the feeling dimension of emotion is itself (...) intentional, I argue against the currently popular view that it is a form of perception-like receptivity to value. I instead propose that emotional feeling is a specific type of response to value, an affective ‘position-taking’. This alternative conceives of emotional feeling as intimately related to our cares and concerns. While situating itself within the analytic-philosophical debate on emotion, the discussion crucially draws on ideas from the early phenomenological tradition in an attempt to think past the theoretical strictures of many contemporary approaches to this subject. The result is a new view of emotional feeling as a thoroughly personal form of engagement with value. (shrink)

One of the strongest strands in Nancy's philosophy is an attempt to rethink community and the very idea of the social in a way that does not ground these ideas in some individual subject or subjectivity. The fundamental argument of this book is that being is always 'being with', that 'I' is not prior to 'we', that existence is essentially co-existence. He thinks this being together, not as a comfortable enclosure in a pre-existing group, but as a mutual abandonment and (...) exposure to each other, one that would preserve the 'I' and its freedom in a mode of imagining community as neither a 'society of spectacle' nor via some form of 'authenticity'. (shrink)

This ambitious work aims to shed new light on the relations between Husserlian phenomenology and the present-day efforts toward a scientific theory of cognition—with its complex structure of disciplines, levels of explanation, and ...

This major study of Hobbes' political philosophy draws on recent developments in game and decision theory to explore whether the thrust of the argument in Leviathan, that it is in the interests of the people to create a ruler with absolute power, can be shown to be cogent. Professor Hampton has written a book of vital importance to political philosophers, political and social scientists, and intellectual historians.

In his Discourses, Rousseau argues that inequalities of rank, wealth, and power are the inevitable result of the civilizing process. If inequality is intolerable - and Rousseau shows with unparalledled eloquence how it robs us not only of our material but also of our psychological independence - then how can we recover the peaceful self-sufficiency of life in the state of nature? We cannot return to a simpler time, but measuring the costs of progress may help us to imagine alternatives (...) to the corruption and oppressive conformity of modern society. Rousseau's sweeping account of humanity's social and political development epitomizes the innovative boldness of the Englightment, and it is one of the most provocative and influential works of the eighteenth century. This new translation includes all Rousseau's own notes, and Patrick Coleman's introduction builds on recent key scholarship, considering particularly the relationship between political and aesthetic thought. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. (shrink)

The new paradigm in the psychology of reasoning adopts a Bayesian, or prob- abilistic, model for studying human reasoning. Contrary to the traditional binary approach based on truth functional logic, with its binary values of truth and falsity, a third value that represents uncertainty can be introduced in the new paradigm. A variety of three-valued truth table systems are available in the formal literature, including one proposed by de Finetti. We examine the descriptive adequacy of these systems for natural language (...) indicative condi- tionals and bets on conditionals. Within our framework the so-called “defective” truth table, in which participants choose a third value when the antecedent of the indicative conditional is false, becomes a coherent response. We show that only de Finetti’s system has a good descriptive fit when uncer- tainty is the third value. (shrink)

This paper examines the relationship between CEO incentives and strong and weak corporate social performance. Using the KLD database we find that incentives have no significant relationship with strong social performance. Salary and long-term incentives have a positive association with weak social performance.

We argue that thought insertion primarily involves a disruption of the sense of ownership for thoughts and that the lack of a sense of agency is but a consequence of this disruption. We defend the hypothesis that this disruption of the sense of ownership stems from a fail- ure in the online integration of the contextual information related to a thought, in partic- ular contextual information concerning the different causal factors that may be implicated in their production. Loss of unity (...) of consciousness, manifested by incoherent subjective experiences is a general phenomenal characteristic of schizophrenia. This loss of coherence has been hypothesized to reflect a generalized deficit of contextual information integration not conveyed by, but related to, a target event. This deficit is manifested across many cog- nitive domains. We argue that it is also manifested in the process of thinking itself, result- ing in causally decontextualized thoughts that are experienced as inserted thoughts. (shrink)

In recent years, theorists have contended that we should move to a mode of social organisation where work and the values attached to it are no longer central, a ‘post-work society’. For these theorists, the modern ideology of work is intrinsically unjust, even irrational and no longer suited to the challenges of our time. The article presents an alternative response to the problems of work and employment. Rather than moving to a ‘post-work’ society, the article argues that we should transform (...) the world of work, precisely by keeping in view why working is important to individuals and the community. In fact, it is not realistic to believe that human societies could ever do without work. Because human societies are by necessity work societies, and work, if organised correctly, entails many goods, we cannot really, and we should not, wish work away. (shrink)

Emotion Review, Volume 14, Issue 4, Page 244-253, October 2022. This article is a précis of my 2019 monograph The World-Directedness of Emotional Feeling: On Affect and Intentionality. The book engages with a growing trend of philosophical thinking according to which the felt dimension and the intentionality of emotion are unified. While sympathetic to the general approach, I argue for a reconceptualization of the form of intentionality that emotional feelings are widely thought to possess and, accordingly, of the kind of (...) role they play in our mental lives. More specifically, I argue that the way we feel in having an emotion is not a perception-like awareness of evaluative properties of its object, but instead constitutes the taking of a stand or position on this object in light of its evaluative properties. (shrink)

Theory from the south -- On personhood : a perspective from Africa -- Liberalism, policulturalism, and ideology : thoughts on citizenship and difference -- Nations with/out borders : the brave neo world and the problem of belonging -- Postcolonial politics and discourses of democracy : an anthropological take on African political modernities -- History on trial : memory, evidence, and the forensic production of the past -- Alien-nation : zombies, immigrants, and millennial capitalism -- Beyond bare life : AIDS, (bio)politics, (...) and the neo world order. (shrink)

The paper challenges the assumption, common amongst philosophers, that the reality described in the fundamental theories of microphysics is all the reality we have. It will be argued that this assumption is in fact incompatible with the nature of such theories. It will be shown further that the macro-world of three-dimensional bodies and of such qualitative structures as colour and sound can be treated scientifically on its own terms, which is to say not only from the perspective of psychology but (...) also ontologically. A new sort of emergentist position will be defended, one which yields the basis of a method for describing the perceptually salient macroscopic world in mathematical terms. Broadly, it will be argued that the macroscopic world exists in virtue of certain specific sorts of boundary-patterns in the field of what is captured by the theories of microphysics. (shrink)

At once an introduction to Hegel and a radically new vision of his thought, this work penetrates the entirety of the Hegelian field with brevity and precision, while compromising neither rigour nor depth.

Through careful analysis of phenomenological texts by Husserl and Heidegger, Marion argues for the necessity of a third phenomenological reduction that concerns what is fully implied but left largely unthought by the phenomenologies of both ...

Revolutionary in its own time and controversial to this day, this work is a permanent classic of political theory and a key source of democratic belief. Rousseau's concepts of "the general will" as a mode of self-interest uniting for a common good, and the submission of the individual to government by contract inform the heart of democracy, and stand as its most contentious components today. Also included in this edition is Rousseau's Discourse on Political Economy", a key transitional work between (...) his Discourse on Inequality and The Social Contract. This new translation offers fresh insight into a cornerstone of political thought, which is further illuminated by a comprehensive introduction and notes. (shrink)

Un essai qui prend l'époque à revers pour répondre à la question de la faillite de la communauté.

It is popular to hold that our primary epistemic access to specific response-dependent properties like the fearsome or admirable (or so-called ‘affective properties’) is constituted by the corresponding emotion. I argue that this view is incompatible with a widely held meta-ethical view, according to which affective properties have deontic force. More specifically, I argue that this view cannot accommodate for the requirement that deontic entities provide guidance. If affective properties are to guide the formation of the corresponding emotion, our primary (...) access to them cannot be provided by that same emotion. (shrink)

This article argues that understanding the dangers and risks of authoritarian populism in consolidated constitutional democracies requires analysis of the forms of pluralism and status anxieties that emerge in civil and economic society, in a context of profound political, socioeconomic, and cultural change. This paper has two basic theses. The first is that when societies become deeply divided, and segmental pluralism maps onto affective party political polarization, generalized social solidarity is imperiled, as is commitment to democratic norms, social justice, and (...) liberal democratic constitutionalism. The second, is that populist political entrepreneurs excel in fomenting social antagonisms by framing shifts in the forms of social pluralism in ways that foster deep political polarization, generalized distrust and a politics of resentment against “elites,” “the establishment,” “the oligarchy,” and “outsiders.” Why populist offers resonate requires a social theoretical analysis of status/solidarity and class issues and a direct response to them. I draw on Polanyi and Habermas to develop an explanatory approach to the current crisis and the populist responses it triggers. I navigate between two inadequate approaches: that of the Hofstadter consensus school which construes status concerns and populism as retrograde, anti-modern, paranoid and meriting no direct response; and that of the neo-Marxist tradition that acknowledges the mobilizing power of “cultural factors” and status anxieties but deems them to be epiphenomena of the deeper story of economic distributive injustice. I reject this assessment and seek to take up the status/solidarity issues in ways that take them seriously, challenge populist framing and provide alternative direct responses to them. I reject the narrative frames of left populists who foment polarization and I try to present an alternative narrative framing for a future democratic politics that draws on the best in politically liberal, constitutionalist, democratic, and socialist traditions. (shrink)

This collection of essays, by Reding, in the emergent field of Sino-Hellenic studies, explores the neglected inchoative strains of rational thought in ancient China and compares them to similar themes in ancient Greek thought, right at the beginnings of philosophy in both cultures. Reding develops and defends the bold hypothesis that Greek and Chinese rational thinking are one and the same phenomenon. Rather than stressing the extreme differences between these two cultures - as most other writings on these subjects - (...) Reding looks for the parameters that have to be restored to see the similarities. Reding maintains that philosophy is like an unknown continent discovered simultaneously in both China and Greece, but from different starting-points. The book comprises seven essays moving thematically from conceptual analysis, logic and categories to epistemology and ontology, with an incursion in the field of comparative metaphorology. One of the book's main concerns is a systematic examination of the problem of linguistic relativism through many detailed examples. (shrink)

Age‐related and cancer‐related epigenomic modifications have been associated with enhanced cell‐to‐cell gene expression variability that characterizes increased cellular stochasticity. Since gene expression variability appears to be highly reduced by—and epigenetic and phenotypic stability acquired through—direct or long‐range cellular interactions during cell differentiation, we propose a common origin for aging and cancer in the failure to control cellular stochasticity by cell–cell interactions. Tissue‐disruption‐induced cellular stochasticity associated with epigenetic drift would be at the origin of organ dysfunction because of an increase in (...) phenotypic variation among cells, ultimately leading to cell death and organ failure through a loss of coordination in cellular functions, and eventually to cancerization. We propose mechanistic research perspectives to corroborate this hypothesis and explore its evolutionary consequences, highlighting a positive correlation between the median age of mass loss onset (a proxy for the onset of organ aging) and the median age at cancer diagnosis. (shrink)

Physical reality is all the reality we have, and so physical theory in the standard sense is all the ontology we need. This, at least, was an assumption taken almost universally for granted by the advocates of exact philosophy for much of the present century. Every event, it was held, is a physical event, and all structure in reality is physical structure. The grip of this assumption has perhaps been gradually weakened in recent years as far as the sciences of (...) mind are concerned. When it comes to the sciences of external reality, however, it continues to hold sway, so that contemporary philosophers B even while devoting vast amounts of attention to the language we use in describing the world of everyday experience B still refuse to see this world as being itself a proper object of theoretical concern. Here, however, we shall argue that the usual conception of physical reality as constituting a unique bedrock of objectivity reflects a rather archaic view as to the nature of physics itself and is in fact incompatible with the development of the discipline since Newton. More specifically, we shall seek to show that the world of qualitative structures, for example of colour and sound, or the commonsense world of coloured and sounding things, can be treated scientifically (ontologically) on its own terms, and that such a treatment can help us better to understand the structures both of physical reality and of cognition. (shrink)

In this work, published here as a single volume, the authors present a disturbing and decidedly non-classical reading of Greek tragedy that insists on its radical discontinuity with our own outlook and with our social, aesthetic, and psychological categories.

En lieu et place du « retour aux choses mêmes » prôné par Husserl, la phénoménologie françaiseoscille aujourd’hui, dans un paysage philosophique surdéterminé par la question du « réalisme »,entre une description « traumatologique » de l’événement et une herméneutique infinie destinée à l’y rendre « résiliente ». La présente étude tente de comprendre, de manière critique, un tel état de chose, en le reconduisant à ce qui apparaît rétrospectivement, chez Husserl lui-même mais, finalement, dans l’ensemble de la philosophie transcendantale, (...) comme un présupposé voire un dogme qui exige d’être analysé comme tel : celui d’une impuissance de l’apparaître. (shrink)

Freedom of Religion, Inc.: Whose Sovereignty? This article focuses on an expansive conception of religious freedom propagated by a vocal group of American legal scholars – jurisdictional pluralists – often working with well-funded conservative foundations and influencing accommodation decisions throughout the US. I show that the proliferation of ‘accommodation’ claims in the name of church autonomy and religious conscience entailing exemption from civil regulation and anti-discrimination laws required by justice have a deep structure that has little to do with fairness (...) or inclusion or liberal pluralism. Instead they are tantamount to sovereignty claims, involving powers and immunities for the religious, implicitly referring to another, higher law and sovereign than the constitution or the people. The twenty-first century version of older pluralist ‘freedom of religion’ discourses also rejects the comprehensive jurisdiction and scope of public, civil law – this time challenging the ‘monistic sovereignty’ of the democratic constitutional state. I argue that the jurisdictional pluralist approach to religious freedom challenges liberal democratic constitutionalism at its core and should be resisted wherever it arises. (shrink)

The first part of this paper has shown that the development of regulatory genetics and the lactose operon model stemmed from laboratory cultures rooted in local traditions. A "physiological" culture may be recognized in the Pasteurian context. The institutional continuity provided the basis for a tenuous link between Pasteur, Lwoff, and Monod. My claim is that the "national" value of regulatory and physiological genetics is an artifact produced in the course of the legitimization process accompanying the institutionalisation of the discipline. (...) In the 1960s, the lactose operon model was turned into a "flag-object," a symbol of the new culture. The work done by the Pasteurian group became therefore the most important, if not the only, exemplar of molecular biology in France.The second part o f the paper described the origins of general patterns that dominated the building of molecular biology in France. The study of the relationships between molecular biologists and biochemists or immunologists revealed the existence of alternatives to the development of operon research, or to the convergence with molecular biology. Both examples uncover specific paths leading to achievements that might be viewed as international trends: the expansion of RNA and translation studies, and the development of cellular immunology. They illustrate two possible patterns of linking local settings and disciplinary traditions: an oligopolistic situation where a few groups or one institution dominate an entire field, and the emergence of "collective" trends through collaboration networks or schools. (shrink)

This Special Issue of Origins of Life and Evolution of Biospheres contains papers based on the contributions presented at the Conference "Defining Life" held in Paris (France) on 4-5 February, 2008. The main objective of this Conference was to confront speakers from several disciplines--chemists, biochemists, biologists, exo/astrobiologists, computer scientists, philosophers and historians of science--on the topic of the definition of life. Different viewpoints of the problem approached from different perspectives have been expounded and, as a result, common grounds as well (...) as remaining diverging arguments have been identified. In addition to individual talks, two large roundtables gave ample room for speakers to discuss their diverging viewpoints. This volume collects almost all the contributions presented during the Conference and provides a rich spectrum of renewed answers to the ever-standing question "What is Life?". Besides the arguments directly regarding this question, more philosophical or historical reflections are also proposed in this issue that were not presented during the Conference. This volume also offers a synthesis written by J. Gayon taking each contribution into account. To conclude this foreword, we would like to thank all the participants and speakers who made this Conference a most stimulating event. Each provided novel ideas to "Defining Life" while highlighting the extreme difficulty to reach a consensus on this topic. We are also very grateful to the French CNRS Interdisciplinary Program Origines des Planètes et de la Vie (Origins of Planets and Life) for its generous support, as well as to the National Museum of Natural History in Paris for hosting the Conference. We also thank Alan W. Schwartz for generously offering this space for publishing the Proceedings of the Conference. (shrink)

It is widely assumed that emotions are evaluative. Moreover, many authors suppose that emotions are important or valuable as evaluations. According to the currently dominant version of cognitivism, emotions are evaluative insofar as they make us aware of value properties of their intentional objects. In attributing to emotions an epistemic role, this view conceives of them as epistemically valuable. In this paper, I argue that proponents of this account mischaracterize the evaluative character of emotions and, a fortiori, their value. Moreover, (...) I propose an alternative view of emotional evaluation, according to which emotions are practically rather than epistemically important. As I argue, emotions are ways of acknowledging their intentional objects as (dis)valuable. As such, they do not apprehend values but make them count. I elaborate this idea by drawing an analogy with legal and political sanctions. The resulting view has it that emotions are practically important in that they affirm the cares and concerns which serve as standards of emotional evaluation. (shrink)

he article focuses on the contemporary social movements and new identities as well as the new theoretical paradigms to explain these developments. It is reported that the social movements like feminist, ecological, and local-autonomy movements started in the Europe in the 1970's. The participants in these movements, it is said, did not view themselves in terms of a socioeconomic class. Class background does not determine the collective identities of the actors of these socio-political movements. Different social philosophers and thinkers like (...) Karl Marx and Emile Durkheim and their ideas are also discussed. (shrink)

This new edition of "What is Literature?" also collects three other crucial essays of Sartre's for the first time in a volume of his.

On the one hand, freedom is said to be the property of a subject. On the other, freedom only happens in the space of being-in-common. Freedom, then, is the place of a conflict between the “self” and the “with,” between independence or autonomy and dependence or sharing. Resolving this apparent antinomy requires showing how the with ontologically constitutes the self. This, in turn, allows for a rethinking of freedom beyond what liberal democracy and political economy have to offer, as the (...) renewed opening of existence onto nothing, or onto an “outside” that the opening itself constitutes. (shrink)

This article argues that Axel Honneth’s ethics of recognition offers a robust model for a renewed critical theory of society, provided that it does not shy away from its political dimensions. First, the ethics of recognition needs to clarify its political moment at the conceptual level to remain conceptually sustainable. This requires a clarification of the notion of identity in relation to the three spheres of recognition, and a clarification of its exact place in a politics of recognition. We suggest (...) that a return to Hegel’s mature theory of subjectivity helps specify the relationship between the normative demand for autonomous identity and its realization in and through politics. (shrink)

The traditional conception construes human rights as moral rights all people have due to some basic feature or interests deemed intrinsically valuable. This comported well with the revival of the discourse of human rights in the wake of atrocities committed during WWII. It served as a useful referent for local struggles against foreign rule and domestic dictatorship in the 1980s. Since 1989, human rights discourse acquired a new function: the justification of sanctions, military invasions, and transformative occupation administrations by outsiders, (...) framed as enforcement of international law against violators. The traditional conception doesn't fit this new function, hence the efforts to counter-pose a "political" to the "traditional" approach. This essay analyzes two recent versions of the political conception, and argues for a third. The thesis is that sovereign equality and human rights are normative principles of our dualist international system and both are needed to construct a more just version of that system. (shrink)

The project of this book is to establish that Aristotle, contrary to what some have thought, did have a theory of distinctively "moral" responsibility, and one that is consistent with determinism. It is stipulated early on that having a theory of moral responsibility is a matter of first identifying the proper objects of peculiarly moral evaluation and thus specifying the range of responsible agents, and then identifying the actions for which those responsible agents are responsible. Aristotle’s account of moral character (...) is supposed to do the former. The latter is accomplished with his account of voluntariness. I will begin with that. (shrink)

The dual-process model of cognition but most especially its reflective component, system 2 processing, shows strong conceptual links with critical thinking. In fact, the salient characteristics of system 2 processing are so strikingly close to that of critical thinking, that it is tempting to claim that critical thinking is system 2 processing, no more and no less. In this article, I consider the two sides of that claim: Does critical thinking always require system 2 processing? And does system 2 processing (...) always result in critical thinking? I argue that it is plausible and helpful to consider that critical thinking requires system 2 processing. In particular, this assumption can provide interesting insights and benchmarks for critical thinking education. On the other hand, I show that system 2 processing can result in a range of outcomes which are either contradictory with critical thinking, or of debatable social desirability—which suggests that there is more to critical thinking than mere system 2 processing, and more to system 2 processing than just critical thinking. (shrink)

This article aims to present a new perspective on contemporary debates about the transformations of work and employment, and their impacts on individuals and communities, by focusing on the writings of Christophe Dejours. Basically, the article attempts to show that Dejours' writings make a significant contribution to contemporary social theory. This might seem like an odd claim to make, since Dejours' main training was in psychoanalysis and his main activity is the clinical, psychiatric study of pathologies linked to work. However, (...) in the course of his career, Dejours has greatly extended this initial clinical interest, and by integrating insights from philosophy and other social sciences, has developed a highly sophisticated and consistent theoretical model of work. Starting from a narrow psychopathological focus, Dejours has gradually developed a full-blown theoretical defence of the centrality of work. The article outlines the main features of Dejours' metapsychological model, and the structuring role played by work in his theory of subjective identity. This allows us to outline the originality of his approach by comparison with some of the most significant current accounts of the impact of transformations of work and employment conditions upon individuals and societies, notably Honneth, Castel and Sennett. (shrink)

In this paper, we try to establish that some mathematical theories, like K-theory, homology, cohomology, homotopy theories, spectral sequences, modern Galois theory (in its various applications), representation theory and character theory, etc., should be thought of as (abstract) machines in the same way that there are (concrete) machines in the natural sciences. If this is correct, then many epistemological and ontological issues in the philosophy of mathematics are seen in a different light. We concentrate on one problem which immediately follows (...) the recognition of the particular status of these theories: the demarcation problem between ‘natural kinds’ and ‘artefacts’. (shrink)

In the field of philosophy of language, is there life beyond Chomsky? Deleuze's deep distrust for, and fascination with language provide a positive answer - nothing less than a brand new philosophy of language, where pragmatics replaces structural linguistics, and where the literary text and the concept of style have pride of place. This should be good news not only for philosophers, but for linguistics and literary critics as well.

Using the behavioral agency model, we analyze how two compensation design characteristics, pay-performance sensitivity and duration of CEO compensation, affect corporate social performance. We find that the performance sensitivity of CEO pay is negatively associated with poor social performance but also negatively affects strong social performance. These results suggest that pay-performance sensitivity increases the relevance of potential negative consequences of poor social performance. However, the ‘insurance’ benefits of strong social performance may also become less relevant. With respect to the duration (...) of CEO compensation, we find that it reduces poor social performance. This finding confirms arguments that a long-term compensation time horizon increases the perceived threat that the negative effects of poor social performance will become visible. With our findings, we integrate behavioral agency theory with the traditional stakeholder views. (shrink)

Contrary to common assumptions, appeals to rewards and punishments play a central role in Scripture. We find these appeals in both the Old and New Testaments, and in every major biblical genre. Moreover, these appeals almost always presuppose that the one addressed by a promise, threat, or inducement will respond out of some self‐referential desire to enjoy something good or to avoid an evil. Similarly, they take for granted that such desires provide legitimate motives for obedience or fidelity. In short, (...) appeals to rewards and punishments, with their implied endorsement of a kind of self‐referential desire, play a central part in scriptural depictions of the divine‐human relationship. They strongly suggest that men and women naturally and properly expect good things from their Creator, and fear the consequences of divine displeasure. These observations do not necessarily commit us to some version of eudaimonism. Nonetheless, eudaimonism, considered broadly as a positive normative perspective on happiness, will always be relevant to Christian ethics, insofar as it offers starting points and theoretical tools for addressing unavoidable theological questions. (shrink)

This article aims to present some of the main results of contemporary French psychodynamics of work. The writings of Christophe Dejours constitute the central references in this area. His psychoanalytical approach, which is initially concerned with the impact of contemporary work practices on individual health, has implications that go well beyond the narrow psycho-pathological interest. The most significant theoretical development to have come out of Dejours's research is that of Yves Clot, whose writings will constitute the second reference point in (...) this article. The article attempts to demonstrate that the thick definition of work that Dejours and Clot operate with, as a result of their focus on its psychological function, speaks directly, in substantial and critical ways, to all disciplines with an interest in work, to philosophers, social theorists and social scientists, including economic theorists. (shrink)

Theories of sentence production that involve a convergence of activation from conceptual‐semantic and syntactic‐sequential units inspired a connectionist model that was trained to produce simple sentences. The model used a learning algorithm that resulted in a sharing of responsibility (or “division of labor”) between syntactic and semantic inputs for lexical activation according to their predictive power. Semantically rich, or “heavy”, verbs in the model came to rely on semantic cues more than on syntactic cues, whereas semantically impoverished, or “light”, verbs (...) relied more on syntactic cues. When the syntactic and semantic inputs were lesioned, the model exhibited patterns of production characteristic of agrammatic and anomic aphasic patients, respectively. Anomic models tended to lose the ability to retrieve heavy verbs, whereas agrammatic models were more impaired in retrieving light verbs. These results obtained in both sentence production and single‐word naming simulations. Moreover, simulated agrammatic lexical retrieval was more impaired overall in sentences than in single‐word tasks, in agreement with the literature. The results provide a demonstration of the division‐of‐labor principle, as well as general support for the claim that connectionist learning principles can contribute to the understanding of non‐transparent neuropsychological dissociations. (shrink)