1. La décision de l'intelligence et la méthode concrète-complexe.--2. La transmutation concrète-complexe.--3. Réalité sociale et logique: 1. essai. Psychologie collective; histoire et connaissance. 2. essai. Jugements économiques et sociologie des liaisons.

L'ouvrage de Scarlett Beauvalet-Boutouyrie vient combler une lacune de l'historiographie en proposant la première synthèse sur le veuvage féminin dans la France d'Ancien Régime. Se plaçant dans une perspective d'histoire sociale, l'auteure a mené un travail ambitieux, résultat d'une habilitation à diriger des recherches, dans laquelle elle a volontairement croisé les approches. Partant d'une étude des discours, dans la première partie consacrée à la figure mythique de la veuve, elle ab...

Papers... "selected from a larger number of contributions most of them based on talks presented at the First World Congress on the Square of Opposition organized in Montreux in June 2007"--Preface, p. 12.

Appearing in English for the first time, Jean-Luc Nancy’s 2002 book reflects on globalization and its impact on our being-in-the-world. Developing a contrast in the French language between two terms that are usually synonymous, or that are used interchangeably, namely globalisation (globalization) and mondialisation (world-forming), Nancy undertakes a rethinking of what “world-forming” might mean. At stake in this distinction is for him nothing less than two possible destinies of our humanity, and of our time. On the one hand, with (...) globalization, there is the uniformity produced by a global economical and technological logic leading to the contrary of an inhabitable world, “the un-world” (l’im-monde)—as Nancy refers to it—an un-world that entails social disintegration, misery, and injustice. And, on the other hand, there is the possibility of an authentic world-forming, that is, of a making of the world and of a making sense that Nancy calls a “creation” of the world. Nancy understands such world-forming in terms of an inexhaustible struggle for justice. This book is an important contribution by Nancy to a philosophical reflection on the phenomenon of globalization and a further development on his earlier works on our being-in-common, justice, and a-theological existence. (shrink)

Jean-Pierre Vernant delineates a compelling new vision of ancient Greece that takesus far from the calm and familiar images of Polykleitos and the Parthenon, and reveals a culture ofslavery, of blood sacrifice, of perpetual and ritualized warfare, of ceremonial hunting andecstasies.In his provocative discussions of various institutions and practices including war,marriage, and the city state, Vernant unveils a complex and previously unexplored intersection ofthe religious, social, and political structures of ancient Greece. He concludes with a genealogy ofthe study of (...) myth from antiquity to the present, and offers a critique of structuralism.Jean-PierreVernant is Professor Emeritus of Comparative Study of Ancient Religions at the College de France inParis. (shrink)

Baudrillard's remarkably prescient meditation on terrorism throws light on post-9/11 delusional fears and political simulations. Published one year after Forget Foucault, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities may be the most important sociopolitical manifesto of the twentieth century: it calls for nothing less than the end of both sociology and politics. Disenfranchised revolutionaries hoped to reach the masses directly through spectacular actions, but their message merely played into the hands of the media and the state. In a media society (...) meaning has no meaning anymore; communication merely communicates itself. Jean Baudrillard uses this last outburst of ideological terrorism in Europe to showcase the end of the "Social." Once invoked by Marx as the motor of history, the masses no longer have sociological reality. In the electronic media society, all the masses can do—and all they will do—is enjoy the spectacle. In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities takes to its ultimate conclusion the "end of ideologies" experienced in Europe after the Soviet invasion of Hungary and the death of revolutionary illusions after May 1968. Ideological terrorism doesn't represent anything anymore, writes Baudrillard, not even itself. It is just the last hysterical reaction to discredited political illusions. (shrink)

This review seeks to present a comprehensive picture of recent discussions in the social sciences of the anticipated impact of AI on the world of work. Issues covered include: technological unemployment, algorithmic management, platform work and the politics of AI work. The review identifies the major disciplinary and methodological perspectives on AI’s impact on work, and the obstacles they face in making predictions. Two parameters influencing the development and deployment of AI in the economy are highlighted: the capitalist imperative and (...) nationalistic pressures. (shrink)

First published in France in 1936 as a journal article, The Transcendence of the Ego was one of Jean-Paul Sartre's earliest philosophical publications. When it appeared, Sartre was still largely unknown, working as a school teacher in provincial France and struggling to find a publisher for his most famous fictional work, Nausea . The Transcendence of the Ego is the outcome of Sartre's intense engagement with the philosophy of Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology. Here, as in many subsequent (...) writings, Sartre embraces Husserl's vision of phenomenology as the proper method for philosophy. But he argues that Husserl's conception of the self as an inner entity, 'behind' conscious experience is mistaken and phenomenologically unfounded. The Transcendence of the Ego offers a brilliant diagnosis of where Husserl went wrong, and a radical alternative account of the self as a product of consciousness, situated in the world. This essay introduces many of the themes central to Sartre's major work, Being and Nothingness : the nature of consciousness, the problem of self-knowledge, other minds, anguish. It demonstrates their presence and importance in Sartre's thinking from the very outset of his career. This fresh translation makes this classic work available again to students of Sartre, phenomenology, existentialism, and twentieth century philosophy. It includes a thorough and illuminating introduction by Sarah Richmond, placing Sartre's essay in its philosophical and historical context. (shrink)

The problem of the intensification and remission of qualities was a crux for philosophical, theological, and scientific thought in the Middle Ages. It was raised in Antiquity with this remark of Aristotle: some qualities, as accidental beings, admit the more and the less. Admitting more and less is not a trivial property, since it belongs neither to every category of being, nor to every quality. Rather it applies only to states and dispositions such as virtue, to affections of bodies such (...) as heat and sweetness, and to affections of soul such as anger. However, the property of admitting more and less was a matter of importance for the qualitative physics that had reigned up to about the time of Descartes, a physics which was concerned with concepts such as heat, coldness, lightness, heaviness, and so on. (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)

The poor performances of typically developing children younger than 4 in the first-order false-belief task “Maxi and the chocolate” is analyzed from the perspective of conversational pragmatics. An ambiguous question asked by an adult experimenter (perceived as a teacher) can receive different interpretations based on a search for relevance, by which children according to their age attribute different intentions to the questioner, within the limits of their own meta-cognitive knowledge. The adult experimenter tells the child the following story of object-transfer: (...) “Maxi puts his chocolate into the green cupboard before going out to play. In his absence, his mother moves the chocolate from the green cupboard to the blue one.” The child must then predict where Maxi will pick up the chocolate when he returns. To the child, the question from an adult (a knowledgeable person) may seem surprising and can be understood as a question of his own knowledge of the world, rather than on Maxi's mental representations. In our study, without any modification of the initial task, we disambiguate the context of the question by (1) replacing the adult experimenter with a humanoid robot presented as “ignorant” and “slow” but trying to learn and (2) placing the child in the role of a “mentor” (the knowledgeable person). Sixty-two typical children of 3 years-old completed the first-order false belief task “Maxi and the chocolate,” either with a human or with a robot. Results revealed a significantly higher success rate in the robot condition than in the human condition. Thus, young children seem to fail because of the pragmatic difficulty of the first-order task, which causes a difference of interpretation between the young child and the experimenter. (shrink)

An early work in which Baudrillard became Baudrillard. When Fatal Strategies was first published in French in 1983, it represented a turning point for Jean Baudrillard: an utterly original, and for many readers, utterly bizarre book that offered a theory as proliferative, ecstatic, and hallucinatory as the postmodern world it endeavored to describe. Arguing against the predetermined outcomes of dialectical thought with his renowned, wry, ambivalent passion, with this volume Jean Baudrillard mounted an attack against the “false problems” (...) posed by Western philosophy. If his Marxist days were firmly behind him, Baudrillard here indicated that metaphysics had also gone the way of sociology and politics: the contemporary world demanded nothing less than Pataphysics, Alfred Jarry's absurdist philosphy that described the laws of the universe supplementary to this one. In effect, with Fatal Strategies, Baudrillard became Baudrillard. In his extrapolationist manner, Baudrillard sought to replace Western philosophy's circular arguments with a ritualistic Theater of Cruelty. Using this line of thought developed in Fatal Strategies, Baudrillard went on, throughout the 1980s, to find new and shatteringly accurate ways of discussing American corporatocracy, arms build-up, and hostage taking. Fatal Strategies asserts a profound critique of American politics, and it is an important step towards his examination of evil.Jean Baudrillard was a philosopher, sociologist, cultural critic, and theorist of postmodernity who challenged all existing theories of contemporary society with humor and precision. An outsider in the French intellectual establishment, he was internationally renowned as a twenty-first century visionary, reporter, and provocateur. His Simulations instantly became a cult classic and made him a controversial voice in the world of politics and art. (shrink)

Universal Logic is not a new logic, but a general theory of logics, considered as mathematical structures. The name was introduced about ten years ago, but the subject is as old as the beginning of modern logic: Alfred Tarski and other Polish logicians such as Adolf Lindenbaum developed a general theory of logics at the end of the 1920s based on consequence operations and logical matrices. The subject was revived after the flowering of thousands of new logics during the last (...) thirty years: there was a need for a systematic theory of logics to put some order in this chaotic multiplicity. This book contains recent works on universal logic by first-class researchers from all around the world. The book is full of new and challenging ideas that will guide the future of this exciting subject. It will be of interest for people who want to better understand what logic is. Tools and concepts are provided here for those who want to study classes of already existing logics or want to design and build new ones. (shrink)

Since the death of Jacques Lacan, Jean Laplanche is now considered to be one of the worlds foremost psychoanalytic thinkers. In spite of the influence of his work over the last thirty years, remarkably little has been available in English. Essays On Otherness presents for the first time in English many of Laplanche's key essays and is the first book to provide an overview of his thinking. It offers an introduction to many of the key themes that characterise his (...) work: seduction, persecution, revelation, masochism, transference and mourning. Such themes have been increasingly both in psychoanalytic thought and in continental philosophy, social and cultural theory, and literature making Essays On Otherness indispensable reading for all those concerned with the implications of psychoanalytic theory today. (shrink)

In seven essays that draw from metaphysics, phenomenology, literature, Christological theology, and Biblical exegesis,Marion sketches several prolegomena to a future fuller thinking and saying of love’s paradoxical reasons, exploring evil, freedom, bedazzlement, and the loving gaze; crisis, absence, and knowing.

Tests for hereditary predispositions to breast and ovarian cancer have figured among the first medical applications of the new knowledge gleaned from the Human Genome Project. These applications have set off heated debates on general issues such as intellectual property rights. The genetic diagnosis of breast cancer risks, and the management of women “at risk” has nevertheless developed following highly localized paths. There are major differences in the organization of testing, uses of genetic tests, and the follow up of patients. (...) This article studies testing practices and ways of managing breast cancer risk in France and compares them with those in the United States and United Kingdom. It shows how the complex interaction between global and local factors shapes the multiple meanings assumed by the phrase cancer risk. (shrink)

‘No matter how long I may look at an image, I shall never find anything in it but what I put there. It is in this fact that we find the distinction between an image and a perception.' - Jean-Paul Sartre L’Imagination was published in 1936 when Jean-Paul Sartre was thirty years old. Long out of print, this is the first English translation in many years. The Imagination is Sartre’s first full philosophical work, presenting some of the basic (...) arguments concerning phenomenology, consciousness and intentionality that were to later appear in his master works and be so influential in the course of twentieth-century philosophy. Sartre begins by criticising philosophical theories of the imagination, particularly those of Descartes, Leibniz and Hume, before establishing his central thesis. Imagination does not involve the perception of ‘mental images’ in any literal sense, Sartre argues, yet reveals some of the fundamental capacities of consciousness. He then reviews psychological theories of the imagination, including a fascinating discussion of the work of Henri Bergson. Sartre argues that the ‘classical conception’ is fundamentally flawed because it begins by conceiving of the imagination as being like perception and then seeks, in vain, to re-establish the difference between the two. Sartre concludes with an important chapter on Husserl’s theory of the imagination which, despite sharing the flaws of earlier approaches, signals a new phenomenological way forward in understanding the imagination. The Imagination is essential reading for anyone interested in the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, phenomenology, and the history of twentieth-century philosophy. This new translation includes a helpful historical and philosophical introduction by Kenneth Williford and David Rudrauf. Also included is Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s important review of L’Imagination upon its publication in French in 1936. Translated by Kenneth Williford and David Rudrauf. (shrink)

Jacques Lacan is renowned as a theoretician of psychoanalysis whose work is still influential in many countries. He refashioned psychoanalysis in the name of philosophy and linguistics at a time when it faced certain intellectual decline. Focusing on key terms in Lacan's often difficult, idiosyncratic development of psychoanalysis, this volume brings new perspectives to the work of an intimidating influential thinker.

The article "The logic of hatred and its social and historical expressions: From the great witch-hunt to terror and present-day djihadism," written by Jean Greisch, was originally published electronically on the publisher’s Internet portal on March 2020 with open access.

Our contemporary challenge, according to Jean-Luc Nancy and Aurelien Barrau, is that a new world has stolen up on us. We no longer live in a world, but in worlds. We do not live in a universe anymore, but rather in a multiverse. We no longer create; we appropriate and montage. And we no longer build sovereign, hierarchical political institutions; we form local assemblies and networks of cross-national assemblages— and we do this at the same time as we form (...) multinational corporations that no longer pay taxes to the state. In such a time, one of the world’s most eminent philosophers and an emerging astrophysicist return to the ancient art of cosmology. Nancy and Barrau’s work is a study of life, plural worlds, and what the authors call the struction or rebuilding of these worlds. Nancy and Barrau invite us on an uncharted walk into barely known worlds when an everyday French idiom, “What’s this world coming to?,” is used to question our conventional thinking about the world. We soon find ourselves living among heaps of odd bits and pieces that are amassing without any unifying force or center, living not only in a time of ruin and fragmentation but in one of rebuilding. Astrophysicist Aurelien Barrau articulates a major shift in the paradigm of contemporary physics from a universe to a multiverse. Meanwhile, Jean-Luc Nancy’s essay “Of Struction” is a contemporary comment on the project of deconstruction and French poststructuralist thought. Together Barrau and Nancy argue that contemporary thought has shifted from deconstruction to what they carefully call the struction of dis-order. (shrink)

In May 2000 a group of researchers, university teachers and publishers met to consider the impact of the new media for knowledge transmission on the intellectual world and listed the projects ongoing in France for publishing content electronically. Eighteen months later no one is able to say whether there will one day be a significant body of electronic publishing with French content. Such a transformation calls for a moment's consideration. So what has happened?

Adoration is the second volume of the Deconstruction of Christianity, following Dis-Enclosure. The first volume attempted to demonstrate why it is necessary to open reason up not to a religious dimension but to one transcending reason as we have been accustomed to understanding it; the term "adoration" attempts to name the gesture of this dis-enclosed reason. -/- Adoration causes us to receive ignorance as truth: not a feigned ignorance, perhaps not even a "nonknowledge," nothing that would attempt to justify the (...) negative again, but the simple, naked truth that there is nothing in the place of God, because there is no place for God. The outside of the world opens us in the midst of the world, and there is no first or final place. Each one of us is at once the first and the last. Each one, each name. And our ignorance is made worse by the fact that we do not know whether we ought to name this common and singular property of all names. We must remain in this suspense, hesitating between and stammering in various possible languages, ultimately learning to speak anew. -/- In this book, Jean-Luc Nancy goes beyond his earlier historical and philosophical thought and tries to think-or at least crack open a little to thinking-a stance or bearing that might be suitable to the retreat of God that results from the self-deconstruction of Christianity. Adoration may be a manner, a style of spirit for our time, a time when the "spiritual" seems to have become so absent, so dry, so adulterated. -/- The book is a major contribution to the important strand of attempts to think a "post-secular" situation of religion. (shrink)

Un entretien avec Jean-Luc Gleyze, président du Conseil départemental de la Gironde, qui porte avec une vingtaine de départements français un projet d’expérimentation d’un revenu de base d’un montant suffisant, d’au moins mille euros, automatique, inconditionnel, mais dégressif, c’est-à-dire dépendant des revenus de chacun.

In the works of José Carlos Mariátegui, the analyses focus on the categories of praxis and class struggle. Mariátegui is then to be counted among the ranks of those Marxists who claim to belong to a historicist tradition. This article first provides an overview of the issues relating to this movement, and then examines Mariátegui’s reception of the term historicism. Lastly, it sets out to re-examine his revolutionary strategic proposition in the light of the use of the categories of tradition, (...) myth and history. (shrink)

The history of the Nicaraguan Revolution has received considerable analytical attention. Typically, the successful overthrow of the Somoza regime in the late 1970s is associated with the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional, a Marxist/socialist inspired vanguard group. While the role Christians played in the revolution is often acknowledged as a significant one, in part because many Sandinista cadres were Christian revolutionaries, little attention has been paid to the degree to which Sandinismo, as a unique perspective on socialism, shares elective affinities (...) with liberation theology, a prophetic expression of Christianity. This manuscript sets out to explore the relationship between liberation theology and Sandinismo-as-socialism. It starts by considering the perspective of Christian revolutionaries on this relationship. It then identifies the electives affinities between the aforementioned cultural frameworks, and it evaluates the Nicaraguan Revolution in light of these elective affinities. The latter evaluation includes exploring the connection between Saint Paul and what it means to be a Sandinista revolutionary. (shrink)

Para a maior parte dos filósofos o Ego é um “habitante” da consciência. Alguns afirmam sua presença formal no interior dos “Erlebnisse” como um princípio de unificação vazio. Outros – psicólogos na sua maior parte – pensam descobrir sua presença material, como centro de desejos e de atos, a cada momento de nossa vida psíquica. Pretendemos mostrar aqui que o Ego não está nem formalmente nem materialmente na consciência: ele está lá fora, no mundo, é um ser do mundo, como (...) o Ego do outro. (shrink)

Jean-Marie Straub – Sur Othon, je ne vous dirai qu’une chose. Avec des amis à Vienne, à l’époque, en travaillant, en répétant le texte, on rigolait en disant : voilà une lettre ouverte à Pompidou. Quant au Cézanne, je ne vous dirai pas un mot parce que c’est clair comme de l’eau de roche. J’ai deux choses à dire sur deux autres films différents. Il y en a un, par hasard qui s’appelle Le Fiancé, la Comédienne et le Maquereau. (...) Vous l’avez vu, certains d’entre vous l’ont vu. Mais je tiens à préc... (shrink)

The ambition and proposal for data modeling of myths presented in this paper is to link contemporary technical affordances to some canonical projects developed in structural anthropology. To articulate the theoretical promise and innovation of this proposal, we present a discrete-event system specification modeling and simulation approach in order to perform a generative analysis and a dynamic visualization of selected narratives, aimed at validating and revitalizing the transformational and morphodynamic theory and methodology proposed by Claude Lévi-Strauss in his structural analysis (...) of myth. After an analysis of Lévi-Strauss’s transformational methodology, we describe in detail how discrete-event system specification models are implemented and developed in the framework of a DEVSimPy software environment. The validation of the method involves a discrete-event system specification simulation based on the extension of discrete-event system specification models dedicated to provide a dynamic Google Earth visualization of the selected myth. Future work around the discrete-event system specification formalism in anthropology is described as well as future applications regarding the impact of computational models to new contemporary anthropological domains. (shrink)

La doctrine de Marx continue, alors même qu'elle n'a cessé d'être critiquée, de susciter l'intérêt voir l'adhésion d'un nombre croissant d'intellectuels. L'idée d'un "sens de l'Histoire", notamment, nourrit une littérature de recherche et un combat politique importants. Mais qu'en est-il réellement? A-t-on bien lu Marx? Jean Borella, qui cherche à tisser des liens entre philosophie et foi chrétienne, travaille dans cet ouvrage à sortir des sentiers battus du marxisme orthodoxe pour mettre en regard les conceptions matérialistes et christiques de (...) l'Histoire. (shrink)

Prenant pour fil conducteur les écrits de Jean-Marie Vaysse et de Bernard Mabille, l’article examine la manière dont le « retournement » heideggérien de l’hégélianisme a pu lui-même être « retourné » grâce à une lecture de Hegel libérée des préjugés qui l’affectent usuellement, et dont Heidegger lui-même ne s’est pas complètement libéré. De la sorte se dessine la voie d’une autre Kehre, plus radicale, en un sens, que celle de Heidegger.

Jean-Francois Lyotard is often considered to be the father of postmodernism. Here leading experts in the field of cultural and philosophical studies, including Barry Smart, John O' Neill and Victor J. Seidler, tackle many of the questions still being asked about this controversial figure.