“He devoured her with his eyes.” This expression and many other signs point to the illusion common to both realism and idealism: to know is to eat. After a hundred years of academicism, French philosophy remains at that point. We have all read Brunschvicg, Lalande, and Meyerson,2 we have all believed that the spidery mind trapped things in its web, covered them with a white spit and slowly swallowed them, reducing them to its own substance. What is a table, a (...) rock, a house? Answer: a certain assemblage of “contents of consciousness,” a class of such contents. Oh digestive philosophy! Yet nothing seemed more obvious: is not the table the actual content of my perception? Is not my perception the present state of my consciousness? Nutrition, assimilation! Assimilation, Lalande said, of things to ideas, of ideas by ideas, of minds by minds. The corpulent skeletons of the world were picked clean by these diligent diastases: assimilation, unification, identification. The simplest and plainest among us vainly looked for something solid, something not just mental, but would encounter everywhere only a soft and very genteel mist: themselves. (shrink)

After recalling the distinction between logic as reasoning and logic as theory of reasoning, we first examine the question of relativity of logic arguing that the theory of reasoning as any other science is relative. In a second part we discuss the emergence of universal logic as a general theory of logical systems, making comparison with universal algebra and the project of mathesis universalis. In a third part we critically present three lines of research connected to universal logic: logical pluralism, (...) non-classical logics and cognitive science. (shrink)

La 4e de couv. porte : "Gilbert Simondon (1924-1989) a été considéré de son vivant comme un philosophe de la technique original mais difficile. Il s'impose aujourd’hui comme l’artisan d’un « nouvel encyclopédisme » qui veut unifier les sciences au sein d’une philosophie de la nature et renouveler l’humanisme. Pour l’« ontologie génétique » de Simondon, toute chose tient sa réalité de la genèse où elle«s’individue ». Celle-ci est un processus ininterrompu auquel l’inerte, le vivant, le technique, le social, mais (...) aussi le savoir et la pensée eux-mêmes appartiennent. On expose ici la question de « l’individuation » dans ses trois dimensions essentielles – la différence entre le physique et le biologique, le « transindividuel », l’objet technique – pour montrer ensuite comment le génétisme de Simondon dépasse les oppositions classiques entre matière et forme ou sujet et objet, mais aussi les antagonismes (par exemple entre technicisme et humanisme) qui se disputent la conception de la nature et de l’homme. On développe enfin l’enjeu politique et social d’une philosophie pour laquelle une véritable « culture technique » pourrait supprimer une des principales causes de l’aliénation humaine et donner aux hommes les moyens de comprendre leur monde.". (shrink)

It is time to challenge the issue of pleasure associated with the core of medical practice. Its importance is made clear through its opposite: unhappiness—something which affects doctors in a rather worrying way. The paper aims to provide a discussion on pleasure on reliable grounds. Plato’s conception of techne is a convenient model that offers insights into the unique practice of medicine, which embraces in a single purposive action several heterogeneous dimensions. In Aristotle’s Ethics, pleasure appears to play a central (...) role for action’s assessment and intensification. Pleasure is also tightly associated with the Kantian faculty of reflective judgment, which operates at the heart of clinical reasoning. Indeed, practicing medicine means to deal with the particular and the manifold, requiring clinical judgment, but also relying on embodied habitus . With Bourdieu’s notion of habitus , pleasure is the mark of a happy practice, which presupposes a deep involvement in one’s field. Throughout our inquiry, the question of pleasure comes to offer a critical reappraisal of real medical practice and leads to consider ethics more as a component of techne than as a separate realm of concern. (shrink)

The End of the Avant-Gardes : May 68 and the Situationists What emerges first and foremost from Debord’s writings in 1968 is that the situationists’ initial reaction to the May “events” was to interpret them as the first example of a spontaneous general strike in the context of what he called “overdeveloped capitalism”. Debord’s position on this question is linked to his questioning of the status of the avant-gardes. At the time, Debord and those close to him sought both to (...) conceptualise and to enact the end of the avant-gardes. And this included the Internationale Situationniste in its status as political, philosophical and artistic avant-garde. e article subsequently sets out to show that if the situationists did have any leverage on the events of May, it was insofar as they practised a maverick Marxism centred on the concept of alienation. is enabled them to conceptualise both the exploitation of the wage-earner and the condition of the consumer. Because they represent a comprehensive critique of capitalism and because, furthermore, they refuse to compromise on the revolutionary and worker dimension of the May-June 1968 moment, Debord’s writings of the period enable us to grasp what, in the strict sense, remains beyond any opportunistic recuperation in these events. (shrink)

Drawing on existential phenomenology, particularly Heidegger’s analytic of Dasein, and combining it with a developmental perspective, the paper focuses on those moments of crisis, in which a self faces the question of its own truth, and in the process posits the conditions for disclosing key aspects about the world and society. Late adolescence and early adulthood are the ‘ages of life’ in which such possibility of disclosure occurs most eminently, and this is relayed expressively and reflectively, the paper further argues, (...) in the few examples of popular music that act as genuine outlets for young people’s desires and anxieties. The poetic work of Morrissey is a particularly eloquent case in point. However, a succinct analysis of Morrissey’s poetics reveals that underneath the explicit thread of sexuality, it is violence and cruelty that shape the young soul into becoming a channel for world and social disclosure. (shrink)

Cet article propose l’étude d’un cas (dans deux films de Fassbinder) de ce que je nomme l’ iconologie nostalgique. Celle-ci consiste en une certaine manière de faire retour, par le cinéma comme outil d’expertise, sur quelques chefs-d’œuvre de l’histoire de la peinture, le film officiant comme révélateur iconique d’invention pour les figures peintes et nous permettant de voir et d’interpréter, par rebonds, le tableau pour la première fois, c’est-à-dire d’un regard jamais actualisé avant l’opération filmique.

Parménide n'est-il que le penseur de l'Etre? La présence des multiples déesses n'est-elle que figure poétique de style? Le récit sur le cosmos ne fait-il que décrire la voie de l'illusion, à éviter absolument? En cherchant réponse à ces questions, cet ouvrage met en lumière le rôle incontournable que jouent plusieurs déesses dans la révélation et la compréhension du Vrai. Et, chemin faisant, sont éclairés les liens étroits qui relient ces divinités, l'Etre et le monde du devenir. Ainsi, c'est à (...) partir de l'ontologie fondatrice et d'une théologie inédite que le penseur de l'Etre esquisse une conception non moins originale du cosmos. (shrink)

This volume argues that contemporary narratives resist such influences and evince a great deal of resilience by promoting an ecology of attention based on poetic options that develop an ethics of the particularist type. The contributors draw on critical and theoretical literature hailing from various fields: including psychology and sociology, but more prominently phenomenology, political philosophy, analytical philosophy (essentially Ordinary Language Philosophy), alongside the Ethics of Care and Vulnerability. This volume is designed as an innovative contribution to the nascent field (...) of the study of attention in literary criticism, an area that is full of potential. Its scope is wide, as it embraces a great deal of the Anglophone world, with Britain, Ireland, the USA, but also Australia and even Malta. Its chapters focus on well-established authors, like Kazuo Ishiguro (whose work is revisited here in a completely new light) or more confidential ones like Melissa Harrison or Sarah Moss. (shrink)

This volume argues that contemporary narratives resist such influences and evince a great deal of resilience by promoting an ecology of attention based on poetic options that develop an ethics of the particularist type. The contributors draw on critical and theoretical literature hailing from various fields: including psychology and sociology, but more prominently phenomenology, political philosophy, analytical philosophy (essentially Ordinary Language Philosophy), alongside the Ethics of Care and Vulnerability. This volume is designed as an innovative contribution to the nascent field (...) of the study of attention in literary criticism, an area that is full of potential. Its scope is wide, as it embraces a great deal of the Anglophone world, with Britain, Ireland, the USA, but also Australia and even Malta. Its chapters focus on well-established authors, like Kazuo Ishiguro (whose work is revisited here in a completely new light) or more confidential ones like Melissa Harrison or Sarah Moss. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to argue that the ethical concepts and principles that made Peter Drucker a leading figure in management can be analysed in the terms of the oldest Western worldview, ancient heroism. A description of the salient features of heroism is offered first, followed by an overview of Drucker’s ‘Management by Objectives’ framework. These expositions show that ancient heroism is an important component of MBO and reveal its strengths and weaknesses.

The war against terrorism enables the implementation of techniques of exception at all stages of judicial proceedings in criminal cases, front the initiation of a lawsuit to the verdict. It thus puts into question the constitutional mechanisms intended for the protection of privacy. The type of incrimination specific w the accusation of terrorism has created a specifically political crime, i.e., the intention to exert art inappropriate form of pressure on a government or an international organization. It serves as the means (...) for a preventive attack on any process of class recomposition. We thus are witnessing a suspension of the law, which is paradoxically inscribed within the law and belongs to a new legal or juridical order. This amounts to the end of the twofold dimension of the Western legal system as we have known it, namely, the separation between rule of law within and pure violence on the external level. The present imperial organization knowns no externality pure violence has been reinserted at its heart and now belongs to the rule of law. Hence the State of exception as the form of government of the Empire appears above all to be a transitional phase, a tool in the process of installing a more stable form: dictatorship. The end of the formal separation of powers as well as the legal prerogatives appropriated by the executive branch show that this process is well underway. (shrink)