A ready answer to the question of Empedocles’ thinking about Good and Evil is to be found in Aristotle, who provides us with this simple rule of thumb : Good is associated with Love, and Evil with Hate. Fundamentally obvious as that rule may be, we need to go beyond Aristotle’s words. This article investigates several topics : fire, the sun, water, the hoard of divine thought, reincarnation, Empedoclean ethics, and, finally, the Blessed Ones. Complexity rules our quest to (...) determine what belongs to the Good and what belongs to the Bad. There are times when Love takes advantage of Hate’s ability to cause separation. The sun, manifestation par excellence of fire, is loaded with ambivalence in Empedocles – even though the high value placed almost universally on light is a commonplace in Greek thought. Empedocles is torn between his sense of wonder at the works of Aphrodite and his pessimism on recognizing the infernal cycle in which mortals are involved. (shrink)

Le début du fr. 21 DK d’Empédocle concerne les manifestations des quatre éléments dans le monde autour de nous. D’après le contexte, le référent de l’adjectif substantivé ambrota, au vers 4, concernerait l’air ou quelque chose intimement lié à l’air. Le mot ambrota se trouve enchâssé dans un développement sur le soleil, qui suggère le passage homérique du voile d’Héra d’un blanc éclatant comme le soleil. À partir de là et grâce à l’interprétation livrée par Aétius selon laquelle la racine (...) divine Héra, chez Empédocle, est l’air, il vient que les ambrota, souvent associés à heimata (les vêtements immortels) dans les vers épiques, désigneraient une Héra vêtue. Les vêtements qui dissimulent Héra, la déesse qu’il faut associer aux ambrota, seraient les nuages blancs, essentiellement faits d’air. L’explication repose sur une matrice thématique inscrite dans des vers épiques. Une présentation du chœur des Nuées d’Aristophane apporterait un écho à la conception empédocléenne des ambrota compris comme des nuages blancs. (shrink)

Dans le fr. 128 DK d'Empédocle, Empédocle nomme cinq dieux en opposition à Cypris : Arès, Kudoimos, Zeus, Cronos, Poséidon. Pourquoi ces cinq dieux? Quelle relation peuvent-ils entretenir avec le mythe hésiodique des cinq races, qui semble être en arrière-plan du propos d'Empédocle? Pourquoi Poséidon est-il présent à côté de Zeus et non pas Aïdôneus? L'article tente de répondre à ces questions. Pour finir, il s'interroge sur la relation possible des hommes de l'âge de Cypris et des daimones, et conclut (...) sur la place du fr. 128 dans l'œuvre d'Empédocle. In fr. 128 DK by Empedocles, Empedocles lists five gods in opposition to Cypris: Ares, Kudoimos, Zeus, Cronos, and Poseidon. Why these five gods? What link could they have with the Hesiodic myth of the five races of men, which seems to be in the background of Empedocles' purpose? Why does Poseidon appear near Zeus and not Aïdôneus? The article attempts to answer these questions. Finally, it examines the relationship of the men of the age of Cypris and the daimones, and concludes on the place of fr. 128 in the work of Empedocles. (shrink)

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Les Présocratiques sont de retour. Ou plutôt ils font leur entrée dans un monde qui les avait à peu près ignorés jusque-là, faute de pouvoir les comprendre de l'intérieur. Cependant - et telle est la véritable originalité de ce livre - personne n'avait encore inscrit les Présocratiques dans l'ensemble des grandes traditions de l'humanité. A la lumière des cosmologies et des sagesses orientales - hindouisme, bouddhisme, taoïsme en particulier, dont Jean Biès est un familier - l'ouvrage explore pour la (...) première fois dans leur véritable lumière ce que furent la mentalité, la vision du monde et les enseignements des Présocratiques, en en renouvelant ainsi, et de fond en comble, l'intérêt, et par delà même, l'avenir des " Humanités classiques ". Parmi eux, Empédocle - poète, médecin, thaumaturge - occupe une place de choix pour peu que l'on déchiffre sa vie à l'aide du symbolisme : sa " descente " parmi les hommes, ses " pouvoirs " chamaniques, son " enlèvement " miraculeux. Philosophe de la nature, Empédocle fonde son système sur des " Racines " et des " Principes " opposés et complémentaires, sur la corrélation du multiple et de l'Un, sur la doctrine des cycles cosmiques et sur le Sphaïros, divinité suprême, qui, tous, permettent d'inattendus rapprochements avec les " points de vue " de l'Asie. Maître spirituel, il transmet des méthodes initiatiques également proches de l'ascèse orientale, permettant la réminiscence des vies antérieures et fournissant les moyens d'échapper à la transmigration. L'ouvrage propose une traduction inédite et commentée des poèmes de l'Agrigentin : De la Nature et Purifications. (shrink)

Le terme consacré de " présocratique " n'est-il qu'une formule commode donnant un repère historique, ou peut-on trouver des lignes dominantes communes aux différentes écoles de cette période? S'il faut en croire Nietzsche et Heidegger, à partir de Socrate, quelque chose changerait et les philosophes présocratiques constitueraient la véritable tradition philosophique aujourd'hui perdue. Cet ouvrage nous invite à découvrir et comprendre ces philosophes dont seuls des fragments plus ou moins importants d'oeuvre nous ont été transmis : Thalès de Milet, Pythagore, (...) Héraclite, Parménide, Zénon d'Elée, Empédocle ou encore Anaxagore de Clazomènes. (shrink)

De la connaissance à la vie, et de la vie à la connaissance: en s'installant dans cette circularité radicale, les initiateurs grecs de la philosophie ont tâché de répondre à la difficulté que résume la question lancée par Socrate à ses contemporains: Comment doit-on vivre?. Pour ceux-là, connaître est tout sauf une activité désincarnée, et la vie humaine ne peut atteindre sa perfection propre qu'en se forgeant dans la quète d'un savoir sur soi, sur les autres et sur le monde. (...) En ce sens, c'est un savoir-vivre fondamental qui s'élabore dans les démarches contrastées, mais à bien des égards convergentes, des trois penseurs liminaires de la réflexion éthique que sont Empédocle, Socrate et Platon. Dans cette perspective, le présent essai se donne pour objet d'explorer de multiples facettes du projet philosophique, tel qu'il s'est affirmé entre le Vème et IVème siècles, interrogeant la visée de perfection individuelle et collective, la dimension réflexive et l'exigence pratique constitutives du mode de vie poursuivi. (shrink)

L’ouvrage de Jean-Claude Picot se présente comme un recueil d’études. Il rassemble dix articles parus entre 1998 et 2018 suivis par cinq textes inédits ; ces derniers occupent la moitié du volume. Chacun de ces quinze textes, dont la plupart se concentrent sur un seul fragment (selon la numérotation du recueil de Diels-Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 19516), peut se lire indépendamment des autres et dans l’ordre voulu par le lecteur. L’ouvrage n’en conserve pas moins son unité comme l...

Romain Rolland (1866-1944), écrivain, dramaturge, historien et musicologue, est l'auteur d'une oeuvre considérable et variée. La Grande Guerre fut pour lui l'occasion d'une méditation sur la violence et la haine, et le désastre qui s'abattit sur l'Europe, méditation qui aboutira à la rédaction d'Au-dessus de la mêlée (1914). Ce manifeste pacifiste, lucide et passionné, contribua à l'obtention, par l'auteur déjà célèbre de Jean-Christophe, Beethoven, La vie de Tolstoï, Danton, Les Loups, etc, du prix Nobel de littérature (1915). Son oeuvre (...) se caractérise par la recherche d'une harmonie universelle, de paix et de justice. Empédocle (1918) et L'éclair de Spinoza (1924) sont une expression "enthousiaste" de gratitude envers deux immenses penseurs, compagnons de route de Rolland, qui en a subi la profonde et durable influence. Il s'y révèle un styliste de grande classe, poète original en même temps que rigoureux penseur et pédagogue. (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)

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)

It is a commonplace that emotions are characteristically passive. As we ordinarily think of them, emotions are ways in which we are acted upon, that is, moved or affected by aspects of our environment. Moreover, we have no voluntary control over whether we feel them. In this paper, I call attention to a much-neglected respect in which emotions are active, which is no less central to our pretheoretical concept of them. That is, in having emotions, we are engaged with the (...) world insofar as we respond to aspects of our environment. In this context, to say that an emotion is a response to x is tantamount to saying that x is a reason for which we have it. Elaborating this claim in light of a historically prominent conception of the active/passive distinction, I will argue that emotions are a form of spontaneity in virtue of their responsive character and contrast in this respect with perceptions, which are fundamentally receptive. While this proposal is prima facie opposed to the ordinary image of emotions as passive, I will show that it actually allows us to make proper sense of it. (shrink)

According to the traditional view of Empedocles' cosmic cycle, there are two creations of plants and animals, one under the dominion of increasing Strife and one under the dominion of increasing Love. At the point at which Strife holds complete sway the four elements are completely separated and all life is destroyed; at the point at which Love is completely dominant there is also a destruction of the biological world, this time because the elements are blended into a perfectly (...) homogeneous mixture. This interpretation of the cosmic cycle, which has prevailed almost since it was developed by Friedrich Panzerbieter and seconded by authority of Eduard Zeller was challenged by Paul Tannery and then by H. von Arnim . Long after these essentially programmatic critiques, three independent studies published in 1965 by Jean Bollack, Uvo Hölscher and Friedrich Solmsen mounted a vigorous challenge to the received view. However, in a detailed monograph devoted to Empedocles' cosmic cycle, Denis O'Brien brought to bear an impressive array of scholarly evidence and critical acumen in support of the traditional view . Several challenges to the traditional view have appeared since O'Brien's book, of which the most significant is that of A. A. Long, who, while criticizing attempts of some opponents of the traditional view, produced some novel and interesting arguments against it. Although the traditional view continues to enjoy the support of authorities such as Jonathan Barnes and M. R. Wright, there is a decided shift in favour of revisionary views. Nevertheless recent advocates of a revisionary interpretation do not provide detailed refutations of the traditional view; Long's arguments remain the strongest objections to the traditional view, and they have never been refuted. Will they stand up to scrutiny? (shrink)

The political writings of Jean-Francois Lyotard, the prophet of the postmodern, are presented here as both the missing dimension of his work and the key to understanding his position within contemporary debate.

Fabienne Blaise« L'expérience délirante de la raison divine : les Bacchantes d'Euripide », Methodos 3 (Figures de l'irrationel), 2003, p. 35-60. Jean Bollack– L'écrit. Une poétique dans l'oeuvre de Celan, Paris (PUF, « Perspectives germaniques »), 2003, 231 p. – Empédocle. Les purifications. Un projet de paix universelle, édité, traduit et commenté par J. Bollack, Paris (Seuil, « Points. Essais »), 2003, 144p. – « Une autre Antigone et un autre Œdipe », dans C. Botella, Penser les limites. Éc..

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.

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)

This book provides an introduction to the historical sources of philosophical hermeneutics as it has come to fruition in the work of Heidegger and Gadamer.

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)

This paper provides a typology of appeals to authority, identifying three distinct types: that which is based on a command; that which is based on expertise; and that which is based on dignity. Each type is distinguished with respect to the reaction that a failure to follow it ordinarily evokes. The rhetorical roots of Locke's ad verecundiam are traced to the rhetorical practices of ancient Rome.

(1) a. The fog extended from London toward Paris. (the state reading is an extent reading (Jackendoff 1990)) b. Debris covered the outfield. c. Water filled the glass.

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.

Aren't we actually sick of sex, of difference, of emancipation, of culture? With this provocative taunt, the indomitable sociologist Jean Baudrillard challenges us to face up to our deadly, technologically empowered renunciation of mortality and subjectivity as he grapples with the complex issues that define our postmillennial world. What does the advent and proliferation of cloning mean for our sense of ourselves as human beings? What does the turn of the millennium say about our relation to time and history? (...) What does the instantaneous, virtual realm of cyberspace do to reality? In _The Vital Illusion_--as always--Baudrillard leads his readers to some surprising conclusions. Baudrillard considers how human cloning--as well as the "cloning" of ideas and social identities--heralds an end to sex and death and the divagations of living by instituting a realm of the Same, beyond the struggles of individuation. In this day and age when everything can be cloned, simulated, programmed, and genetically and neurologically managed, humanity shows itself unable to brave its own diversity, preferring instead to regress to the pathological eternity of self-replicating cells. By reverting to our viral origins as sexless immortal beings, we are, ironically, fulfilling a death wish, putting an end to our own species as we know it. Next, Baudrillard explores the "nonevent" that was and is the turn of the millennium. He provocatively puts forward the thesis that the arrival of the year 2000 could never take place because we could neither resolve nor leave behind our history, nor could we stop counting down toward our future. For Baudrillard, the millennial clock reading to the millionth of a second on its way to zero is the perfect symbol of our time: history decays rather than progresses. In closing, Baudrillard examines what he calls "the murder of the real" by the virtual. In a world of copies and clones in which everything can be made present in an instant by technology, we can no longer even speak of reality. Beyond Nietzsche's symbolic murder of God, our virtual world free of referents is in the process of exterminating reality, leaving no trace: "The corps(e) of the Real--if there is any--has not been recovered, is nowhere to be found." Peppered with Baudrillard's signature counterintuitive moves, prophetic visions, and dark humor, _The Vital Illusion_ exposes the contradictions that guide our contemporary culture and rule our lives. (shrink)

After explaining the interdisciplinary aspect of the series of events organized around the square of opposition since 2007, we discuss papers related to the 4th World Congress on the Square of Opposition which was organized in the Vatican at the Pontifical Lateran University in 2014. We distinguish three categories of work: those dealing with the evolution and development of the theory of opposition, those using the square as a metalogical tool to give a better understanding of various systems of logic (...) and those related with applications of the theory of opposition to conceptual analysis and pedagogy. (shrink)

In Godard's Le Mépris [Contempt, 1963], Fritz Lang, playing a fictional version of himself, evokes the complex relationship between cinema's future and the end of cinema by citing a famous verse from the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin, according to which what counts in respect of poetry is henceforth no longer the secret persistence of the gods, nor their covert proximity, but their enduring absence. This paper explores the implications of that insight as they come to affect first Godard's film, then (...) the three films based on Hölderlin's works directed by Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub between 1986 and 1992: Der Tod des Empedokles [The Death of Empedocles]; Schwarze Sünde [Black Sin]; and Die Antigone des Sophokles nach der Hölderlinschen Übertragung für die Bühne bearbeitet von Brecht (Suhrkamp Verlag, 1948) [Sophocles? Antigone Based on Hölderlin's Translation, as Adapted for the Stage by Brecht (published by Suhrkamp, 1948)]. At issue in all those films, and similarly in Straub and Huillet's 1974 film of Schoenberg's Moses und Aron, is the tension between the project or dream of sacrifice as a form of fusional politico-religious redemption and its very impossibility as such, attributable (among others) to the necessary subordination of film to spatio-temporal differentiation and, by that token, to what is irreducible to the visible and the invisible alike. Through careful analysis of Huillet and Straub's filmmaking strategy, the paper examines both the aesthetic and political consequences of their interruption of the logic of sacrifice, and seeks to show how the future of cinema is not reducible to the aesthetics of the spectacular but is inseparable from the promise of that which, before or beyond spectacle, has not yet ever been seen before. (shrink)

Le doute cartésien – théorique, généralisé, hyperbolique et volontaire – reprend et renforce tout d’abord les raisons sceptiques traditionnelles de douter, afin de mettre pour la première fois en doute tout le sensible, mais aussi de montrer que ces raisons buttent sur les naturae simplicissimae et la certitude de la mathesis universalis. Descartes forge alors un nouvel argument sceptique : le « Dieu qui peut tout », qui permet de penser que, lorsque je me rends à l’évidence des natures simples, (...) je peux me tromper du point de vue d’une autre rationalité et d’une évidence supérieure à la mienne. Mais le doute n’est pas seulement chez Descartes un moment et un moyen provisoires qu’il s’agirait de vaincre, et qui serait effectivement vaincu par la certitude du cogito. Puisqu’il ne dévoile aucune chose, n’énonce aucune proposition et n’engage pas la moindre prédication, le doute laisse en effet la parole ne dire qu’elle-même et se manifester ce qui y parle, c’est-à-dire celui qui parle, ego. On peut donc soutenir que c’est directement du doute, véritable premier principe cartésien, que provient l’existence. (shrink)

Advocates of veganism often assume that food enjoyment has little moral weight, because it involves mere taste pleasure. Because of the triviality of taste pleasure, they consider it obvious that harming animals to secure particular tastes is ‘unnecessary’. After discussing the elements of taste, defending the importance of taste, exploring what ‘unnecessary harm’ means, and introducing a number of taste related thought experiments, I argue that harm to animals is not always unnecessary, when what's at stake is taste. However, by (...) supplementing considerations involving necessity with considerations of character, I conclude that vegans are often, though not always, praiseworthy. (shrink)

This paper aims to make explicit the methodological conditions that should be satisfied for the Bayesian model to be used as a normative model of human probability judgment. After noticing the lack of a clear definition of Bayesianism in the psychological literature and the lack of justification for using it, a classic definition of subjective Bayesianism is recalled, based on the following three criteria: an epistemic criterion, a static coherence criterion and a dynamic coherence criterion. Then it is shown that (...) the adoption of this framework has two kinds of implications. The first one regards the methodology of the experimental study of probability judgment. The Bayesian framework creates pragmatic constraints on the methodology that are linked to the interpretation of, and the belief in, the information presented, or referred to, by an experimenter in order for it to be the basis of a probability judgment by individual participants. It is shown that these constraints have not been satisfied in the past, and the question of whether they can be satisfied in principle is raised and answered negatively. The second kind of implications consists of two limitations in the scope of the Bayesian model. They regard (1) the background of revision (the Bayesian model considers only revising situations but not updating situations), and (2) the notorious case of the null priors. In both cases Lewis’ rule is an appropriate alternative to Bayes’ rule, but its use faces the same operational difficulties. (shrink)

Science and the institutions of science are far from democratic systems,and yet they are the most democratic of regimes. This essay examinesthe demand for transparency and public participation. One can distinguishseveral levels of public influence. Their function suggests thatdecision-makers, both scientists and technocrats, are being obligedto accept and work with rules which are no longer laid down by themselves.

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)

Around people who were close to him, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe would sometimes cry out with anger: “Death is a scandal! It is intolerable!” When he died almost fourteen years ago, prematurely and af...

Little consensus exists about the effectiveness of transnational private governance in domains such as labor, the environment, or human rights. The paper builds on recent scholarship on labor standards to emphasize the role of labor agency in transnational private governance. It argues that the relationship between transnational private regulatory initiatives and labor agency depends on three competences: first, the ability of workers’ organizations to gain access to processes of employment regulation, implementation, and monitoring; second, their ability to insist on the (...) inclusion of employers and state agencies within such processes; and third, the ability of workers to effectively exercise leverage in pursuit of particular goals. The paper develops a framework, called hybrid production regime, for examining how workers’ capacity to act at the local level depends on how these three collective competences are addressed in the institutionalization of capital–labor relations between the transnational and national levels. (shrink)