This text is a set of reflections about a book that had been translated in French, published of late and that collected an article and a book of ethics written by J. Harsanyi. Harsanyi’s aim was to understand and make understood the ethical considerations implied or supposed by game theory; whether its authors were aware of that or not. He does it by the means of a bundle of theses, the ones included in Kant’s works -provided they were criticized enough-, (...) the others in Smith’s works and others again in Bayes, whose way of practicing mathematics is clearly perceived by Harsanyi as linked to an explicitly utilitarian philosophy, but the affinity of which we have recognized as having acquaintance with some considerations of Montaigne in his _ Essays _. So, our own aim was to place Harsinyi’s work in a longer tradition than the Kantian and English-speaking ones as Harsanyi probably believed and suggested to have believed it sufficient with regard to the exclusivity of his references. This c... (shrink)

Eranos Tagung 2020 “Rinascere : la vita minacciata e la passione della vita” Casa Eranos, Ascona-Moscia, 3-5 settembre 2020 Prof. Jean-Jacques Wunenburger 4 settembre 2020 - Philosophie – Nouvel article.

We applaud Boyer's attempt to ground the psychology of ownership partly in a cooperative logic. In this commentary, we propose to go further and ground the psychology of ownership solely in a cooperative logic. The predictions of bargaining theory, we argue, completely contradict the actual features of ownership intuitions. Ownership is only about the calculation of mutually beneficial, reciprocal contracts.

Résumé La linguistique du texte a pour tâche la théorisation et la description des opérations de segmentation qui délimitent des unités de rang et de longueur différentes, et la théorisation et la description des différents effets de continuité créés par les opérations de liage de ces unités. À la structuration phrastique-périodique par la morpho-syntaxe et la prosodie à l’oral, la ponctuation à l’écrit, le palier micro-textuel ajoute six facteurs de texture transphrastique : les liages référentiels et isotopiques, les liages du (...) signifiant, l’ensemble des phénomènes de connexion, les relations d’implicitation, la cohésion énonciative et la cohésion illocutoire. À partir de trois textes, cet article illustre systématiquement et détaille ces six formes de liage transphrastique des unités textuelles de base. (shrink)

The Marx-Bakunin Conflict in the First International : A Confrontation of Political Practices. The conflict between Marx and Bakunin within the First International was more than a merely political opposition. It was in fact a conflict about the very status of the political. Accused of being apolitical, Bakunin replied by declaring his anti-statist stance, while at the same time misinterpreting the Marxian political project. The position he defended within the International prefigured the anarcho-syndicalist subsumption of the political within syndicalism. In (...) return, the opposition helped to clarify the Marxian conception of worker organisations. Finally, the conflict would enable Bakunin to identify the dangers of bureaucratisation to which such organisations are prone, while Marx, for his part, sought to conceive of a type of political action which was specific to the proletariat. The conflict thus enables us to characterise Marx and Bakunin as two types of militant engagement. (shrink)

An important topic in the evolution of language is the kinds of grammars that can be computed by humans and other animals. Fitch and Hauser () approached this question by assessing the ability of different species to learn 2 grammars, (AB)n and An Bn. An Bn was taken to indicate a phrase structure grammar, eliciting a center‐embedded pattern. (AB)n indicates a grammar whose strings entail only local relations between the categories of constituents. F&H's data suggest that humans, but not tamarin (...) monkeys, learn an An Bn grammar, whereas both learn a simpler (AB)n grammar (). In their experiments, the A constituents were syllables pronounced by a female voice, whereas the B constituents were syllables pronounced by a male voice. This study proposes that what characterizes the An Bn exemplars is the distributional regularities of the syllables pronounced by either a male or a female rather than the underlying, more abstract patterns. This article replicates F&H's data and reports new controls using either categories similar to those in F&H or less salient ones. This article shows that distributional regularities explain the data better than grammar learning. Indeed, when familiarized with An Bn exemplars, participants failed to discriminate A3 B2 and A2 B3 from An Bn items, missing the crucial feature that the number of As must equal the number of Bs. Therefore, contrary to F&H, this study concludes that no syntactic rules implementing embedded nonadjacent dependencies were learned in these experiments. The difference between human linguistic abilities and the putative precursors in monkeys deserves further exploration. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Nietzscheforschung Jahrgang: 23 Heft: 1 Seiten: 111-130.

Oyeyemi's critique of racism in the United States focuses on the visual binary between whiteness and blackness, which she shows working in multiple ways to warp and distort relationships. In the Whitman family, children are valued (or not valued) according to how their skin color registers on a scale determined by white superiority. Oyeyemi's approach to racism takes the circuitous route of retelling the fairy tale of “Little Snow White,” thus calling into her own narrative a foundational text of Western (...) cultural aesthetics which links beauty to whiteness. (Snow White, whose skin is “white as snow,” is “fairest in the land.”) Rather than narrate a new version of the fairy tale, Oyeyemi separates out its elements – magic mirror, evil stepmother, and beautiful white stepdaughter – and develops each into a new thematic configuration. My analysis focuses on the subtle ways that Oyeyemi's reshaping of mirror, evil stepmother, and innocent beautiful young girl exposes the harms to children inflicted by allegiance to a (false) structure of visible difference between white skin and black skin. (shrink)

Certains événements de vie peuvent devenir traumatiques chez un sujet lorsqu’ils s’inscrivent dans les singularités de son lien de filiation : incertitude paternelle, infertilité, coïncidence mort/naissance (enfant posthume), dernier d’une lignée...

1. L'Être et le néant. Critique de la raison dialectique.

William C. Hackett s English translation of Jean Wahl s "Existence humaine et transcendence" (1944) brings back to life an all-but-forgotten book that provocatively explores the philosophical concept of transcendence. Based on what Emmanuel Levinas called Wahl s famous lecture from 1937, "Existence humaine et transcendence" captured a watershed moment of European philosophy. Included in the book are Wahl's remarkable original lecture, the debate that ensued, with significant contributions by Gabriel Marcel and Nicolai Berdyaev, as well as letters submitted (...) on the occasion by Heidegger, Levinas, Jaspers, and other famous figures from that era. Concerned above all with the ineradicable felt value of human experience by which any philosophical thesis is measured, Wahl makes a daring clarification of the concept of transcendence and explores its repercussions through a masterly appeal to many (often surprising) places within the entire history of Western thought. Apart from its intrinsic philosophical significance as a discussion of the concepts of being, the absolute, and transcendence, Wahl's work is valuable insofar as it became a focal point for a great many other European intellectuals. Hackett has provided an annotated introduction to orient readers to this influential work of twentieth-century French philosophy and to one of its key figures. "Augmented by William C. Hackett's comprehensive introduction to Jean Wahl and his summary of Wahl's seminal "Human Existence and Transcendence," we now have Wahl's most important writings in English. The book presents the well-known ideas of transascendence and transdescendence and, in so doing, highlights the relevance of Wahl's 'philosophy of transcendence' today. Remarkable for its anticipations of later French thought, Wahl's work provides a key to much of what remains hidden in the tradition of twentieth-century French thought." Leonard Richard Lawlor, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Philosophy, Penn State University". (shrink)

Erst kommt das Leben, dann der Tod, denken viele. Doch schon das Verweilen vor einem Grab eröffnet einen Dialog, der das Band zwischen dem Vergangenen und Gegenwärtigen spürbar werden lässt: Das Band der Kommunikation zwischen den Toten und den Lebenden scheint unzerreißbar. Der Tod? der eigene und der der anderen - ist eine Kategorie des Lebens, die jeden von uns zur Auseinandersetzung zwingt.0Das Buch von Jean-Pierre Wils ist seit langer Zeit der erste, großangelegte Versuch einer Lehre vom Tod, einer (...) Thanatologie, die ein umfassendes Panorama entfaltet: Todesarten, Todesangst, Todeszeitpunkt werden zum Thema ebenso wie die Frage nach der Unsterblichkeit, dem angemessenen Trösten und den Riten der Bestattung. Angesichts des Todes kommt die Philosophie an ihre Grenze? darum holt der Autor der Philosophie eine?Weggefährtin auf der Erkundungsfahrt zum Tod? an die Seite, nämlich die Literatur. So wird das Buch zu einem einmaligen Grenzgang zwischen Philosophie und Literatur, zwischen Reflexion und Narration und beglaubigt den Satz von Saint-Exupéry:?Es wird aussehen, als wäre ich tot, und das wird nicht wahr sein.? (shrink)

The ontology of Stoic causes and effects was clearly anti-platonic, since the Stoics did not want to admit that any incorporeal entity could have an effect. However, by asserting that any cause was the cause of an incorporeal effect, they returned to Plato’s syntax of causes in the Sophist, whose doctrine of the asymmetry of nouns and verbs identified names with the agents and verbs with the actions. The ontological asymmetry of causes and effects blocked the multiplication of causes by (...) reducing it to an efficient cause. However, while ontology and syntax merged into the doctrine of the effect as an incorporeal predicate, this was further complicated by a relational description of a cause as the effect of a body on a body and by the distinction of causes. Since there are different kinds of causes, not every kind of cause has the same syntactical role in the nexus of causal relations. This refinement of the original syntactical model presumably allowed the Stoics to give a more coherent view of human action than is usually assumed. (shrink)

En 1984, Michel Foucault met toutes ses recherches sous le signe de l’histoire de la vérité qui, à l’époque de ses premiers cours, avait pour cible la volonté de vérité « comme formidable machinerie destinée à exclure ». Il nous invite ainsi à comparer les deux versants, critique et positif, de cette histoire. Sont-ils seulement complémentaires? De la critique de la volonté de vérité à la parrêsia, y a-t-il continuité ou rupture?

The debate between Ursin (2019) and Wilkinson and colleagues (2019) in this issue of The American Journal of Bioethics underscores the long-standing theoretical controversy about the equivalence of...

Prosocial compensation is a corporate social responsibility practice that involves donating money to a charitable cause on behalf of customers as a means to compensate them for their loss after a service failure. In order to determine the effectiveness of PC, we carried out three experiments while also comparing its effectiveness within private and public settings. Experiment 1 focused on the signaling effects of communicating the promise to offer PC to potential customers in the event of service failure. Results show (...) that, in both private and public settings, PC has positive effects on corporate image, credibility, and word-of-mouth intent. More significantly, PC improved one’s CSR image, whereas more tangible compensation, such as a gift voucher, did not. Experiments 2A and 2B focused on the effects of offering PC after a service failure on perceptions of justice. Results show that PC contributes to perceived distributive justice, procedural justice, and post-recovery satisfaction in both private and public settings. Our study showed that PC could be a relevant new CSR practice for organizations wanting to enhance theirs CSR image while contributing to fulfilling their ethical and philanthropic CSR responsibilities. We discuss the implications of our findings and offer several avenues for follow-up research on this initial study on PC. (shrink)

This view encouraged theorists to consider artistic geniuses the high-priests of humanity, creators of works that reveal the invisible essence of the world."--BOOK JACKET.

L’article discute l’hypothèse selon laquelle les Anciens percevaient certaines émotions comme typiquement « féminines » ou « masculines », afin de restituer à la fabrication conjointe du genre et des émotions son épaisseur chronologique, de la Grèce archaïque à la Rome impériale. L’étude attire l’attention sur les comportements sociaux face à l’émotion, sur l’importance de la vie en cité et sur l’impact du discours des orateurs antiques dans la (dé)construction de la dimension genrée des émotions.

This book offers a solution for the problem of structure and agency in sociological theory by developing a new pair of fundamental concepts: metric and nonmetric. Nonmetric forms, arising in a crowd made out of innumerable individuals, correspond to social groups that divide the many individuals in the crowd into insiders and outsiders. Metric forms correspond to congested zones like traffic jams on a highway: individuals are constantly entering and leaving these zones so that they continue to exist, even though (...) the individuals passing through them change. Building from these concepts, we can understand “agency” as a requirement for group identity and group membership, thus associating it with nonmetric forms, and “structure” as a building-up effect following the accumulation of metric forms. This reveals the contradiction between structure and agency to be a case of forced perspective, leaving us victim to an optical illusion. (shrink)

Modern science has qualified human beings as homo sapiens. Is there a serious scientific theory backing this nomenclature? And can we proclaim ourselves as wise? The classical rational animals characterization has apparently the same syntactic form but it is not working exactly in the same way. Moreover the semantics behind is more appropriate, encompassing a pivotal ambiguity. In the second part of the paper, we further delve into this ambiguity, relating rationality with three fundamental features of these creatures: ability to (...) laugh, sexuality and transformation. (shrink)

Après le succès du Courage de la nuance, Jean Birnbaum poursuit son enquête sur l''héroïsme du doute' avec une réflexion personnelle et politique sur l'enfance. Dans ce nouveau livre, il montre comment la naissance d'un enfant fait vaciller toute certitude. Ce qui l'intéresse, c'est une expérience banale mais qui a peu attiré l'attention des penseurs: devenir le parent d'un enfant, c'est constater ses effets sur notre rapport aux autres et sur notre vision politique des choses. Si, depuis Socrate, le (...) philosophe est celui qui dynamite nos préjugés, alors le bébé s'impose comme le plus subversif des philosophes. Cette fois encore, Jean Birnbaum mêle réflexions et émotions. Il se tourne vers des auteurs aimés (Hannah Arendt, Georges Bernanos, Roland Barthes, Rosa Luxemburg...) et puise dans sa propre expérience. À l'heure où le mouvement 'No kids' dénonce la procréation comme une catastrophe intime et écologique, ce livre proclame la solidarité essentielle entre espoir d'une société meilleure et promesse de la vie donnée, transmise, sauvée ; il n'y a pas d'émancipation sans générations, pas d'avenir sans enfants, pas de fraternité sans bébés."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

This paper presents the result of researching the mythical conceptions of history in the West, which shed light on numerous cultural and political data that entered the sphere of the imaginary reflected in religions, utopias, and finally, in art. The study is structured in three parts, namely: the three scenarios of universal history; the significant myths of great narratives; the problems of the myth of unique time. These aspects bring into question and demonstrate the importance of the imaginary for the (...) understanding of cosmological and anthropological time. (shrink)

Graphical AbstractCurrent differentiation therapies for cancer may not be effective because it might not be enough to only use molecules targeting chromatin remodelers. It may also be necessary to stabilize the re-expressed genes to convert malignant cells into benign ones.

Les auteurs ont étudié les médiations réalisées dans le cadre d’une association, durant une année, en dirigeant leur recherche sur les attentes des parents séparés, et les motifs et conditions de mise en place de la médiation. La moitié de ces médiations sont imposées par le juge aux Affaires familiales, mais cependant ce n’est pas le fait qu’elle soit ordonnée ou le choix volontaire d’une médiation qui permettent la réussite de ce processus, mais bien l’adhésion des personnes qui viennent. Une (...) partie de ces médiations ont été consacrées à la question de la résidence alternée. L’enjeu central du partage de la vie de l’enfant justifie souvent – pour les juges comme pour les parties – l’utilisation de ce processus dont le résultat ne se compte pas en nombre d’accords conclus mais en possibilité de débloquer les situations. La médiation permet d’ajuster les attentes, et non des motifs « judiciarisés », et de les travailler – de faire en quelque sorte des compromis « sur mesure ». (shrink)