Issues of immigrant political incorporation and transnational politics have drawn increased interest among migration scholars. This paper contributes to debates in this field by examining the role of networks, partnerships and collaborations of immigrant community organizations as mechanisms for immigrant political participation both locally and transnationally. These issues are addressed through an ethnographic study of the Hispanic Development Council, an umbrella advocacy organization representing settlement agencies serving Latin American immigrants in Toronto, Canada. Analysis of HDC’s three sets of networks (at (...) the community, city and transnational levels) from a geographic and relational approach demonstrates the potentials and limits of nonprofit sector partnerships as mechanisms and concrete spaces for immigrant mobilization, empowerment, and social action in a context of neoliberal governance. It is argued that a combination of partnerships with a range of both state and non-state actors and at multiple scales can be significant in enabling nonprofit organizations to advance the interests of immigrant, minority and disadvantaged communities. (shrink)

In this article, we provide a philosophical and ethical reflection about quiet quitting as a tool of political resistance for nurses. Quiet quitting is a trend that gained traction on TikTok in July 2022 and emerged as a method of resistance among employees facing increasing demands from their workplaces at the detriment of their personal lives. It is characterised by employees refraining from exceeding the basic requirements outlined in their job descriptions. To understand why quiet quitting can be a tool (...) of resistance useful for nurses, we first draw on Frédéric Gros' concept of ‘surplus obedience’ and Michael Lipsky's notion of ‘routines and simplification strategies’ to highlight the ethical implications associated with nurses engaging in and sustaining harmful systems, such as the neoliberal healthcare system. Leaning again on Gros, we then propose that ‘obedience a minima’, a concept akin to quiet quitting, can serve as a method of ethical nursing resistance. After describing what the concept entails, we provide a discussion emphasising the potential of obedience a minima as a one method, among many, that can be leveraged by nurses to challenge and resist a system that prioritises financial considerations over patient wellbeing. The article concludes by reflecting on the ethical nature of resistance in the context of nursing, that is the act of obeying oneself and refraining from participating in systems that are detrimental to the lives of Others. (shrink)

This special issue is related to the 6th World Congress on the Square of Opposition which took place at the Orthodox Academy of Crete in November 2018. In this introductory paper we explain the context of the event and the topics discussed.

This paper explores the origins of the term "causa sine qua non" used by Durand de Saint-Pourçain to describe the role of material things in knowledge. I show that its technical meaning comes from the Stoics and was transmitted to the Middle Ages by Boethius' commentary on Cicero's Topics. The expression "sine qua non" here does not have the ordinary and restricted meaning of "indispensable", "necessary condition", which can also apply to direct, per se causes of an effect. In the (...) present context, sine qua non causes do not act on the effect in question, either as concomitant, secondary, or instrumental causes, or as remote causes. They act only on that which hinders the actualization of a potentiality, in order to remove that obstacle. For example, the removal of a support that prevented something from falling does not act on that thing, nor does it add anything to its tendency to fall; it simply enables that thing to exercise its own actualization. Similarly, in cognitive processes, external things do not impose anything on the soul, but simply give it the opportunity to actualize its faculties of its own accord. I situate Durand's use of this form of causality in the context of late 13th/early 14th century theories of cognition, among several other attempts to find an alternative theory to the standard Aristotelian model and to maintain the pure activity of the soul with respect to the body. (shrink)

Cet article porte sur les caractéristiques de la question et de l’interrogation. Dans une perspective énonciative, il présente les différents types de structuration, et leurs implications énonciatives et pragmatiques – modales et illocutoires. Il pose la question de la modalité épistémique et de sa pertinence, et de la plurimodalité sous-jacente à la motivation des questions et de l’interrogation. Il observe de quelle façon se construit la force illocutoire d’une question, et de quelle façon elle se neutralise dans les percontatives. Il (...) met en évidence la relation inter-énonciative et de quelle façon elle est exploitée pour solliciter le destinataire. (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)

Worldwide populations are aging with economic development as a result of public health initiatives and advances in therapeutic discoveries. Since 1850, life expectancy has advanced by 1 year for every four. Accompanying this change is the rapid development of anti‐aging science. There are three schools of thought in the field of aging science. One perspective is the life course approach, which considers that aging is a good and natural process to be embraced as a necessary and positive aspect of life, (...) where the aim is to improve the quality of existing lifespan and “compress” morbidity. Another view is that aging is undesirable, and that rejuvenation and indeed immortality are possible since the biological basis of aging is understood, and therefore, strategies are possible for engineering negligible senescence. Finally, a hybrid approach is that life span can be extended by anti‐aging medicines but with uncertain effects on health. While these advances offer much promise, the ethical perspectives are seldom discussed in cross‐disciplinary settings. This article discusses some of the key ethical issues arising from recent advances in biogerontology. (shrink)

Résumé Dans Nécessité ou contingence, l’un des plus grands livres de Jules Vuillemin, on découvre que, bien avant les premiers calculs « réussis » au XVIIe siècle sur les probabilités, un terrain était mis en place pour les penser fondamentalement selon les divisions mêmes qui traverseront leur notion jusqu’à notre époque. Sortis de leur gangue historique, les problèmes sont élevés à quelque pureté logique. Une chose surprend alors : ainsi dégagés de toute situation réelle, les thèmes probabilistes consonnent avec des (...) problèmes éthiques qui se posaient aux auteurs à chaque époque, mais aussi dans les années 1980 aux hommes qui s’affairaient aux problèmes de bioéthique. Vuillemin reste silencieux sur ce type d’application. Redoutable critique des positions « existentialiste », on le voit, paradoxalement, sous l’effet de sa réflexion touchant les probabilités, s’accorder avec Merleau-Ponty sur des positions importantes, alors que cette réflexion est totalement absente de l'oeuvre de son prédécesseur au Collège de France. (shrink)

The medieval notion of instrumental cause is not limited to what we call today “instruments” or “tools.” It extends way beyond the realm of technology and includes natural entities, for instance, the accidents by which a substance acts on another substance, sensible species in the air acting on a visual faculty, sacraments, bodily organs, and sometimes creatures with respect to God’s action. In all these cases, instrumental causes, like secondary causes in general, are subordinated to a principal cause and contribute (...) to its action and effects. However, the manner in which they do so makes them different from regular secondary causes, and the specifics are not easy to pinpoint. At the occasion of discussions about creation ex nihilo and sacraments, John Duns Scotus challenges Thomas Aquinas’s theory of instrumental causality. Whereas Aquinas does not strongly distinguish between artifacts and natural agents, and postulates a complex superposition of layers of causation, Scotus offers a novel view that clearly separates artificial instrumentality and natural instrumentality, and in both cases explains causation with great economy. Scotus’s in-depth discussion has far-reaching implications. It completely transforms the understanding of instrumental causality in general. (shrink)

Dans cette contribution, nous examinons, dans la perspective de la grammaire générative version Principles & Parameters, l’architecture des interrogatives, en traitant successivement des questions directes ouvertes et fermées, puis des questions imbriquées, après de brèves considérations théoriques permettant de saisir les niveaux de construction et les différents mouvements mis en jeu. Nous concluons par un très bref aperçu des mêmes structures analysées dans la perspective un peu plus récente du Split-CP, où les projections sont multipliées dans la périphérie gauche des (...) phrases. (shrink)

La conception malebranchiste de la liberté est originale. Malebranche ne croit pas en une liberté d’indifférence absolue, c'est-à-dire en une capacité d’opérer un choix indépendamment de toute motivation. Il ne croit pas non plus que nous puissions indifféremment choisir entre deux motivations de force inégale : au moment où on se détermine, le bien le plus grand (du moins selon l’apparence) l’emporte. La liberté réside seulement dans le fait que l’on n’est pas obligé de se déterminer : nous pouvons toujours (...) suspendre notre consentement. Cette conception est exposée à des objections que Pierre Bayle a formulées et qui tentent de la mettre en contradiction avec d’autres thèses de Malebranche : son occasionalisme, sa théorie de la création continuée, l’obscurité de l’âme à elle-même, sa théologie des voies de l’action divine. Nous discuterons ces objections et verrons si Malebranche est en mesure de leur résister. (shrink)

La présente contribution analyse les deux risques auxquels sont confrontés l’administration pénitentiaire et son personnel, les surveillants notamment, dans leur lutte contre la radicalisation : le risque de la protection insuffisante de la société face à des conversions non repérées et susceptibles d’aboutir à des actes violents de type terroriste, d’une part, et, d’autre part, le risque du signalement systématique pouvant conduire au renforcement du sentiment de discrimination chez certains détenus et, paradoxalement, constituer un terrain favorable au développement de la (...) radicalisation violente. Pour dépasser ces deux risques, il est proposé, à partir de données de terrain, une application équilibrée du principe de précaution qui devrait reposer sur une meilleure formation des personnels par la pratique, entre autres, de l’interprétation croisée. (shrink)

We study here equiformity, the standard identity criterion for sentences. This notion was put forward by Lesniewski, mentioned by Tarski and defined explicitly by Presburger. At the practical level this criterion seems workable but if the notion of sentence is taken as a fundamental basis for logic and mathematics, it seems that this principle cannot be maintained without vicious circle. It seems also that equiformity has some semantical features ; maybe this is not so clear for individual signs but sentences (...) are often considered as meaningful combinations of signs. If meaning has to play a role, we are thus maybe in no better position than when dealing with identity criterion for propositions. In formal logic, one speaks rather about well-formed formulas, but closed formulas are called sentences because they are meaningful in the sense that they can be true or false. Formulas look better like mathematical objects than material inscriptions and equiformity does not seem to apply to them. Various congruencies can be considered as identities between formulas and in particular "to have the same logical form". One can say that the objects of study of logic are rather logical forms than sentences conceived as material inscriptions. (shrink)

Presentation of the Excellence Award at the Fonds Ricœur’s Summer Workshop 2019.

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)

This volume explores African philosophies’ expression of transitional acts where thought interacts with history and proposes solutions to problems. Influential thinkers from both sides of the Atlantic engage with the realm of criticism and imagination, public spaces in Africa, and the relationship between historical politics and poetics.

This study is the foundation of a new interpretation of the introduction and the three first books of Diophantus’s Arithmetica, one that opens the way to a historically correct contextualization of the work. Its purpose, as indicated in the title, is to renew the traditional discussion on the methods of problem-solving used by Diophantus, through the detailed exposition of a new analytical framework that aims to give an account of the coherence and progressive nature of the material included in the (...) three first books of the Arithmetica. One outcome of this new ‘toolbox’ is a new conspectus of the problems and solutions contained in the latter, which is presented in appendix. The first part of the article clarifies, as a necessary preliminary, the key notions and terminology underlying our analysis. Among these new concepts is the notion of “method of invention,” which accounts in general for any way, by which “positions” (hypostaseis) are used in the Arithmetica. The next part proposes a complete inventory of the various methods of invention found in the three first books. Finally the last part presents the above mentioned conspectus and proposes a series of preliminary conclusions that can be drawn from it. (shrink)

Deleuze, même s’il n’en fait presque jamais mention, connaît très bien la pensée de Nicolas de Cues, qu’il a abordée sans doute par la médiation de Maurice de Gandillac, son directeur de thèse. Le thème où l’influence du Cusain se marque le plus clairement est celui de l’Idiot. L’idiot pour Deleuze est l’homme qui philosophe avec les seules ressources de la raison naturelle, sans révélation ni recours à des traditions livresques. Or, dans la conception que Deleuze se fait de la (...) pensée, l’événement vient sortir l’esprit humain de sa torpeur native et l’invite à faire face à de l’inédit, vis-à-vis duquel la pensée est, au départ, démunie. En ce sens, penser véritablement, « c’est faire l’idiot ». L’article examine aussi quelques thématiques connexes : la philosophie comme production de concepts, la nature du concept constitué de notes caractéristiques, le statut du monde et celui des images dans ses études sur le cinéma. Dans ces différents champs, l’influence de Nicolas de Cues sur Deleuze est indéniable. (shrink)

Cet article revient sur le rapport complexe qu’ont entretenu Marx puis les marxistes à la nation et à l’internationalisme. Après un bref examen des positions de Marx, celles de plusieurs théoriciens et responsables politiques, notamment Otto Bauer, Rosa Luxemburg, Staline, et Gramsci, sont exposées. C’est enfin aux évolutions les plus récentes, notamment à travers la question de l’Union européenne et les débats qu’elle suscite, que s’attache principalement la dernière partie de l’article. La thèse centrale est de montrer que la nation (...) n’a jamais été clairement définie ni fait l’objet d’un consensus dans les traditions marxistes et socialistes. Il remarque notamment l’évolution des trente dernières années : après une période de relativisation du fait national, plusieurs courants politiques ont cherché à se réapproprier la nation, sans proposer pour autant une voie qui fasse consensus. (shrink)

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)

La notion d’exclamation contient à la fois l’idée d’extériorisation et d’intensité. Une première observation aboutit à l’hypothèse suivante : l’exclamation se caractérise par un surcroît d’expressivité qui donne de la saillance à un énoncé ou à un fragment d’énoncé. La motivation de l’exclamation peut se trouver en amont, en aval, et/ou à l’intérieur d’un énoncé. L’exclamation est compatible avec tout type d’énoncé, comme modulation énonciative marquée qui s’oppose toujours à une variante non exclamative. On s’interroge sur l’affinité entre exclamation et (...) émotion ; entre exclamation et hiatus par rapport à une attente ; entre exclamation et haut degré, entre exclamation et pluri-modalité. On réexamine les énoncés exclamatifs du corpus, apostrophes, interjections, focalisation, énoncés injonctifs, déontiques, optatifs, assertifs, appréciatifs, structures exclamatives. (shrink)