Jean-François Lyotard (1924-1998) was one of the most important French philosophers of the Twentieth Century. His impact has been felt across many disciplines: sociology; cultural studies; art theory and politics. This volume presents a diverse selection of interviews, conversations and debates which relate to the five decades of his working life, both as a political militant, experimental philosopher and teacher. Including hard-to-find interviews and previously untranslated material, this is the first time that interviews with Lyotard have been presented (...) as a collection. Key concepts from Lyotard's thought – the differend, the postmodern, the immaterial – are debated and discussed across different time periods, prompted by specific contexts and provocations. In addition there are debates with other thinkers, including Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, which may be less familiar to an Anglophone audience. These debates and interviews help to contextualise Lyotard, highlighting the importance of Marx, Freud, Kant and Wittgenstein, in addition to the Jewish thought which accompanies the questions of silence, justice and presence that pervades Lyotard's thinking. (shrink)

In this book it explores science and technology, makes connections between these epistemic, cultural, and political trends, and develops profound insights into the nature of our postmodernity.

In The Differend, Lyotard subjects to scrutiny- from the particular perspective of his notion of 'differend' - the turn of all Western philosophies toward language; the decline of metaphysics; the present intellectual retreat of Marxism; the hopes raised and mostly dashed, by theory; and the growing political despair. Taking his point of departure in an analysis of what Auschwitz meant philosophically, Lyotard attempts to sketch out modes of thought for our present.

Jean-Francois Lyotard's contribution to the debate, Heidegger and 'the Jews, ' is a marked departure from the standard fare. In the first of the two interrelated essays, 'the Jews, ' Leotard quickly establishes the theme of the entire text, placing 'the Jews' in lower case, plural, and in quotation marks to represent the outsiders, the nonconformists: the artists, anarchists, blacks, homeless, Arabs, etc. --and the Jews; as an alien and dangerous disruption, they represent an 'other' to be excised from (...) the West's dream of unbounded fulfillment and development. (shrink)

This latest offering from one of the founding figures of postmodernism is a collection of fifteen "fables" that ask, in the words of Jean-Francois Lyotard, "how to live, and why?

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.

Nouvelle édition critique et traduction française annotée de la _Lettre à Marcella_ de Porphyre. Le philosophe néoplatonicien Porphyre (234-305) y adresse à sa femme un témoignage unique sur la manière dont une vie philosophique peut être conduite et se préserver. This book presents a new annotated and translated edition of neoplatonist 3rd-century Greek philosopher Porphyrius’ _Letter to Marcella_. This letter, adressed to his wife, gives a unique account on the ways and principles along which a philosophical life should be led (...) so as to perpetuate itself. (shrink)

The objective of this study is to analyze the measurability and interfirm comparability of sustainability performance through the qualitative content analysis of 12 sustainability reports of mining firms using the Global Reporting Initiative guidelines. The systematic comparison of information disclosed in 92 GRI indicators sheds light on the reasons underlying the impossibility of rigorously measuring and comparing the sustainability performance of firms from the same sector, which are supposed to be strictly following the same reporting guideline. These reasons include qualitative (...) aspects of sustainability, lack of compliance with GRI protocols, indicator contingency, ambiguous or incomplete information, data heterogeneity, and report opacity. The study makes it possible to return to the very notion of sustainability, its meaning, and flexible application by organizations. The results are discussed from three different theoretical perspectives, each of which proposes possible and complementary explanations of the main findings. (shrink)

Using a latent variable modelling strategy we study individual differences in patterns of answers to the selection task and to the truth table task. Specifically we investigate the prediction of mental model theory according to which the individual tendency to select the false consequent card (in the selection task) is negatively correlated with the tendency to judge the false antecedent cases as irrelevant (in the truth table task). We fit a psychometric model to two large samples ( N = 486, (...) twice), and find no evidence for this negative correlation. We examine which of the assumptions of the model theory must be amended to accommodate our findings. (shrink)

In The Differend, Lyotard subjects to scrutiny- from the particular perspective of his notion of 'differend' - the turn of all Western philosophies toward language; the decline of metaphysics; the present intellectual retreat of Marxism; the hopes raised and mostly dashed, by theory; and the growing political despair. Taking his point of departure in an analysis of what Auschwitz meant philosophically, Lyotard attempts to sketch out modes of thought for our present.

Durante la vida de Newton, su Óptica se publicó en sucesivas ediciones. En esta medida, fijar una versión definitiva del texto es problemático, por lo cual se hace necesario recurrir no sólo al texto sino también a los contextos y a la intertextualidad. El artículo plantea las dificultades de las lecturas tradicionales de la Óptica (como respuesta a teorías de la visión y la luz precedentes y como parte de la físico-teología inglesa) y argumenta a favor de una lectura teológica (...) del tratado, desde la epistemología de la Óptica y del entusiasmo religioso que Newton rechazó categóricamente. Consecuencia de esta lectura es una reformulación del texto, el contexto y la intertextualidad que hacen comprensible la Óptica de Newton. (shrink)

This book argues that the science of reasoning will prove most useful if focused on studying what human reasoning does best - understanding people. Bonnefon argues that humanity's unique reasoning abilities developed in order to handle the complexities of cooperative social life. Accordingly, human beings became exquisite students of the minds of other people to predict the kind of decisions they make, and assess their character. In particular, this volume explores the inferences humans make about the moral character of others, (...) how they delude themselves about their own moral character, and the ways in which they can see through the delusions of others. In conclusion, the book considers how to leverage the power of human reasoning in order to sustain democratic life. This work will interest scholars and students working in fields including theory of mind, decision-making, moral cognition, critical thinking, experimental philosophy, and behavioural economics, as well as policy makers interested in how reasoning impacts our political understanding. (shrink)

L’œuvre du criminologue italien Cesare Lombroso illustre le fait que la médecine, au xixe siècle, n’est pas seulement une technique thérapeutique mais qu’elle propose bien plutôt une véritable « vision médicale du monde ». La médecine entend résoudre définitivement les problèmes philosophiques traditionnels. Pour Lombroso les références à la médecine ou à la mesure sont des moyens de valider des thèses matérialistes mais surtout ultra-déterministes, et d’en tirer des conséquences politiques et sociales.The works of the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso illustrates (...) the fact that medicine, in the 19th century, is not only a therapeutic technique but, first and foremost, that it suggests a genuine « medical view of the world ». It is assumed that medicine would solve, once and for all, all the traditional philosophical problems. Lombroso’s references to medicine or measurement serve as evidence for materialistic and ultra-deterministic philosophical theses, and enable one to draw their political and social implications. (shrink)

« Sir, you shall present before her The Nine Worthies... as concerning some entertainment of time, some show in the posterior of this day... »« There’s no business like show business ! »Georges Duhamel voyait dans le cinéma naissant un divertissement d’ilotes. Le même mépris a pu accabler les pièces de Shakespeare dont la rudesse de langue chagrine les esprits éclairés depuis..

First recorded in the 14th century, the analogy of spit-roast meat argues that expecting the Sun to rotate around a strictly immobile Earth would be just as ludicrous as trying to move the fire around the roasting meat. On the contrary, it should be the Earth that spins upon itself in order to glean, from all possible angles, all the benefits of the Sun, just as it is the meat’s responsibility to turn on the spit before the motionless fire for (...) it to be perfectly cooked on all sides. Aimed at demonstrating, in geocentricism, the plausibility of the rotation of the Earth and, in heliocentrism, at supporting the physical reality of this terrestrial rotation, nowadays this analogy barely elicits more than an amused, or even condescending, smile. However, its continued long-term existence and its frequency of use — from the 14th to the 19th century, we found it mentioned by no less than 45 different authors — incited us to finally pay attention to it. We then noticed that beyond its explicitly cosmological scope, it raises, in its own way, the question of the purpose of the natural world: had the latter been conceived based upon humankind, then it is normal, despite what this analogy advocates, that the Sun is at the service of something more important than itself by rotating, to the profit of humankind, around the Earth; conversely, since such an infringement of the rule of common sense, as illustrated by this analogy, can neither be justified nor tolerated, it is up to the Earth to move around the Sun. Tracing the vicissitudes of this analogy, over 6 centuries, is thus not only about reconstructing the largely forgotten history of a presently obsolete analogy, but also about discovering the deeper meaning, henceforth incomprehensible, behind it. In describing how this meaning became progressively lost, one can finally pro­vide an understanding of why, in the present day, we are no longer capable of more than an amused smile when happening upon it! (shrink)

resumo O presente artigo investiga as relações entre individualidade e espírito objetivo no quadro da filosofia política hegeliana. Retomando o significado mediador contido na idéia de “vida ética”, procura-se apontar uma alternativa à interpretação de que Hegel seria partidário de um institucionalismo forte, que dissolveria o indivíduo quando de sua institucionalização sócio-política. palavras-chave vida ética – subjetividade – indivíduo – instituição – linguagem universal.

Personality signatures are sets of if-then rules describing how a given person would feel or act in a specific situation. These rules can be used as the major premise of a deductive argument, but they are mostly processed for social cognition purposes; and this common usage is likely to leak into the way they are processed in a deductive reasoning context. It is hypothesised that agreement with a Modus Ponens argument featuring a personality signature as its major premise is affected (...) by the reasoner's own propensity to display this personality signature. To test this prediction, Modus Ponens arguments were constructed from conditionally phrased items extracted from available personality scales. This allowed recording of (a) agreement with the conclusion of these arguments, and (b) the reasoner's propensity to display the personality signature, using as a proxy this reasoner's score on the personality scale without the items used in the argument. Three experiments ( N = 256, N = 318, N = 298) applied this procedure to Fairness, Responsive Joy, and Self-Control. These experiments yielded very comparable effects, establishing that a reasoner's propensity to display a given personality signature determines this reasoner's agreement with the conclusion of a Modus Ponens argument featuring the personality signature. (shrink)

Dans les débats sur la situation des religions en Europe, la pensée de Jürgen Habermas reste incontournable. Depuis le choc de 11 septembre 2001, celle-ci a largement évolué pour accorder une place plus grande aux demandes de reconnaissance des religions dans l’espace public. Pour autant, l’éthique de la discussion doit aujourd’hui être interrogée à nouveaux frais face aux recrudescences des fondamentalismes religieux et laïcistes.

In this paper, we look for the relevance of chaos in the well-known Hicks-Samuelson's oscillator model investigating the endogenous fluctuations of the national income between two limits: full employment income and under-employment income. We compute the Lyapunov exponent, via Monte- Carlo simulations, to detect chaos in the evolution of the income between both limits. In the case of positive Lyapunov exponent and large values of the parameter (i.e. marginal propensity to consume and technical coefficient for capital), the evolution of income (...) is seen to be chaotic. The model also may contain a quasi-periodic attractor that can be chaotic or not. (shrink)

This translation of Lyotard's first book, La phenomenologie (first publication in 1954; the translation is from the 10th edition of 1986, Presses Universitaires de France) supplies an important link to Lyotard's more recent work.

Dominique Janicaud, qui nous a quittés brutalement en août 2002, à la veille de son départ à la retraite, était né le 14 novembre 1937 à Paris. Élève d’André Jacob en Terminale, puis de Jean Brun en khâgne au lycée Lakanal, il entre à l’ENS de la rue d’Ulm en 1958. Agrégé de philosophie en 1961, il est professeur à l’ENI de Caen et à l’École militaire de Saint-Cyr..

In this paper, we consider how the four key team emergent states for team learning identified by Bell, Kozlowski and Blawath (2012), namely psychological safety, goal orientation, cohesion, and efficacy, operate as a system that produces the team’s learning climate (TLC). Using the language of systems dynamics, we conceptualize TLC as a stock that rises and falls as a joint function of the psychological safety, goal orientation, cohesion, and efficacy that exists in the team. The systems approach highlights aspects of (...) TLC management that are traditionally overlooked, such as the simultaneous influence of and feedback between the four team emergent states and the inertia that TLC can have as a result. The management of TLC becomes an issue of controlling the system rather than each state as an independent force, especially because changing one part of the system will also affect other parts in sometimes unintended and undesirable ways. Thus the value is to offer a systems view on the leadership function of team monitoring with regards to team emergent states, which we term team state monitoring. This view offers promising avenues for future research as well as practical wisdom. It can help leaders remember that TLC represents an equilibrium that needs balance, in addition to pointing to the various ways in which they can influence such equilibrium. (shrink)