Thick terms and concepts, such as honesty and cruelty, are at the heart of a variety of debates in philosophy of language and metaethics. Central to these debates is the question of how the descriptive and evaluative components of thick concepts are related and whether they can be separated from each other. So far, no empirical data on how thick terms are used in ordinary language has been collected to inform these debates. In this paper, we present the first empirical (...) study, designed to investigate whether the evaluative component of thick concepts is communicated as part of the semantic meaning or by means of conversational implicatures. While neither the semantic nor the pragmatic view can fully account for the use of thick terms in ordinary language, our results do favour the semanticist interpretation: the evaluation of a thick concept is only slightly easier to cancel than semantically entailed content. We further discovered a polarity effect, demonstrating that how easily an evaluation can be cancelled depends on whether the thick term is of positive or negative polarity. (shrink)

How evaluative are legal texts? Do legal scholars and jurists speak a more descriptive or perhaps a more evaluative language? In this paper, we present the results of a corpus study in which we examined the use of evaluative language in both the legal domain as well as public discourse. For this purpose, we created two corpora. Our legal professional corpus is based on court opinions from the U.S. Courts of Appeals. We compared this professional corpus to a public corpus, (...) which is based on blog discussions on the internet forum Reddit. While many linguistic phenomena can give insights into evaluativity, we investigated the use of a wide selection of evaluative adjectives (more specifically, thick adjectives) to gain a more comprehensive picture of the degree of evaluativity in the legal domain. Our analysis shows that legal professionals use thick terms less evaluatively than laypeople, which suggests that legal texts are less evaluative than ordinary discussions. This result, more generally, supports the philosophical idea that thick concepts may vary in their evaluative intensity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Dispelling the Myth of the Non-Singer:Embracing Two Aesthetics for SingingLouise M. PascaleI entered the Music Workshop course with trepidation. Of all the courses in my Master's program, I feared this one the most. My experiences with music have always been negative ones. As I entered the classroom, memories surfaced of the time I was told to mouth the words so I would not throw the rest of the class (...) off key and when I was laughed off the stage after a friend and I attempted a rendition of "Rolling O'er the Billows." After that, I was convinced I should not sing.1Maxine Greene reminds us how easy it is to get caught in the "main text of life," one that is "negotiated mostly by convention, routine, habit, duty and one we have very little choice in."2 Our long-held acceptance of the "singer" and "non-singer" provides a perfect example of Greene's metaphor. The traditional meaning of "singing" is created out of convention and habit, perpetuated by the "main text" (white, middle class) values of American society.Singing, as it is understood in today's educational settings, settled into its role in American music education as a result of a number of significant decisions made as early as the 1600s by prominent leaders of the church.3 Each of these decisions added to the growth and strength of the view of singing that became [End Page 165] what I refer to as a "taproot"4 in music education. This taproot continued to settle comfortably into the groundwork of music education and has had major and long-lasting effects on how we generally perceive and experience singing.The Western perspective of singing is wedded to a multitude of assumptions and beliefs and, over a period of time, has taken on complex meaning. It is associated with subtle nuances, such as valuing the high, lilting soprano voice over the alto. It is connected to various philosophies and strongly held convictions, such as improving vocal performance through the mastery of musical literacy, and even exclusionary practices, such as selecting out the "better singers" and suggesting that others refrain from singing at all.Perhaps the most profound consequence of this entrenched taproot is that it has left American society with a very limited perception of "singing." This singular, well-supported root, albeit strong, impenetrable, and closely connected with a number of cultural and societal assumptions, effectively narrows the scope of our perceptions, our language, our philosophy, and our teaching practices in the domain of singing in education. Illustration of the powerful ways music relates to and directly expresses the social attitudes and cognitive processes of a culture are found in the work of John Blacking and John Miller Chernoff.5 Their work provides an opportunity to reflect on the cultural and societal influences of the "taproot" philosophy of music education and the ways these have created limitations on who expresses themselves musically, why, how, and for whom.One of the most critical of those limitations is that we have classroom teachers who rarely, if ever, sing with their students. The gap between those in education who sing and offer musical activities to their students and those who do not is greater than ever. The "non-singer" mentality persists in educational communities and is not being addressed in music education circles. Singing continues to be considered, by most educators, to be a complicated skill that must be learned and requires training in breathing, vocal technique, and diction, and a basic knowledge of note reading.Many have strong feelings about singing; it is not a neutral subject. When the topic of singing is brought up, some involved in the conversation are likely to personalize it and be eager to share stories about their singing ability and to express their opinions about whether or not they qualify as a "singer." Sometimes the reactions can be extreme. Some people shy completely away from singing, to the point of running from the room at the mere suggestion that they might be asked to participate in singing in public. Others have an opposite reaction and experience singing as an enjoyable activity... (shrink)

Imagine you and your friend Pierre agreed on meeting each other at a café, but he does not show up. What is the difference between a friend’s not showing up meeting? and any other person not coming? In some sense, all people who did not come show the same kind of behaviour, but most people would be willing to say that the absence of a friend who you expected to see is different in kind. In this paper, I will spell (...) out this difference by investigating laypeople’s conceptualisation of absences of actions in four experiments. In languages such as German, French, Italian, or Polish, people consider a friend’s not coming an omission. Any other person’s not coming, in contrast, is not considered an omission at all, but just a mere nothing. This use of the term omission differs from the usage in English, where ‘omission’ refers to all kinds of absences. In addition, ‘omission’ is not even an everyday term, but invented by philosophers for the sake of philosophical investigation. In other languages, ‘omission’ is part of an everyday vocabulary. Finally, I will discuss how this folk concept of omission could be made fruitful for philosophical questions. (shrink)

On édite ici un sermon de Robert Holcot, frère prêcheur anglais actif dans les années 1331-1344, d’après le manuscrit 342 de la bibliothèque municipale de Toulouse. Ce discours introduit un commentaire à la Genèse qui est perdu. Il a dû être délivré dans un contexte conventuel, étant donné la diversité d’âges et d’occupations de son auditoire clérical. Il contient plusieurs traits notables que l’on peut qualifier de pré-humanistes : affirmation de la supériorité des Grecs sur les Latins, éloge de la (...) grammaire plus que de toute autre discipline, insistance sur la narrativité de l’Écriture, admiration pour les écoles philosophiques antiques. Parmi les sources citées, plusieurs exempla proviennent des Nuits Attiques d’Aulu-Gelle. (shrink)

Acts that are considered undesirable standardly violate our expectations. In contrast, acts that count as morally desirable can either meet our expectations or exceed them. The zone in which an act can be morally desirable yet not exceed our expectations is what we call the zone of moral indifference, and it has so far been neglected. In this paper, we show that people can use positive terms in a deflated manner to refer to actions in the zone of moral indifference, (...) whereas negative terms cannot be so interpreted. (shrink)

Is it tautological to call an action "wrongful discrimination?" Some philosophers and political theorists answer this question in the affirmative and claim that the term "discrimination" is intrinsically evaluative. Others agree that "discrimination" usually conveys the action’s moral wrongness but claim that the term can be used in a purely descriptive way. In this paper, we present two corpus studies and two experiments designed to test whether the folk concept of discrimination is evaluative. We demonstrate that the term has undergone (...) a historical development and is nowadays no longer used purely descriptively. Further, we show that this evaluation cannot be cancelled without yielding a contradiction. We conclude that the descriptive use of "discriminatory" is a thing of the past. (shrink)

La présente contribution analyse un texte célèbre de Grégoire de Rimini, extrait de son commentaire des Sentences publié à Paris en 1346, livre II, distinction 34-37, question 1, qui demande « si Dieu est la cause efficiente immédiate du péché actuel ». Ce texte porte sur les fondements de l’éthique. Grégoire de Rimini y affirme en substance que si Dieu n’existait pas, agir contre la droite raison équivaudrait tout de même à commettre un mal. Ce texte est considéré comme la (...) première formulation de l’autonomie de la morale par un théologien philosophe. On en propose ici une relecture, attentive à sa logique argumentative et au jeu des autorités tirées du De libero arbitrio d’Augustin qu’il met en œuvre. L’Ordre des Ermites de Saint Augustin est associé de multiples manières au renouveau de l’augustinisme dès la période du premier humanisme de Pétrarque (1304-1374). La façon dont Grégoire de Rimini traite la question des racines de l’agir moral illustre à quel point il figure au premier plan du renouveau scolastique et humaniste de l’érudition augustinienne au xiv e siècle. (shrink)

This article focuses on Nicomachean Ethics III, 13 and its quotations in the work of Thomas Aquinas. The aristotelian examples of predators pursuing their prey inserted in this extract aroused Thomas’ interest from the Sentences commentary until the IIa-IIae. They offered him an alternative model to the famous avicennian paradigm of the sheep fleeing the wolf, that enabled him to account for the motivation of animal movement, instinct and animal pleasure. Unlike modern commentators, Thomas takes seriously this small but significant (...) piece of zoology inserted in the chapter on temperance of the ethica vetus. (shrink)

Une enquête de terrain sur les expertises collectives de l’Inserm Le présent article rapporte une enquête de terrain effectuée en 2010 et 2011 auprès des acteurs impliqués dans les expertises collectives de l’Inserm . L’enquête teste l’hypothèse selon laquelle le processus de fabrication des expertises renferme en lui-même des éléments qui nourrissent les controverses dans l’espace public, et ce, indépendamment du sujet de l’expertise.This article reports on a field survey conducted in 2010 and 2011 among those involved in the expert (...) studies conducted collectively at Inserm . The survey aimed to test the assumption that the factors that arouse public controversy are inherent to the process of producing expert studies, regardless of the topic they address. (shrink)

In “The Immorality of Horror Films,” philosopher and film scholar Gianluca Di Muzio proposes an analytic argument that aims to prove horror narratives, particularly slashers, unethical. His Argument from Reactive Attitudes contests slashers encourage pleasurable responses towards depictions of torture and death, which is possible only by suspending compassionate reactions. Doing so degrades sympathy and empathy, causing desensitization. This article will argue Di Muzio’s ARA, while valuable to discussion of art horror and morbidity, fails to meet its intended aim. The (...) ARA contains structural flaws in its logic, compounded by reliance on insufficient evidence. Additionally, Di Muzio does not adequately consider or rebut prominent aesthetic concerns, including ontological and moral distance of representations. Lastly, the argument utilizes a flawed classificatory schema that undermines its primary goal. Even narrowly confined to slashers, the ARA cannot explain alternative reasons for engaging with horror, nor does it account for those nuanced slasher works designed to foster compassion. The project concludes by offering a modified ARA with greater potential to accurately analyze the interrelation between art horror and morality. (shrink)

In this brilliant essay, Jacques Derrida explores issues of vision, blindness, self-representation, and their relation to drawing, while offering detailed readings of an extraordinary collection of images. Selected by Derrida from the prints and drawings department of the Louvre, the works depict blindness—fictional, historical, and biblical. From Old and New Testament scenes to the myth of Perseus and the Gorgon and the blinding of Polyphemus, Derrida uncovers in these images rich, provocative layers of interpretation. For Derrida drawing is itself blind; (...) as an act rooted in memory and anticipation, drawing necessarily replaces one kind of seeing with another. Ultimately, he explains, the very lines which compose any drawing are themselves never fully visible to the viewer since they exist only in a tenuous state of multiple identities: as marks on a page, as indicators of a contour. Lacking a "pure" identity, the lines of a drawing summon the supplement of the word, of verbal discourse, and, in doing so, obscure the visual experience. Consequently, Derrida demonstrates, the very act of depicting a blind person undertakes multiple enactments and statements of blindness and sight. _Memoirs of the Blind_ is both a sophisticated philosophical argument and a series of detailed readings. Derrida provides compelling insights into famous and lesser known works, interweaving analyses of texts—including Diderot's _Lettres sur les aveugles_, the notion of mnemonic art in Baudelaire's _The Painter of Modern _ _Life_, and Merleau-Ponty's _The Visible and the _ _Invisible_. Along with engaging meditations on the history and philosophy of art, Derrida reveals the ways viewers approach philosophical ideas through art, and the ways art enriches philosophical reflection. An exploration of sight, representation, and art, _Memoirs of the Blind_ extends and deepens the meditation on vision and painting presented in _Truth and _ _Painting_. Readers of Derrida, both new and familiar, will profit from this powerful contribution to the study of the visual arts. (shrink)

Jacques Derrida is, in the words of the_ New York Times_, "perhaps the world's most famous philosopher—if not the only famous philosopher." He often provokes controversy as soon as his name is mentioned. But he also inspires the respect that comes from an illustrious career, and, among many who were his colleagues and peers, he inspired friendship. _The Work of Mourning_ is a collection that honors those friendships in the wake of passing. Gathered here are texts—letters of condolence, memorial essays, (...) eulogies, funeral orations—written after the deaths of well-known figures: Roland Barthes, Paul de Man, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Edmond Jabès, Louis Marin, Sarah Kofman, Gilles Deleuze, Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-François Lyotard, Max Loreau, Jean-Marie Benoist, Joseph Riddel, and Michel Servière. With his words, Derrida bears witness to the singularity of a friendship and to the absolute uniqueness of each relationship. In each case, he is acutely aware of the questions of tact, taste, and ethical responsibility involved in speaking of the dead—the risks of using the occasion for one's own purposes, political calculation, personal vendetta, and the expiation of guilt. More than a collection of memorial addresses, this volume sheds light not only on Derrida's relation to some of the most prominent French thinkers of the past quarter century but also on some of the most important themes of Derrida's entire oeuvre-mourning, the "gift of death," time, memory, and friendship itself. "In his rapt attention to his subjects' work and their influence upon him, the book also offers a hesitant and tangential retelling of Derrida's own life in French philosophical history. There are illuminating and playful anecdotes—how Lyotard led Derrida to begin using a word-processor; how Paul de Man talked knowledgeably of jazz with Derrida's son. Anyone who still thinks that Derrida is a facetious punster will find such resentful prejudice unable to survive a reading of this beautiful work."—Steven Poole, _Guardian_ "Strikingly _simpa_ meditations on friendship, on shared vocations and avocations and on philosophy and history."—_Publishers Weekly _. (shrink)

This article explores how Levinas’s analysis of family relations (paternity, filiality, fecundity, and maternity) and the ethical relationship to the other (requiring both a paradoxical process of separation and the aptitude to be ethically ordained) can retrospectively enlighten our understanding of King Lear. It first shows how, in the Shakespearean tragedy, Levinas’s ethical answer, “here I am,” cannot be dissociated from fearless speech, which becomes the manifestation of the ethical relationship to the other. It then focuses on the Levinasian paradox (...) of “separation” as a prerequisite to the ethical relationship, and sees how this is radically distorted in the families presented in King Lear. It finally considers Levinas’s idea of maternity as a responsibility for others to the point of substitution, to questions the absence of mothers in King Lear and argue that the denouement of the tragedy can be regarded as a gender-reversed variation on the mater dolorosa motif. (shrink)

Résumé – Nous nous intéressons à l’enseignement et l’apprentissage de l’infini en classe de mathématiques en considérant les différences et les relations entre infini potentiel et infini actuel. Nous présentons les principaux éléments de notre étude philosophique, épistémologique et didactique, ainsi que trois situations visant à conduire un travail explicite avec les élèves sur ces questions en début de lycée. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------- Abstract – We are interested in the teaching and learning of infinite in mathematics class, taking into account the relations (...) between potential infinite and actual infinite. We report the main elements of our current philosophical, epistemological and didactical study; we also present three mathematical situations that we consider relevant for this purpose and to be explored with 10 and 11 grade students. (shrink)

Die Betrachtungen, die ich Ihnen im Folgenden vortragen möchte, konzentrieren sich auf den Begriff der Gesellschaft in Fichtes Philosophie und überschneiden sich unvermeidlich mit einer Neubewertung des Begriffs des Politischen, wie er sich bei Fichte abzeichnet. Ausgangspunkt ist die Unterscheidung zwischen Gesellschaft und Staat: eine Unterscheidung, die philosophiegeschichtlich in Hegel ihren wichtigsten Exponenten hat, doch, obgleich nicht immer überlegt und vollständig ausgearbeitet, bereits in die Schriften vieler Autoren als Voraussetzung eingeflossen war. Und darüber hinaus war dies ein Gedanke, der auf (...) einer anderen, wenn man so will, niedrigeren Reflexionsebene in der deutschen Publizistik insbesondere gegen Ende des 18. Jh./anfang des 19. Jh. schon allgemein verbreitet war, das heißt zu einer Zeit, als das Thema der Staatsbildung in den größeren Ländern auf der Tagesordnung stand. Das Thema von einer Neubewertung des Begriffs des Politischen bei Fichte ist vornehmlich aus zwei Gründen von Bedeutung. Einerseits zeigt sich, wenn wir einfach auf das Wort »Politik« achten, daß es bei Fichte nicht oft zu finden ist: es steht in Verbindung mit Eigenschaften wie »Klugheit« oder »Geschicklichkeit« und bezeichnet alles andere als das Ergebnis einer wissenschaftlichen Forschung. Die Politik nimmt daher in Anbetracht der theoretischen Vorannahmen, die Fichtes Philosophie kennzeichnen, und des geringen Gewichts, das er der geschichtlichen Kontingenz bei der Forschung beimißt, nur eine bescheidene Stellung ein. Und in der Tat scheint der Zuständigkeitsbereich der Politik in der Rechtswissenschaft äußerst begrenzt: in ihn fällt nur eine geringe Anzahl von Fragestellungen, deren wichtigste die verschiedenen Regierungsformen betrifft, was jedoch keineswegs ein ausschlaggebendes Problem darstellt, sofern die »Wissenschaft« ihre Prinzipien richtig aufgestellt und in angemessener Weise miteinander verknüpft hat. Allerdings ist zu erwähnen, daß bei genauerer Betrachtung die Zahl der Fragestellungen, deren Lösung Fichte tatsächlich der Politik anvertraut, deutlich größer ist und sich auch auf eine Vielzahl von Bereichen erstreckt - bis hin zur wirtschaftlichen Organisation innerhalb eines Staates, um nur ein Beispiel zu nennen. In jedem Fall aber ist der Bereich der praktischen Politik und nicht der der politischen Theorie betroffen. Betrachtet man das Thema schließlich in Hinblick auf die aktiv an der Politik Beteiligten, stellt man fest, daß ihre Zahl sehr gering ist, da die politischen Rechte, sowohl was das aktive als auch das passive Wahlrecht anbetrifft, nur in begrenztem Maße anerkannt werden. (shrink)

La justice prédictive, ici envisagée comme outil de quantification des données des décisions rendues par les juges du fond, va permettre directement de révéler la jurisprudence du fond. En la révélant, elle va pour part la constituer comme source du droit. Ce faisant, elle pourra être utilisée bien au-delà de sa fonction initiale de prédiction pour les professionnels du droit : elle est susceptible d’aider à mieux légiférer, mieux interpréter et mieux penser le droit – toutes utilisations qui se heurtent (...) toutefois aux pratiques des juristes comme aux limites des outils de justice prédictive. Ces utilisations ne sont pas anodines et elles tendent indirectement à orienter la jurisprudence du fond par son harmonisation. Si cette harmonisation est recherchée par une justice prédictive indiquant des normes, elle risque de heurter le pouvoir d’appréciation souverain des juges du fond. En revanche, la justice prédictive peut aider à la rationalisation de ce même pouvoir, en appelant à une motivation adaptée. La justice prédictive se révèle alors source d’arguments plutôt qu’elle n’est source de normes et appelle le développement de réflexions et de formations sur l’argumentation autour des questions de fond. (shrink)

This article seeks to explain how and why groups and networks of undocumented migrants mobilizing in Berlin, Montréal, and Paris since the beginning of the 2000s construct different types of claims. The authors explore the relationship between undocumented migrants and state authorities at the local level through the concept of the citizenship regime and its specific application to undocumented migrants. Despite their common formal exclusion from citizenship, nonstatus migrants experience different degrees and forms of exclusion in their daily lives, in (...) terms of access to certain rights and services, recognition, and belonging within the state. As a result, they have an opportunity to create different, specific forms of leeway in the society in which they live. The concurrence of these different degrees of exclusion and different forms of leeway defines specific conditions of mobilization. The authors demonstrate how the content of their claims is influenced by these conditions of mobilization. (shrink)

To study the interaction of forces that produce chest wall motion, we propose a model based on the lever system of Hillman and Finucane :951–961, 1987) and introduce some dynamic properties of the respiratory system. The passive elements are considered as elastic compartments linked to the open air via a resistive tube, an image of airways. The respiratory muscles force is applied to both compartments. Parameters of the model are identified in using experimental data of airflow signal measured by pneumotachography (...) and rib cage and abdomen signals measured by respiratory inductive plethysmography on eleven healthy volunteers in five conditions: at rest and with four level of added loads. A breath by breath analysis showed, whatever the individual and the condition are, that there are several breaths on which the airflow simulated by our model is well fitted to the airflow measured by pneumotachography as estimated by a determination coefficient R2 ≥ 0.70. This very simple model may well represent the behaviour of the chest wall and thus may be useful to interpret the relative motion of rib cage and abdomen during quiet breathing. (shrink)

En prenant appui sur des textes de Descartes et de philosophes post-cartésiens comme Géraud de Cordemoy, ou encore des théoriciens de Port-Royal, tels Lancelot, Arnauld et Nicole, nous nous intéressons au statut double et paradoxal que revêt la parole dans la philosophie classique, au moment où se construit la question de l’union psychophysique et où sont proposées diverses « réponses » à cette question, dans la perspective d’une conceptualisation nouvelle d’une identité humaine rendue problématique. Le paradoxe tient au fait que (...) l’activité de langage est d’abord manifestation de la pensée, indice publiquement observable ou témoignage extérieur de l’existence d’un esprit à l’origine des actes linguistiques, conformément à la théorie cartésienne à ce sujet ; mais la parole dénote aussi, dans la philosophie même de Descartes, une faculté spécifiquement humaine, propre au « vrai homme », en tant qu’il est indissolublement esprit et corps. Nous tentons de montrer que ce qui est en jeu dans les études brèves et éparses que Descartes consacre au langage, puis dans les développements ultérieurs de la Grammaire générale et raisonnée et de la Logique de Port-Royal, à travers la théorie du signe linguistique et de la signification, c’est la compréhension de la relation, nécessairement postulée et pourtant constamment renvoyée à l’ordre d’un lien contre-nature, et par là arbitraire, fruit d’une institution, entre la parole comme phénomène physique et la parole comme activité symbolique par excellence ; si bien que le prodige du phénomène humain du langage, comme expression publique des pensées, donne la mesure de l’énigme que constitue l’unité en l’homme du corps et de l’esprit. (shrink)

This paper examines the Buddhist’s answer to one of the most famous (and more intuitive) objections against the semantic theory of “exclusion” ( apoha ), namely, the charge of circularity. If the understanding of X is not reached positively, but X is understood via the exclusion of non-X, the Buddhist nominalist is facing a problem of circularity, for the understanding of X would depend on that of non-X, which, in turn, depends on that of X. I distinguish in this paper (...) two strategies aiming at “breaking the circle”: (i) conceding the precedence of a positive understanding of X, from which a negative understanding (i.e., the understanding of “non-X”) is derived by contrast, and (ii) denying any precedence by proposing a simultaneous understanding of both X and non-X. I consider how these two options are articulated respectively by Dharmakīrti in his Pramāṇavārttika cum Svavṛtti and by one of his Tibetan interpreters, Sa skya Paṇḍita, and examine the requirements for their workability. I suggest that Sa skya Paṇḍita’s motivation to opt for an alternative solution has to do with his criticism of notions shared by his Tibetan predecessors, an outline of which is given in Appendix 1. In Appendix 2, I present the surprising use of the charge of circularity by an early Tibetan logician against his coreligionists. (shrink)

This study examines the hydrolysis of lignocellulose extracted from poultry manure for the purpose of investigating low-cost feedstocks for ethanol production while providing an alternative solid waste management strategy for agricultural livestock manures. Poultry manure underwent various pretreatments to enhance subsequent enzymatic hydrolysis including untreated, alkaline pretreatment with 0.5N KOH, drying, and grinding. The KOH-treated, dried, and grinded poultry manure yielded the highest glucose conversions. When poultry manure without pretreatment was hydrolyzed at 40°C with an enzyme loading 400 units/g feedstock, (...) 7.1 ± 0.3% was converted to glucose in 24 hours. This increased to 27.6 ± 1.2% when a KOH pretreatment followed by drying and grinding was applied. Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy analyses were used to examine differences in the composition of the pretreated feedstock before and after enzymatic hydrolysis. These indicate that the cellulose content in pretreated poultry manure was removed during enzymatic hydrolysis. (shrink)

L’ouvrage de David Niget est tiré d’une thèse soutenue à Angers, bel aboutissement d’un travail de cotutelle et d’un projet d’histoire croisée entre la France et le Québec. Devenu au fil des ans le principal spécialiste français de l’histoire de la justice des mineurs pour le premier xxe siècle, David Niget a, plus récemment, étendu ses études à la Belgique et, sans abandonner son champ de recherche, s’est plus directement investi dans des recherches sur « Jeunesses et violences ». Il (...) s’intér... (shrink)

Noires ou métisses, Africaines, Antillaises ou Américaines, Suzanne Césaire, Paulette Nardal, Eugénie Éboué-Tell, Jane Vialle, Andrée Blouin, Aoua Kéita et Eslanda Robeson sont les protagonistes de ce livre novateur, riche et stimulant. Leur point commun : s’être engagées, à différents titres, pour contester la domination coloniale dans la seconde moitié du xxe siècle. Le destin de certaines (Suzanne Césaire, Eugénie Eboué-Tell, Eslanda Robeson), souvent associé à celui de leur mari, est plus...

Foucault (1926-1984) et Wittgenstein (1889-1951) appartiennent, selon une présentation courante, à deux traditions de pensée différentes, pour ne pas dire rivales, dont chacun serait en quelque sorte une figure tutélaire. Au-delà des oppositions des philosophies continentale et analytique, tous deux partagent pourtant un fond commun : une critique radicale de la notion classique de subjectivité, une façon spécifique de concevoir et de pratiquer la philosophie comme manière d'être et de vivre. Tous deux, en philosophant, engagent un discours critique et un (...) exercice de transformation de soi-même, des autres et du monde. Cet ouvrage ne cherche nullement à réconcilier deux traditions adverses. Nul oecuménisme ici, mais plutôt la volonté de faire ressurgir des problèmes dont la force et l'insistance se jouent des clivages institués : le rapport à soi, la conscience et ses illusions, le rapport entre le " je " et le " nous ". Une telle confrontation possède la vertu d'arracher ces deux auteurs au statut de doctrines instituées et figées et de susciter de nouvelles interrogations à propos d'oeuvres prétendument connues et reconnues. Un questionnement contemporain. (shrink)