Since the 1990s, the terms “Lamarckism” and “Lamarckian” have seen a significant resurgence in biological publications. The discovery of new molecular mechanisms have been interpreted as evidence supporting the reality and efficiency of the inheritance of acquired characters, and thus the revival of Lamarckism. The present paper aims at giving a critical evaluation of such interpretations. I argue that two types of arguments allow to draw a clear distinction between the genuine Lamarckian concept of inheritance of acquired characters and transgenerational (...) epigenetic inheritance. The first concerns the explanandum of the processes under consideration: molecular mechanisms of transgenerational epigenetic inheritance are understood as evolved products of natural selection. This means that the kind of inheritance of acquired characters they might be responsible for is an obligatory emergent feature of evolution, whereas traditional Lamarckisms conceived the inheritance of acquired characters as a property inherent in living matter itself. The second argument concerns the explanans of the inheritance of acquired characters: in light of current knowledge, epigenetic mechanisms are not able to drive adaptive evolution by themselves. Emergent Lamarckian phenomena would be possible if and only if individual epigenetic variation allowed the inheritance of acquired characters to be a factor of unlimited change. This implies specific requirements for epigenetic variation, which I explicitly define and expand upon. I then show that given current knowledge, these requirements are not empirically grounded. (shrink)

Three experiments explored how hypocrisy affects attributions of criminal guilt and the desire to punish hypocritical criminals. Study 1 established that via perceived hypocrisy, a hypocritical criminal was seen as more culpable and was punished more than a non-hypocritical criminal who committed an identical crime. Study 2 expanded on this, showing that negative moral emotions (anger and disgust) mediated the relationships between perceived hypocrisy, criminal guilt, and punishment. Study 3 replicated the emotion finding from Study 2 using new scenarios where (...) group agents were clearly aware of the hypocrisy of their actions, yet acted anyway. Again, perceived hypocrisy worked through moral emotions to affect criminal guilt and punishment. The current studies provide empirical support for theories relating hypocrisy and moral transgressions to moral emotions, also informing the literature on the role of moral emotions in moral reasoning and legal decision making. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper1 is to rationalise why and how philosophy can help today’s managers in their daily practices. I will first explain why today’s managers particularly should engage themselves in profound and enduring dialogue with philosophers. To this end, I will present the close links between the major managerial activities and the major philosophical domains. In the second section, I will sketch out how such a dialogue can be facilitated. To this end, I will present some of the (...) methods and conditions used to ensure the success of the practice of philosophy in organisations. (shrink)

EveryK-trivial set is computable from an incomplete Martin-Löf random set, i.e., a Martin-Löf random set that does not compute the halting problem.

This article shows how Lamarckism was essential in the birth of the French school of molecular biology. We argue that the concept of inheritance of acquired characters positively shaped debates surrounding bacteriophagy and lysogeny in the Pasteurian tradition during the interwar period. During this period the typical Lamarckian account of heredity treated it as the continuation of protoplasmic physiology in daughter cells. Félix d’Hérelle applied this conception to argue that there was only one species of bacteriophage and Jules Bordet applied (...) it to develop an account of bacteriophagy as a transmissible form of autolysis and to analyze the new phenomenon of lysogeny. In a long-standing controversy with Bordet, Eugène Wollman deployed a more morphological understanding of the inheritance of acquired characters, yielding a particulate, but still Lamarckian, account of lysogeny. We then turn to André Lwoff who, with several colleagues, completed Wollman’s research program from 1949 to 1953. We examine how he gradually set aside the Lamarckian background, finally removing inheritance of acquired characters from the resulting account of bacteriophagy and lysogeny. In the conclusion, we emphasize the complex dual role of Lamarckism as it moved from an assumed explanatory framework to a challenge that the nascent molecular biology had to overcome. (shrink)

The role of the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) in mate choice in humans is controversial. Nowadays, the availability of genetic variation data at genomic scales allows for a careful assessment of this question. In 2008, Chaix et al. reported evidence for MHC‐dependent mate choice among European American spouses from the HapMap 2 dataset. Recently, Derti et al. suggested that this observation was not robust. Furthermore, when Derti et al. applied similar analyses to the HapMap 3 European American samples, they did (...) not see a significant effect. Although some of the points raised by Derti et al. are relevant, we disagree with the reported absence of evidence for MHC‐dependent mate choice within the HapMap samples. More precisely, we show here that the MHC dissimilarity among HapMap 3 European American spouses is still extreme in comparison to the rest of the genome, even after multiple testing correction. This finding supports the hypothesis of MHC‐dependent mate choice in some human populations. (shrink)

La philosophie de Schelling pénètre en France, assez timidement, par le canal des penseurs spiritualistes (Cousin, Ravaisson), mais aussi par le biais d’érudits (Matter, Willm…). Sa philosophie romantique et son volontarisme métaphysique entrent en résonance avec des préoccupations d’époque ; son néo-christianisme semble pouvoir remplir l’espace laissé vacant par le retrait des croyances religieuses. La situation s’inverse avec le « retour à Kant » et le triomphe du rationalisme républicain. La philosophie de l’identité est alors interprétée comme un monisme qu’il (...) faut tenir à distance. Cette désaffection explique la rareté des traductions. On trouvera à la fin de l’article l’inventaire des textes (de Schelling et sur Schelling) publiés en français avant 1900. (shrink)

Derrida's treatment of Chinese script as essentially non-phonetic in Of Grammatology has been a recurrent leitmotif among several sinologists and scholars of Chinese origin, particularly in Rey Chow's famous 2001 essay ‘How Inscrutable Chinese Led to Globalized Theory’. Despite forceful refutations of this misconception, the accusation of a fantasizing ‘ethnocentrism thinking itself as anti-ethnocentrism’ has endured and could still be found in a recent 2015 article suggestively titled ‘A Sort of European Hallucination: On Derrida's “Chinese Prejudice”’. This essay will probe (...) into the recurrent accusation of a Derridean hallucination of the other as the other's own hallucination in order to analyse the sustained misreading of Derrida's phrase ‘outside of all logocentrism’ used about the Chinese ideogram. (shrink)

Resumé On a coutume de considérer qu’il y a un revirement complet qui s’opère chez Fichte entre ses Considérations sur la Révolution française de 1793 et son Fondement du droit naturel de 1796 en vertu de ce que le droit naturel et la morale ne sont pas dissociés dans la première œuvre et le deviennent complètement dans la seconde. Sans doute, le droit naturel est bien posé en 1793 comme l’expression de la loi morale dans les phénomènes, au lieu qu’il (...) est affirmé comme une science distincte de la morale en 1796. Il y aurait donc là une évolution bien connue de sa philosophie et non un problème. Pourtant, c’est faire fi de la complexité de la rationalité juridique chez Fichte que de s’en tenir à une simple lecture discontinuiste. Cet article voudrait montrer que ces deux œuvres que l’on oppose traditionnellement ne représentent pas deux visions inconciliables de la rationalité juridique, mais plutôt deux aspects complémentaires de la même rationalité juridique. En effet, selon que le Moi est pris sous le rapport de sa destination ou de sa genèse, deux perspectives différentes mais conciliables s’ouvrent sur le droit. (shrink)

Eternal recurrence and the principle of economy in Nietzscheʼs thought. This paper explores the place that the principle of parsimony occupies in Nietzscheʼs thought. I argue that the principle of parsimony is one of the criteria that allow Nietzsche to organize the many different interpretations available to us into a hierarchy. The question is whether Nietzsche can justify the use of this principle without making it a petitio principii. Oddly enough, it seems that eternal recurrence has a role to play (...) in this context. The most important problem Nietzsche has to confront is the problem of circularity. Bringing together Nietzsche’s specific conception of truth with the problem of eternal recurrence allows us to recognize that circularity provides for access to a higher density of the real. (shrink)

Environmentalism has been a part of the ideological landscape of liberal societies for nearly three decades. Classical liberals have not yet succeeded, however, in articulating a coherent response that would be relevant to politically active environmentalists, as well as to liberals receptive to postmodern ideas. Robert C. Paehlke argues that, conservative liberals being in fact hostile to environmental thinking, moderate progressivism and environmentalism should enter into a close alliance. This paper challenges both assertions. Admittedly, not all currents within contemporary conservative (...) liberalism could play a part in the development of a neoliberal environmentalist movement. One current, however, the skeptical tradition, whose origin can be traced back to the Scottish Englightenment, is remarkably well suited to this task. Progressivism, on the other hand, could end up smothering the environmental movement under the weight of its own certainties. (shrink)

Pour Plotin, toutes les formes de vie procedent de l'activite spirituelle rendue possible par l'ineffable perfection de l'Un. Tous les vivants, les vegetaux, les animaux et les astres, n'agissent que grace a une contemplation qui vise a se remplir d'un contenu intelligible. La nature sublunaire ou les hommes se trouvent etablis est donc doublement fondee: par la Participation aux idees et par la Procession des differentes modalites psychiques. Le monde sensible est la plus belle image de la beaute de l'intelligence, (...) c'est-a-dire de l'etre lui-meme. La pensee de Plotin, notamment par une doctrine originale de la Providence, montre que la Nature est une traduction de l'Esprit. (shrink)

Qu'en est-il du statut de l' enfance dans le programme éducatif des Lois? Pour montrer la tension entre la fragilité de l'enfant et la démesure de son comportement, on examine particulièrement VII, 808. L' éducation est une domestication qui doit apprendre à l'enfant non seulement la rationalité, mais aussi la philanthropie et l'espérance. Education and childhood in the Laws What is the status of childhood in the educational program in the Laws? In order to show the tension between the child's (...) frailty and the excesses of his behaviour, we analyse Laws VII 808. Education becomes a domestication that is meant to teach the child not only rationality but also philanthropy and hope. (shrink)

We aimed to identify maternal characteristics predicting interpretation of infant emotions, as well as relations between such interpretations and mother-infant stress. Specifically, we investigated (1) prospective associations between maternal dispositional mindfulness and interpretation of infant emotions, and (2) concurrent associations between maternal interpretation of infant emotions and mothers’ and infants’ cortisol during a dyadic stressor in a non-clinical community sample (n = 78) of mother-infant dyads. Mothers completed the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire at 3 months postnatal, and the IFEEL Picture (...) infant emotion interpretation task at 6 months postnatal. At 6-months, mother-infant dyads completed the Face-to-Face Still Face paradigm, and physiological stress was assessed via salivary cortisol. Regression analyses revealed significant links between aspects of maternal mindfulness – specifically, Observing, Describing, and Acting with Awareness facets – and infant emotion interpretation; more mindful mothers’ emotion ratings were less negatively biased and covered the full spectrum of infant emotions, congruent with the range of responses given by a low-risk reference sample. In turn, less negativity bias and greater interpretive congruence predicted lower infant and mother cortisol during the stress session, with effects small-medium in size. Findings highlight the potential role of maternal interpretation of infant emotions in mindful parenting. (shrink)

In this essay, I attempt to define the 'ethnocategory' mushi in Japanese culture, through a semantic analysis of the Chinese characters bearing the radical "mushi," and fieldwork research in rural Japan. The research offers criteria for an animal's inclusion in the category, reveals the differences in people's perception of mushi according to age and gender, and elicits a structure of the category as a series of concentric circles around a semantic core. The richness and complexity of the findings provide insight (...) into Japanese attitudes towards animals and nature. (shrink)

L’homme est un animal extraordinaire selon Platon, mais il est bien un animal. Il faut donc maîtriser et domestiquer l’animalité de l’homme. Le cas de l’alimentation montre l’importance des pulsions animales en l’homme. L’animal n’est pas l’autre de l’homme, mais l’une de ses possibilités.

The first in-depth engagement with and close reading of Anankè, this essay focuses on how Cixous's novel plays with and rewrites psychoanalytic concepts and practices. The critical elaboration of her own ‘cixanalysis’ in this fiction-as-becoming and journey, which reinvents psychoanalysis as it gives free creative rein to woman's desire instead of pathologizing it, unfolds in six related studies: on ‘conduct’, ‘habit’, staging, transference and/as translation, the interpretation of interpretation, and the shift from drive to drift in Cixous's fictional liberation of (...) woman from destiny and destination. (shrink)

It is from the point of view of the productive force of the «singularities » and the affirmation of the multiplicity, of virtues talents, that the young thinker is revolted by a Reason that doesn’t discuss, justify and invent. Positing misery as one of the primary elements the philosophical experience of the world, V conceinves the knowledge by sentiment the force that snatches away modem thought from the era of meditation on death, in order to re-inscribe the philosophique expression in (...) the powerful dynamic of " perpetual generation " of the temporal being of the "desire-without object ". And this effort, pregnant with the whole cooperative experience of the world, is political. It is that of a soul " capable of multiplying "that, strategically, decides of the future. In this "becoming plural " of the "popular and accessible "prince, it is thus the idea of a radical re-founding of the very conception of the State, correlative to the philosophical re founding of the relation between Reason and the passions, that is clearly posed. (shrink)

Dans cet article sont commentées trois tentatives de résolution de la Belle au bois dormant, la célèbre énigme d'auto-localisation qui engendre un paradoxe probabiliste troublant : l'arbitrage fréquentiste propose une lecture ontologique des probabilités lorsque l'approche bayésienne atteint une limite ; l'analogie avec le Monty Hall s'efforce de penser de nouvelles règles de révision doxastique communes aux deux problèmes ; enfin, la leçon des compagnons encourage le partage et l'harmonisation d'estimations probabilistes entre agents rationnels. Chacun des trois arguments est rappelé (...) brièvement, puis certaines parties sont examinées plus attentivement, critiquées ou au contraire appuyées par des idées neuves, telles que la variante des Quatre Belles. (shrink)

Le discours amoureux dans ses fondements comme ses impensés philosophiques peut éclairer d’une manière pertinente l’entreprise de l’abstraction picturale, ses ambitions comme ses limites. Moins analogique que métaphorique au sens de Hans Blummer le présent article tente de tisser des liens entre deux domaines d’ordinaire séparés : l’art et… l’amour!

The intellectual founding fathers of the French Third Republic were innovative thinkers who achieved an original synthesis of republican and liberal principles. This becomes evident when one examines the works of four philosophers who played a crucial role in the French intellectual and political life of the period extending from the 1870s to the early 1900s: Emile Littre, Charles Renouvier, Henry Michel and Alfred Fouillee. Among their many contributions to moral and political philosophy, I highlight two themes: a) a conception (...) of political liberty that grants a pre-eminent place to civic education as a means to free citizens from domination by dogmatic religious authorities, sectarian political movements or unexamined beliefs of any kind; b) the need to implement reasonable social reforms in order to ensure that the many and complex relations of functional interdependence constitutive of modern societies are equitable and realize an ideal of national solidarity. I suggest that these ideas ought to be carefully examined by contemporary proponents of civic republicanism. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Nietzsche-Studien Jahrgang: 44 Heft: 1 Seiten: 176-199.

« Dans le domaine de la science, tout se passe avec la même force, la même souveraineté, la même magnificence que dans les contes. Et Ulrich sentait que les hommes ignoraient cela, qu’ils n’avaient même aucune idée de la façon dont on peut penser ; si on leur apprenait à penser autrement, ils vivraient aussi autrement ». Robert Musil L’image d’une pensée sèche et déshumanisante, bornée à une conception dogmatique de l’avenir des sciences et des techniques, occulte la forme originale (...) que le... (shrink)

Les travaux ici rassemblés constituent les actes d’une journée d’études tenue en mai 2010 au Centre d’études supérieures de la Renaissance de Tours. Conformément aux coutumes épistémologiques du Centre, des spécialistes venus d’horizons disciplinaires très variés – histoire, philosophie, géographie, études italiennes – s’y sont retrouvés autour d’une interrogation commune sur les formes de la domination territoriale que met en jeu l’idée...

Les Cahiers La Boétie accueillent des travaux interdisciplinaires explorant tous les aspects et les enjeux de l'oeuvre de La Boétie.

Bergson raconte que pour remédier à l'insufisance de l'évolutionnisme de Herbert Spencer, il s'était d'abord tourné vers l'histoire de la philosophie depuis ses origines. Il dut alors se rendre à l'évidence, dit-il, que, pas plus que celui de Spencer, aucun des systèmes n'avait tenu compte du temps réel. On avait étudié les propriétés de l'espace pour appliquer directement ensuite ses conclusions au temps en se contentant de remplacer l'idée de juxtaposition par celle de succession. Ainsi serait né ce que Bergson (...) appelle le temps homogène ou temps-espace auquel la durée concrète échappe tout à fait. (shrink)

Novalis explores the possibilities contained within the intellectual intuition highlighted by Fichte. The pure I or intellectual intuition is the absolute organ of the mind ; it no longer serves merely to deduce the world a priori, as it does in Fichte, but to discipline all the other organs with which man is endowed. It does so in order to abstract the body and soul from any mechanical influence and allow each of our senses to engender an a priori world. (...) This article set outs to analyse the meaning of this aesthetic and poetic extension of Fichte’s philosophy. Novalis explore les possibilités recelées par l’intuition intellectuelle mise en évidence par Fichte. Le Moi pur ou intuition intellectuelle est l’organe absolu de l’esprit qui ne servira plus simplement, comme chez Fichte, à déduire a priori le monde, mais à discipliner la totalité des autres organes dont l’homme est pourvu, de manière à pouvoir soustraire le corps et l’âme à toute influence mécanique, et à permettre à chacun de nos sens d’engendrer un monde a priori. C’est le sens de ce prolongement esthétique et poétique de la philosophie de Fichte que cet article se propose d’analyser. (shrink)

The opposition between community and society set out by Collingwood in hisNew Leviathan(1942) should be compared with the distinction betweenGemeinschaftandGesellschaftthat Tönnies had introduced in 1887. The debate on ideal types of social organizations apparently pertains to «pure sociology» and was continued by Durkheim and Weber. However, Collingwood's use of this distinction may be construed as an attack on the very idea of sociology in the name of the primacy of rational will.

As the world population ages, the patients per physician ratio keeps on increasing. This is even more important in the domain of chronic pathologies where people are usually monitored for years and need regular consultations.To address this problem, we propose an automated system to monitor a patient population, detecting anomalies in instantaneous data and in their temporal evolution, so that it could alert physicians. By handling the population of healthy patients autonomously and by drawing the physicians' attention to the patients–at-risk, (...) the system allows physicians to spend comparatively more time with patients who need their services. In such a system, the interaction between the patients, the diagnosis module, and the physicians is very important. We have based this system on a combination of stochastic models, fuzzy filters, and strong medical semantics. (shrink)

Mario Bunge vient tout juste de prendre sa retraite universitaire à l’âge vénérable de 90 ans. Après plus de soixante ans d’enseignement de la physique et de la philosophie, il laisse une oeuvre foisonnante et riche. Son style unique allie des arguments incisifs à la clarté du propos. Sa méthode puise dans le vaste arsenal des sciences, de la physique à la sociologie. Bunge suit en cela l’héritage des Lumières, qui prônait la foi en la raison ainsi qu’un certain réalisme (...) et un matérialisme qu’il reprend et retravaille à la lumière des avancées théoriques contemporaines. Peu de philosophes depuis Leibniz ou Russell ont su faire preuve d’autant d’érudition scientifique. Nul doute qu’il mérite une place de choix dans les débats entourant la philosophie des sciences contemporaines.Mario Bunge has recently retired from academic life at the venerable age of 90 years old. After more than sixty years of teaching physics and philosophy, he leaves a rich and abundant work. His unique style allies quickness and precision. His method draws from the vast realm of sciences, from physics to sociology. He thus follows the Enlightenment’s heritage that advocated a faith in reason and a kind of realism and materialism, which Bunge reorganizes from the study of modern sciences. Few philosophers since Leibniz or Russell have shown this kind of scientific erudition. No doubt that he deserves a prominent role in the contemporary debates in philosophy of sciences. (shrink)