Utopia repeatedly sets forth the rhetorical strategy of using pleasant and healing words to “enter” or “flow” or “steal into” fortresses of hardened opinion and custom without arousing warlike passions to keep them out. An important part of this strategy is the creation of a character who denounces major instances and causes of injustice but who nonetheless supports war and other means of force at the expense of law in rectifying that injustice; another part of the strategy is the creation (...) of a character and a plot that embody the “indirect” rhetorical approach aimed primarily at long-term persuasion needed to improve laws and institutions. (shrink)

Evocation de la découverte de l'Orient par Teilhard de Chardin et analyse de la vision teilhardienne de ce que devrait apporter l'Orient à l'Occident. L'originalité de sa démarche se caractèrise par l'intégration du phénomène religieux au coeur du phénomène humain et plus précisément par l'idée d'une "convergence des religions".

After providing a novel taxonomy of lottery procedures for fairly distributing scarce goods, I defend a new weighted lottery theory. This taxonomy is necessary because the debate between unweighted and weighted lottery theorists overlooks a range of cases, overlap cases, in which conducting an unweighted lottery is impossible or implausible. Therefore, to account for all such cases, lottery theorists must adopt a weighted lottery. However, while no extant weighted lottery is adequate in overlap cases, my new weighted lottery theory is. (...) I conclude by discussing my theory’s practical implications. (shrink)

This paper examines patterns of metaphor in usage. Four samples of text excerpts of on average 47,000 words each were taken from the British National Corpus and annotated for metaphor. The linguistic metaphor data were collected by five analysts on the basis of a highly explicit identification procedure that is a variant of the approach developed by the Pragglejaz Group (Metaphor and Symbol 22: 1–39, 2007). Part of this paper is a report of the protocol and the reliability of the (...) procedure. Data analysis shows that, on average, one in every seven and a half lexical units in the corpus is related to metaphor defined as a potential cross-domain mapping in conceptual structure. It also appears that the bulk of the expression of metaphor in discourse consists of non-signalled metaphorically used words, not similes. The distribution of metaphor-related words, finally, turns out to be quite variable between the four registers examined in this study: academic texts have 18.5%, news 16.4%, fiction 11.7%, and conversation 7.7%. The systematic comparative investigation of these registers raises new questions about the relation between cognitive linguistic and other approaches to metaphor. (shrink)

Le mérite le plus patent de Zur Kritik der Gewalt de Benjamin consiste à défaire toute représentation innocente de la violence et de ses usages, toute compréhension de la violence qui n’y verrait que l’innocuité d’un moyen neutre légitimé, ou pas, par les fins qu’il vise, les intérêts qu’il sert ou les classes qui le mobilisent. « Dans cette perspective, la violence est un produit naturel, en quelque sorte un matériau brut dont l’utilisation ne pose aucun problème ». S’interroger sur (...) la viole... (shrink)

Dans la quasi-définition hyperbolique qu’en donne Derrida, la circoncision s’effectue toujours sans (mémoire, événement, moi, sujet). Là où, pour Hegel, la négation se nie et l’aliénation s’aliène, le sans vient inciser chirurgicalement la texture même de la langue spéculative, laquelle assure continûment la « reprise dans le concept ». La différance consigne ainsi l’impossibilité de la guérison dialectique et de l’accomplissement salutaire où s’annuleraient le différemment, l’attente, la non-venue. La circoncision nomme donc une coupure, une séparation, un disjointement, dont elle (...) fournit dans l’œuvre de Derrida le philosophème le plus propre. (shrink)

C’est un lieu commun de voir en Calliclès ou parfois en Thrasymaque les grands ancêtres de Nietzsche : refus du droit institué, apologie de la force, légitimité de son exercice naturel, soit de la persévérance dans son être et de la conservation de soi. La lecture de Nietzsche fragilise considérablement ce point de vue. Si la justice comme revendication propre à la doctrine de l’égalité ou encore comme injonction contenue dans les commandements divins ou moraux est refusée sans appel, la (...) « vraie devise de la justice » est promue comme l’éminente qualité du philosophe à venir. Que signifie ce paradoxe? Une justice justifiée par le sentiment de la puissance, voire par la perspective du bonheur, est une justice s’extériorisant dans la gratuité du don, la dépense, la prodigalité, ce qui fait apparaître par contraste tout conatus essendi comme plate satisfaction et parcimonie propres au dernier homme qui « veut se conserver ». Voilà pourquoi la justice de Nietzsche, la grande justice, est une qualité de la pensée et une vertu du philosophe dont la probité actualise sans cesse la puissance individuelle. (shrink)

August 27, 2018 marked eight hundred years since Pope Honorius III wrote a letter to Cardinal Hugolino.1 The cardinal had encountered various groups of pious women in Central Italy who wanted to live a life of poverty together. In fact, he had other things on his mind: the cities of Central Italy had to make peace with each other to enable their able-bodied men to join the Crusade to the Holy Land and Egypt, but Cardinal Hugolino took it upon himself (...) to take an interest in these women's fate. He asked the advice of the pope, who ordered Hugolino to free the women's communities from the authority of the bishops and place them directly under the Holy See. As a result, the women no longer depended on... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Plato's Timaeus as Cultural IconGerard NaddafGretchen J. Reydams-Schils, editor. Plato's Timaeus as Cultural Icon. Notre Dame, IN.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003. Pp. xiv + 334. Cloth, $59.95. Paper, $29.95.This volume emanates from an international conference entitled "Plato's Timaeus as Cultural Icon" held at the University of Notre Dame in 2000. In the introduction, the editor and organizer, Gretchen Reydams-Schils (GRS), contends that the title is meant (...) to communicate the considerable influence of Plato's Timaeus on so many different intellectual traditions and asks "What could account for this philosophical and cultural status?" (1).There are thirteen essays by distinguished specialists in the field. For some reason, a number of the essays do not focus on the general theme of the volume and the question GRS raises, "what could account for this philosophical and cultural status?" is never directly, or even indirectly, addressed. In this short review, I will examine the essays in their order of appearance and make some general comments at the end.Mitchell Miller, in the opening essay, argues that the Timaeus must be understood as addressed to a nonphilosophical audience, although he endeavors to show how the philosophically minded could interpret the Timaeus in light of the god-given method, the longer way, of the Philebus (16c-17a). With this in mind, Miller shows that the constitution of the elements and animals in the Timaeus was in fact determined in light of this method. From this perspective, the Timaeus is addressed not only to a nonphilosophical audience—albeit chiefly to these—but also to a philosophical audience.Kenneth Sayre discusses a number of inconsistencies and incoherences in Plato's description/analysis of the Receptacle and concludes that it is nothing short of a "failed experiment." Personally, I find Plato's analysis rather helpful in a manner analogous to the famous similes he employs in the Republic to help us grasp the Form of the Good. Meanwhile, there is nothing in the essay, as with Miller's essay, to indicate why the Timaeus would constitute a cultural icon (unless as a paradigm for opacity and thus as a catalyst for allegorical interpretation, but again this is not Sayre's intent). [End Page 335]John Dillon, with whom the notion of the Timaeus as a cultural icon begins to emerge, emphasizes that most of the members of the Old Academy, including Speusippus, Xenocrates, and Cantor, maintained (contra Aristotle) that Plato did not hold that the universe was created. While it is true, as he notes, that they were in a better position to interpret the master, the fact remains that they all had different interpretations. There is thus a sense in which Dillon's analysis confirms Miller's position that Plato meant the Timaeus for two very different audiences.Carlos Lévy focuses on the difficulty that Cicero had in translating the Timaeus without reverting to Stoic concepts. He argues that a Latin reader, unfamiliar with the Greek, would assume that transcendence is nonexistent and that mind and matter, as with the Stoics, are one. However, Lévy remains silent on why Cicero would not allow Plato to speak for himself, given that this appears to be the norm with many of his other interlocutors. Moreover, it is difficult again to see why the Timaeus would constitute a "cultural icon."Luc Brisson presents the Timaeus in a radical new light. He shows the extent to which the Timaeus, or more precisely the highly exegetical Middle Platonist interpretation of the work, was the primary reference text for the influential Chaldean Oracles. This is an excellent example of the iconic status of the Timaeus, but it is worth noting that the Chaldean Oracles themselves and their doctrine of salvation may have been historically more influential than the Timaeus itself.David Runia's essay is also an excellent example of the iconic influence of Plato's Timaeus, but unlike Brisson, he focuses on a particular feature of the cosmogonical account rather than the entire treatise: how the Timaeus influenced the debate, including with regard to the opening verses of Genesis, on first principles and the doctrine of creation. Runia... (shrink)

Defeasible reasoning is concerned with the logics of non-deductive argument. As is described in the literature, the study of this type of reasoning is considerably more involved than the study of deductive argument, even so that, in realistic applications, there is often a lack of resources to perform an exhaustive analysis. It follows that, in a theory of defeasible reasoning, the order and direction in which arguments are developed, i.e. theprocedure, is important. The aim of this article is to show (...) that debate is the most efficient procedure to argue in the presence of limited resources. To do so, there is first some general theory on defeasible argumentation, which is followed by an introduction to the problem of dialectical search. The problem of dialectical search is (or at least, should be) the essential issue in every theory on argumentation, and emerges at every occasion that involves adjudication on competing arguments. Starting with an example, it is explained that dialectical search can be best scheduled according to classical debating techniques, that work along well-tried methods. These methods (which include various forms of curtailment, interruption, and interpretation) have proven their value in keeping debating efforts within reasonable bounds. How they apply in a theory of formal argument, will be shown in this article. (shrink)

Danielle Cohen-Levinas (DCL) : Qu’est-ce qui se trouve pour Rosenzweig définitivement achevé après la guerre? C’est par cette question à bien des égards brutale, que j’aimerais entrer avec vous dans l’œuvre de Franz Rosenzweig, une œuvre complexe, qui déplace les interprétations hégéliennes de l’histoire, mais qui toutefois reste encore confidentielle, confinée à quelques cercles de savants, érudits, ou intellectuels qui ont trouvé chez ce philosophe un « agir » de la philosophie. Que ma pre...

Nos rencontres, les publiques et les autres, obéissaient à une pudique proximité où s’abritait le différend – que l’amitié, sans mot dire, tenait en bride. Entre nous, le discord s’emportait sur fond d’entente préalable et tacite. Pour dire autrement la même chose : un accord foncier, nourri de références et de lectures communes, partagées par lui et par moi, mais tout autant par une ou deux cohortes générationnelles – cet accord ne parvenait à se dire qu’à revenir sur des différences, (...) selon... (shrink)

La philosophie politique, dans sa tradition dominante, prend essentiellement en vue la possibilité d’une continuité plus ou moins harmonieuse entre personne et société, entre individu et communauté – que ce soit dans la figure du contrat, de l’association, du transfert de forces ou dans celle de l’universalité concrète de l’État. La pensée du politique autorisée par l’éthique de Levinas frappe de discontinuité les formes et les instances d’homogénéisation ou de dialectisation qui découlent de ce modèle. Elle propose une pensée de (...) l’altérité comme interruption radicale mais fragile des totalisations et des autonomisations de la politique. Dans le contraste entre visage et personne, entre proximité duelle et multiplicité des tiers, dans l’équivoque même de la personne, dans l’inspiration de la société et de la politique par ce qui vient avant elles, une pensée de la Justice s’esquisse, originale et profonde. (shrink)

Popper's methodology does not entail any playing down of the various indispensible distinctions such as the distinction between knowing and guessing, the distinction between myth and science, the distinction between the observational and the theoretical, and between the vernacular and technical sublanguages or technical vocabulary. By avoiding both the totalization that led to the foundationalist position and the scepticist reactions to these frustrated foundationalist hopes, Popper's methodology makes it possible to combine fallibilism with a realist view of theories. It combines (...) the perennial willingness to re-examine positions, statements, etc. with the claim that a particular theory (as an item of knowledge in the objective sense) constitutes cognitive progress over its rivals. However, some of his formulations have been deliberately provocative and in this way have given rise to certain misgivings about possible paradoxical implications, even in philosophers congenial with Popper's approach. The concept of knowledge in the objective sense is, of course, an explicatum which Popper proposes primarily for use in methodology and epistemology. The concept is an expression of the acknowledgment of fallibility in principle. The phrasing that ‘knowledge is conjectural’ or ‘knowledge is fallible’, even when it refers to knowledge in the objective sense, is but an abbreviation for: since our methods for ascertaining the truth-value of a particular statement about empirical reality are fallible in principle, there cannot be any certain knowledge about reality. In everyday life and in politics tolerance will be possible to the extent to which the recognition of this fallibility is more than a declaration. (shrink)

On a charge of murder or manslaughter it must be shown that the person killed was one who was in being. It is neither murder nor manslaughter to kill an unborn child while still in its mother’s womb although it may be the statutory offences of child destruction or abortion. If however the child is born alive and afterwards dies by reason of an unlawful act done to it in the mother’s womb or in the process of birth, the person (...) who committed that act is guilty of murder or manslaughter according to the intent with which the act is done. [Halsbury’s LAWS OF ENGLAND, 4th ed. reissue, Vol. 11 (1). London: Butterworths, 1990.]. (shrink)

Ce double numéro de _Noesis _est issu du colloque « Europe, État, fédéralisme » que Mélanie Plouviez et Pierre-Yves Quiviger ont organisé à la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme et de la Société Sud-Est (MSHS-SE), à Nice, du 3 au 5 octobre 2017, dans le cadre du programme de recherche en droit, en philosophie du droit et en philosophie politique, qui associe depuis 2010 le Laboratorio Hans Kelsen (LHK) de l’Università degli studi di Salerno ; l’équipe « Normes, Sociétés, Philosophies (...) » (NoSoPhi) de l’Institut des sciences juridique et philosophique de la Sorbonne à l’Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne (ISJPS) ; et, depuis 2012, le Centre de recherches en histoire des idées (CRHI) d’Université Côte d’Azur (UCA). Le choix du thème de l’Europe a été déterminé par le constat de l’accumulation des « crises européennes » depuis alors plus de dix ans : « constitutionnelle », « grecque », « des dettes souveraines », « de la zone euro », « ukrainienne », « des réfugié-e-s », « sécuritaire » ou e... (shrink)

Starting from the observation of the seriousness and recurrence of the “European crises” for more than fifteen years, this article proposes to study one of their main causes: the “midstream” that characterizes the contemporary political and institutional situation of Europe, in particular of the European Union, the eurozone and the Schengen area, that is, the unsustainable tension between, on the one hand, the irreducibly contradictory diversity of the member states of these institutions at this intermediate stage of their integration, and, (...) on the other hand, the necessity, for the overcoming of the crises, of the accomplishment of their integration into a European political unity. The main thesis of the article is that only such a unification could overcome the current crises, provided that it is open to the rest of the world, on the internal mode of hospitality and external mode of contribution to the unification of the world itself. (shrink)

Kubovy and Epstein distinguish between systems that follow rules, and those that merely instantiate them. They regard compliance with the principles of kinematic geometry in apparent motion as a case of instantiation. There is, however, some reason to believe that the human visual system internalizes the principles of kinematic geometry, even if it does not explicitly represent them. We offer functional resemblance as a criterion for internal representation. [Kubovy & Epstein].

The paper presents the results of two vignette studies that examine how company breastfeeding accommodation influences ratings of organizational attractiveness and work-related intentions. North American business students and employees engaged in long-term employment found organizations that accommodate breastfeeding to be more fair, attractive, and were more likely to apply to them, and accept jobs from them, than organizations that did not accommodate. Effects were stronger for female participants than for male participants. Female participants without children indicated lower support for breastfeeding (...) accommodation than female participants with children and male participants. (shrink)

When examined in terms of hermeneutical principles, the revised lectionaries turn out to be distinct improvements. But it is precisely the hermeneutical function of a lectionary that raises the most important questions about the newer ones and calls for a continuing effort to bring them in line with the intention of the whole of Scripture and the principles of interpretation appropriate to it.

Esse livro reúne os textos críticos dispersos de Gérard Lebrun sobre a filosofia crítica de um dos maiores filósofos do idealismo alemão,Immanuel Kant, tornando-os agora acessíveis à maioria do público, que não tem o hábito de consultar revistas especializadas em filosofia.

... OU RÉALISME? L'aventure est trop courante dans la vie d'un érudit qu'il décide de lui-même ou à la demande d'autrui d'aborder un sujet qu'il croit ou ...

There is hardly any university, college, or even high school left where they do not teach Darwinism—and rightly so. Yet, most of these places do more preaching than teaching. They teach more than they should, and at the same time, they teach less than they should. This book wants to evaluate Darwin’s legacy from a philosophical viewpoint by trying to analyze the strong points as well as the weak points of what came to be known as neo-Darwinism.

_The first comprehensive one-volume collection of St.Thomas More’s writing__ “[A] tremendous scholarly undertaking.... Accessible and transparent to both scholars and the general audience.”—_Renaissance and Reformation__ In this book, Wegemer and Smith assemble More’s most important English and Latin works for the first time in a single volume. This volume reveals the breadth of More’s writing and includes a rich selection of illustrations and artwork. The book provides the most complete picture of More’s work available, serving as a major resource for (...) early modern scholars, teachers, students, and the general reader. (shrink)