Les statues de la Vierge qui sont l'objet d'une dévotion particulièrement intense ont été et sont encore, dans bien des régions de l'Europe catholique, habillées de vêtements réels. La coutume réserve presqu'exclusivement à des femmes le droit de les changer, et donc de voir et de toucher le corps de la statue. L'Église, pourtant, n'accorde qu'aux prêtres le droit de manipuler les objets sacrés, et les femmes, on le sait, ne peuvent accéder à la prêtrise. Comment comprendre, par conséquent, que (...) les « chambrières » de la Vierge soient des femmes ? Comment assument-elles leur fonction et quel sens lui donnent-elles ? (shrink)

Organe de l’Instituto de Estudios de la Mujer (Institut d’Études sur la Femme) de Grenade, la revue Arenal contient des varia (recensions, articles divers, annonces etc.) et un dossier thématique. Intitulé, dans cette livraison, « Genre et imaginaire religieux : Marie et les femmes », il est coordonné par Angela Muñoz Fernández, qui a signé aussi un de ses articles les plus stimulants. On regrette qu’elle n’ait pas rédigé une présentation générale du numéro ; sa problématique est, cependant,...

Les données dont on dispose sur les apparitions mariales du xixe et du début du xxe siècle montrent que les visionnaires de sexe féminin sont largement majoritaires, à l’inverse des apparitions médiévales qui ont laissé des traces dans les archives. Cette féminisation participe de la « féminisation du catholicisme » qui caractérise le xixe siècle, mais elle ne concerne cependant pas toutes les femmes : les visionnaires reconnues par les catholiques et leur Église sont presque exclusivement des fillettes et des (...) jeunes filles. C’est l’indice d’une valorisation renforcée de la virginité féminine par l’Église catholique, qui contribue à renforcer la proximité entre « la Vierge et ses filles ». (shrink)

Au centre des fêtes patronales de la haute vallée d’Ossau, celles de Laruns et Bielle plus particulièrement, forment une manifestation que le visiteur est tenté de qualifier de folklorique : des danses traditionnelles, exécutées sur la place centrale par des hommes et des femmes vêtus d’un costume également traditionnel. Ce costume, particulièrement celui des femmes, est très valorisé localement. Le but de cet article est de comprendre les raisons de cette valorisation. On y montre que le processus de folklorisation des (...) coutumes de la vallée, qui commence dès le milieu du xixe siècle et a été une des conditions de leur conservation, n’a pas ôté tout sens social au costume de fête : les femmes, ou une partie d’entre elles, ne le mettent pas seulement pour offrir un beau spectacle aux touristes venus voir les danses ossaloises mais parce qu’il cristallise l’histoire familiale et locale. La jupe rouge témoignerait ainsi du statut privilégié des femmes dans le passé de la société ossaloise. (shrink)

Ce livre consacré aux apparitions de Medjugorje, un bourg de Bosnie-Herzégovine, dans l’ex-Yougoslavie, s’ouvre sur le portrait d’un homme qui, frappé d’amnésie, ne sait plus où il se trouve et ne cesse de s’en enquérir auprès de tous ceux qu’il rencontre : les réponses qu’il obtient le perdent davantage : « Vous êtes chez la Sainte Vierge », « Vous êtes à Medjugorje », « Vous êtes en Bosnie », « Vous êtes dans un pèlerinage ». S’il avait pu s’adresser (...) aux habitants du village en parlant leur... (shrink)

À propos du livre récent de Marlène Albert Llorca, Les Vierges miraculeuses, l’auteur survole rapidement les conclusions de recherches récentes sur l’image religieuse dans l’Europe traditionnelle. Il examine les manières dont les dévots convertissent des images en objets cultuels en les associant à des laïcs importants et aux sanctuaires qui les accueillent. Il commente les conclusions d’Albert Llorca selon lesquelles ces images, vêtues pour la circonstance, peuvent servir à répliquer le “miracle” originel pour les dévots qui manipulent ces vêtements (...) ; ainsi se rejouent les événements miraculeux censés être à l’origine du charisme de l’image. C’est donc l’imaginaire de la communauté, incarné dans les “cameraras” qui habillent l’image, qui dote celle-ci de pouvoirs miraculeux. (shrink)

Charles Sanders Peirce is generally regarded as the founder of pragmatism, and one of the greatest ever American philosophers. Peirce is also widely known for his work on truth, his foundational work in mathematical logic, and an influential theory of signs, or semiotics. Albert Atkin introduces the full spectrum of Peirce’s thought for those coming to his work for the first time. The book begins with an overview of Peirce’s life and work, considering his early and long-standing interest in logic (...) and science, and highlighting important views on the structure of philosophical thought. Atkin then explains Peirce’s accounts of pragmatism and truth examining important later developments to these theories. He then introduces Peirce’s full accounts of semiotics, examines his foundational work on formal and graphical logic, and introduces Peirce’s account of metaphysics, the least understood aspect of his philosophy. The final chapter considers Peirce’s legacy and influence on the thought of philosophers such as John Dewey and Richard Rorty, as well as highlighting areas where Peirce’s ideas could still provide important insights for contemporary philosophers. Including chapter summaries, suggestions for further reading and a glossary, this invaluable introduction and guide to Peirce’s philosophy is essential reading for those new to his work. (shrink)

The first English collection of the work of Albert Lautman, a major figure in philosophy of mathematics and a key influence on Badiou and Deleuze.

America is a wonderful and magnificent country that affords its citizens the broadest freedoms and the greatest prosperity in the world. But it also has its share of warts. It is embroiled in a war that many of its citizens consider unjust and even illegal. It continues to ravage the natural environment and ignore poverty both at home and abroad, and its culture is increasingly driven by materialism and consumerism. But America, for better or for worse, is still a nation (...) that we have built. So why then, asks Albert Borgmann in this most timely and urgent work, are we failing to take responsibility for it? In Real American Ethics , Borgmann asks us to reevaluate our role in the making of American values. Taking his cue from Winston Churchill—who once observed that we shape our buildings, and then our buildings shape us—Borgmann considers the power of our most enduring institutions and the condition of our present moral makeup to propose inspired new ways in which we, as ordinary citizens, can act to improve our country. This, he shows, includes everything from where we choose to live and what we spend our money on to daunting tasks like the reshaping of our cities—habits and actions that can guide us to more accomplished and virtuous lives. Using prose that is easy and direct throughout, Borgmann’s position is grounded neither by conservative nor liberal ideology, but in his understanding that he is a devoted citizen among many. In an age in which the blame game is the only game in town, this patriotic book is an eloquent reminder of the political strength we all wield when we work together. (shrink)

This eighth volume in the highly praised Study of Time series presents articles that fall into three broad categories: life and time as they are understood in the biological, cognitive, and psychological dimensions; the experience of time and life in words, sounds, and images; and time and life as ordered according to sociological, historical, and anthropological perspectives. The International Society for the Study of Time (ISST) is largely composed of the very academics whose early training and research have encouraged them (...) to specialized in subjects of less and less scope. But the very interdisciplinary nature of a society of heterogenous scholars from over 30 countries in more than 20 disciplines committed to the study of time is bound to broaden the perspective of those who are thus engaged. Furthermore, the insistence on delivering papers in plenary session - and in a milieu which has always proved to be a delight to the eyes, the mind, and the body - invariably encourages highly productive, jargon free, and very profitable discussions throughout the day and in smaller groups often late into the night. How does time and life apply to music, technology, philosophy, physics, film, and so much more? The pleasant pain and the resulting creative energy that derive from being obliged to view one's subject in a newer and broader perspective produced the excellent papers chosen for presentation at the conference. And that same creative energy is presented here in the more Apollonian form of the papers selected by their external readers and the editors, as Dimensions of Time and Life. (shrink)

Winner of the Bernard J. Brommel Award for Biography & Memoir Best Graphic Novels of the Year--Forbes Jewish Book Award Finalist Finalist for the Chautauqua Prize For Persepolis and Logicomix fans, a New Yorker cartoonist’s page-turning graphic biography of the fascinating Hannah Arendt, the most prominent philosopher of the twentieth century. One of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century and a hero of political thought, the largely unsung and often misunderstood Hannah Arendt is best known for her landmark 1951 (...) book on openness in political life,The Origins of Totalitarianism, which, with its powerful and timely lessons for today, has become newly relevant. She led an extraordinary life. This was a woman who endured Nazi persecution firsthand, survived harrowing "escapes" from country to country in Europe, and befriended such luminaries as Walter Benjamin and Mary McCarthy, in a world inhabited by everyone from Marc Chagall and Marlene Dietrich to Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud. A woman who finally had to give up her unique genius for philosophy, and her love of a very compromised man--the philosopher and Nazi-sympathizer Martin Heidegger--for what she called "love of the world." Compassionate and enlightening, playful and page-turning, New Yorker cartoonist Ken Krimstein's The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt is a strikingly illustrated portrait of a complex, controversial, deeply flawed, and irrefutably courageous woman whose intelligence and "virulent truth telling" led her to breathtaking insights into the human condition, and whose experience continues to shine a light on how to live as an individual and a public citizen in troubled times. (shrink)

Sweet describes the pragmatic foundations of standard logic and applies these foundations to the task of developing a theory of intended models as an extension of standard model theory in which the relevant "intending" is represented pragmatically. Methods of formal logic are used to investigate the structure of the relation between language and the world. The truism which holds that this relation includes the speaker as well as the object spoken about is formally explicated and applied to the problem of (...) illuminating one of the deepest phenomena in standard model theory: the existence of non-isomorphic models of complete theories. To this end it is shown that standard logic admits pragmatic foundations upon which a theory of intended models can be built as an extension of standard model theory. The relevant "intending" is represented by the very forms of verbal behavior which determine the grammatical and logical structure of the sentences whose referential meaning is in question. The uniqueness properties of the class of intended models may then be described. The first section of the book states the immediate goal of standard pragmatics as that of recovering the algebraic structure first-order logic by means of a purely pragmatic construction. The second section, the major portion of the work, then provides the foundation for a semiotic theory of intended models and referential meaning. The theory is then applied to the problem of referential indeterminancy, which has been associated with the phenomenon of scientific revolutions. The theory is also applied to the problem of the apparent synonymy of observationally equivalent theories. Sweet concludes that such theories are not referentially synonymous in any natural sense which is analogous to the paradigm sense in which theories of alternative scales of measurement are referentially synonymous. A novel feature of this book is the formal explication of the idea that the factors, pragmatical in nature, which distinguish the actual meaning of a sentence from among its possible meanings, whose range is defined by the manner in which the sentence is parsed, determine that very parsing. Applicability to natural language of the model-theoretic semantics thereby obtained is made possible by another feature of the book: the development of a theory of locally standard grammar which provides the foundation for representing the structure of natural language as that of standard first-order logic, in a local, as distinguished from a global, sense. This book is intended for scholars in logic, semiotics, and the philosophies of language and of science. Those concerned specifically with such philosophers as Peirce, Martin, and Davidson will also find the study valuable. (shrink)

Sartre importe à l'histoire vivante de la philosophie sous plusieurs angles. Héritier de Hegel qui le hante, il conteste celui-ci dans sa conviction « totaliste ». S'il reste fidèle au dynamisme hégélien, à l'interrogation constante du vécu, il les traduit pourtant par nos langages présents.

Some 2300 years ago, Hellenic Philosophy had already produced some rather sophisticated theories of human psychological functioning as well as most of the broad theoretical controversies which characterize the contemporary psychological stage. Democritus, for example, had put forth a theory of thinking and action which emphasized the physiological components of the person and looked to immediate environmental antecedents as explanations for what we did. Plato, by contrast, insisted upon the formal rule-governed characteristics of human thinking as basic to intellect and (...) denied the possibility that these could be acquired piecemeal through experience with environmental events. Nor would he accept the relevance of physiological descriptions for answering psychological questions. The following centuries have witnessed both the intensification of these controversies and their proliferation into new scientific and societal spheres, as intellectual fashions have favored now one and then another theoretic orientation. A resolution to many such controversies was proposed by Aristotle in the course of formulating his developmental and teleological doctrine of Man, and the logic of this mode of resolution still has great relevance today for the evaluation of psychological theories. In Aristotle's account, a new approach to the concept of causality evolved, an approach that paid special attention to how the term "causes" should be applied to biological events. Moreover, this approach to causality was highly successful in integrating biological phenomena with an understanding of the nature of causes for psychological phenomena. The explication of this account demonstrated that "why" explanations and "how" explanations of action could and should be used concurrently and also demonstrated that many psychological controversies were based on pseudo-issues. This approach, and particularly its relevance to developmental psychology, will be outlined here. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)