Leo Strauss's readings of historical figures in the philosophical tradition have been justly well explored; however, his relation to contemporary thinkers has not enjoyed the same coverage. In Leo Strauss and Contemporary Thought, an international group of scholars examines the possible conversations between Strauss and figures such as Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Charles Taylor, and Hans Blumenberg. The contributors examine topics including religious liberty, the political function of comedy, law, and the relation between the Ancients and the (...) Moderns, and bring Strauss into many new and original discussions that will be of use to those interested in the thought of Strauss, the history of philosophy and political theory, and contemporary continental thought"--Back cover. (shrink)

This review-essay looks at three texts from, or about, the early days of the Situationist International. The first volume of Guy Debord’s Correspondence reveals the SI’s internal discussions during their decisive first three years; Bernstein’s book represents an example of the continued relevance of the technique of détournement; while Wark’s text demonstrates both the breadth of the Situationist project and that, despite being continually mined by the academy, activists, the creative industries, and other more sinister recuperators, their work has (...) not been depleted of its vitality. Taken together, the three books undermine a series of preconceptions about the SI, namely in terms of Debord’s role at the centre of the group and the SI’s engagement with the forces of the ‘spectacled’. (shrink)

_John Dewey and Continental Philosophy_ provides a rich sampling of exchanges that could have taken place long ago between the traditions of American pragmatism and continental philosophy had the lines of communication been more open between Dewey and his European contemporaries. Since they were not, Paul Fairfield and thirteen of his colleagues seek to remedy the situation by bringing the philosophy of Dewey into conversation with several currents in continental philosophical thought, from post-Kantian idealism and the work of Friedrich Nietzsche (...) to twentieth-century phenomenology, hermeneutics, and poststructuralism. This unique volume includes discussions comparing and contrasting Dewey with the German philosophers G. W. F. Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Hans-Georg Gadamer on such topics as phenomenology, naturalism, organicism, contextualism, and poetry. Others investigate a series of connections between Dewey and contemporary French philosophy, including the notions of subjectivity, education, and the critique of modernity in Michel Foucault; language and politics in Jacques Derrida; and the concept of experience in Gilles Deleuze. Also discussed is the question of whether we can identify traces of _Bildung_ in Dewey’s writings on education, and pragmatism’s complex relation to twentieth-century phenomenology and hermeneutics, including the problematic question of whether Heidegger was a pragmatist in any meaningful sense. Presented in intriguing pairings, these thirteen essays offer different approaches to the material that will leave readers with much to deliberate. _ John Dewey and Continental Philosophy_ demonstrates some of the many connections and opportunities for cross-traditional thinking that have long existed between Dewey and continental thought, but have been under-explored. The intersection presented here between Dewey’s pragmatism and the European traditions makes a significant contribution to continental and American philosophy and will spur new and important developments in the American philosophical debate. (shrink)

Our work is aimed at studying the optimization of a complex motor behaviour from a global perspective. First, free climbing as a sport will be briefly introduced while emphasizing in particular its psychomotor aspect called route finding. The basic question raised here is how does the optimization of a sensorimotoricity-environment system take place. The material under study is the free climber's trajectory, viewed as the signature of climbing behaviour (i.e., the spatial dimension). The concepts of learning, optimization, constraint, and degrees (...) of freedom of a system will be discussed using the synergistic approach to the study of movement (Bernstein, 1967; Kelso, 1977). Measures of a trajectory's length and convex hull can be used to define an index whose equation resembles that of an entropy. This index is a measure of the trajectory's overall complexity. Some important concepts related to the thermodynamics of curves will also be discussed. The optimization process will be studied by examining the changes in entropy over time for a set of trajectories generated during the learning of a route (ten successive repetitions of the same climb). It will be shown that the entropy of the trajectories decreases as learning progresses, that each level of expertise has its own characteristic entropy curve, and that for the subjects tested, the mean entropy of skilled climbers is lower than that of average climbers. Basing our analysis on the concepts of degrees of freedom and constraint equations, an attempt is made to relate trajectory entropy to system entropy. Based on the postulate that trajectory entropy is equal to the difference in entropy between the unconstrained and constrained system, a model of motor optimization is proposed. This model is illustrated by an entropy graph reflecting a dynamic release process. In the light of our results, two opposing views will be examined: movement construction vs. movement emergence. (shrink)

In a historical situation characterised by crisis, wars and widespread protests the question of the relationship between past Left-revolutionary endeavours and present political challenges is of utmost importance for the possibility of mounting an anti-systemic challenge to capitalism. T. J. Clark’s essay ‘For a Left with No Future’ argues that the future-oriented stance of the 19th and 20th Century Left turned the Left into a disastrous dobbel- gänger of capitalist modernity causing havoc and death instead of being a genuine opposition (...) to capitalism. The great refusals have to be replaced with a ‘modest’ and more ‘realistic’ approach, Clark argues, enabling the Left to understand the human propensity to violence and therefore engaging in a kind of anti-war activism. This article rejects Clark’s analysis and tries to save the revolutionary perspective Clark is trying to get rid of arguing that it is indeed the Left that we have to bury. Juxtaposing Clark’s argument with a reading of Michèle Bernstein’s ‘Victories of the Proletariat’ made as part of the 1963 Situationist exhibition ‘Destruction of RSG-6’ the article attempts to contribute to the re-formulation of a contemporary revolutionary position on the basis of the breakdown of the programmatic Left. (shrink)

Some proponents of the Integrated Information Theory of consciousness profess strong views on the Neural Correlates of Consciousness, namely that large swathes of the neocortex, the cerebellum, at least some sensory cortices, and the so-called limbic system are all not essential for any form of conscious experiences. We argue that this connection is not incidental. Conflation between strong and weak versions of the theory has led these researchers to adopt definitions of NCC that are inconsistent with their own previous definitions, (...) inadvertently betraying the promises of an otherwise fruitful empirical endeavour. (shrink)

The history of research on pseudoalleles, closely linked genes that have similar functions, is rich and complex. Because pseudoalleles’ proximity on the chromosome makes their distinction by the complementation tests traditionally used by geneticists difficult, and because they have similar functions, they were initially often considered as allelic forms of the same gene, hence their name. The Hox cluster is an emblematic example of a pseudoallelic gene complex. The first observations of pseudoalleles were made very early but remained puzzling until (...) a simple model explaining their formation and characteristics emerged in the middle of the 1930s. This model suggested that pseudoalleles originated by gene.. (shrink)

In this 1966 interview, published here in English translation for the first time, Michel Foucault positions himself as a representative of a ‘generation’ of French thinkers who turned towards the analysis of ‘structures’ and away from the phenomenological approaches that had previously dominated French philosophy. In this, Foucault claims inspiration not only from older French scholars—namely Georges Dumézil, Jacques Lacan, and Claude Lévi-Strauss—but also from the science of genetics.

This study examines how hunger narratives and performances contribute to a reconsideration of neglected or prohibited domains of thinking which only a full confrontation with the body's heterogeneity and plasticity can reveal. From literary motif or psychosomatic symptom to revolutionary gesture or existential malady, the double crux of hunger and disgust is a powerful force which can define the experience of embodiment. Kafka's fable of the "Hunger Artist" offers a matrix for the fast, while its surprising last-page revelation introduces disgust (...) as a correlative of abstinence, conscious or otherwise. Grounded in Kristeva's theory of abjection, the figure of the fraught body lurking at the heart of the negative grotesque gathers precision throughout this study, where it is employed in a widening series of contexts: suicide through overeating, starvation as self-performance or political resistance, the teratological versus the totalitarian, the anorexic harboring of death. In the process, writers and artists as diverse as Herman Melville, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Christina Rossetti, George Orwell, Knut Hamsun, J.M. Coetzee, Cindy Sherman, Pieter Breughel, Marina Abramovic, David Nebreda, Paul McCarthy, and others are brought into the discussion. By looking at the different acts of visceral, affective, and ideological resistance performed by the starving body, this book intensifies the relationship between hunger and disgust studies while offering insight into the modalities of the "dark grotesque" which inform the aesthetics and politics of hunger. It will be of value to anyone interested in the culture, politics, and subjectivity of embodiment, and scholars working within the fields of disgust studies, food studies, literary studies, cultural theory, and media studies. (shrink)

This article explains how strong sustainability ethics has emerged and developed as a new field over the last two decades as a critical response to influential conceptions of weak sustainability. It investigates three competing, normative approaches to strong sustainability: the communitarian approach, the Rawlsian approach, and the capabilities approach. Although these approaches converge around the idea that there are critical, non-substitutable natural resources and services, they diverge on how to reconcile human development and environmental protection. The aim of the paper (...) is to provide a critical overview of these three perspectives, but also and mostly to show that when we put them into dialogue with each other, we can clarify the demands of sustainability. The paper concludes that the capabilities approach is the most suitable way to think about sustainability, but only if it goes beyond its dominantly anthropocentric view. (shrink)

Quantum Mechanics has imposed strain on traditional (dualist and representationalist) epistemological conceptions. An alternative was offered by Bohr and Heisenberg, according to whom natural science does not describe nature, but rather the interplay between nature and ourselves. But this was only a suggestion. In this paper, a systematic development of the Bohr-Heisenberg conception is outlined, by way of a comparison with the modern self-organizational theories of cognition. It is shown that a perfectly consistent non-representationalist (and/or relational) reading of quantum mechanics (...) can be reached thus. (shrink)

Vers la fin du vie s.apr. J.‑C., le forum de Philippes est devenu une place de village, en fort contraste avec l’intense activité de construction d’églises qu’avait connue le centre de la ville dans la première moitié du siècle. Ce retour à la ruralité s’inscrit dans un courant plus général qui affecte alors les Balkans, mais la présente note étudie l’hypothèse que l’épidémie dite « peste de Justinien » a eu un fort impact à Philippes. Une vague connue à Constantinople (...) en 573‑574 a atteint Thessalonique en juillet 586 et a dû passer par Philippes. Ce facteur qui n’a pas été invoqué jusqu’ici pourrait expliquer les enterrements en masse très mal connus et mal datés observés par Paul Lemerle dans la basilique B, l’abandon de la construction de cette église en raison de la diminution des moyens financiers et surtout humains qui pouvaient lui être consacrés, et le déclin de la forme urbaine de la vie collective qui ne correspondait plus aux besoins d’une population devenue moins nombreuse. (shrink)

Marx's work is dual, and includes both a philosophical and an economic aspect. The philosophical work was developed with great speed between 1842 and 1846 in a series of extraordinary texts, notably the Critique of the Hegelian State, the third manuscript of 1844, and The German Ideology (1845–6). It is a philosophy unlike anything that had gone before it and is without equal. It was destined to shake the foundations of Western thought. Such is its originality, in fact, that it (...) remains misunderstood even today. (shrink)

RÉSUMÉDifférentes méthodes ?identification des systèmes ont été développées par les informaticiens qui consistent à déterminer à partir de ľobservation des grandeurs ?entrée et de sortie de ce système, les relations de cause à effet qu'il établit entre ces grandeurs.Cet exposé rappelle le principe des méthodes ?identification 〈statique〉 et 〈dyna‐mique〉, et conclut que ces méthodes peuvent être considéréd comme un exemple ?applications des approches définies par la philosophic de ľouverture pour ľacqui‐sition de nouvelles connaissances.

It is presumed that the evolution of morphological diversity in animals and plants is driven by changes in the developmental processes that govern morphology, hence basically by changes in the function and/or expression of a defined set of genes that control these processes. A large body of evidence has suggested that changes in developmental gene regulation are the predominant mechanisms that sustain morphological evolution, being much more important than the evolution of the primary sequences and functions of proteins. Recent reports1, (...) 2 challenge this idea by highlighting functional evolution of Hox proteins during the evolutionary history of arthropods. BioEssays 24:775–779, 2002. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)