L’apparition de données quantitatives en archéologie, puis des outils de gestion dont on commence seulement à maîtriser le développement, imposent de façon concomitante aux professionnels une réflexion de fond sur l’évolution de leur discipline : il importe en effet, au moment où l’on met en œuvre des outils nouveaux, de s’interroger sur les conséquences des transformations en cours sur le processus scientifique. Au-delà d'une démarche épistémologique, cet article interroge le caractère novateur que peut représenter la gestion de données de plus (...) en plus nombreuses. Il propose surtout de voir, dans la mutualisation de ces données, une nouveauté liée à la conjugaison de diverses décisions (liées à la recherche tant publique que privée), et un changement de paradigme dans la constitution des savoirs. Si la documentation est partagée par tous, le caractère innovant de la réflexion se déplace, non pas vers la maîtrise de données nouvelles, mais bien vers la capacité des acteurs scientifiques à exploiter ces données de façon différente. (shrink)

“ S pace, K no w l edge and P o w e r ” , en tr ev i s t a r ea l i z a d a en 1982 y pub li cada en P aul R ab i no w , The Foucau l t R eade r , N ueva Y o r k, 1984. A quí se pub li ca de acue r do a l a ve r s i ón f r (...) ancesa, t r aduc i da por P ab l o Bli t s t e i n y Tadeo L im a. (shrink)

Translator's preface -- Introduction: The question of phenomenology -- Hyletic phenomenology and material phenomenology -- The phenomenological method -- Pathos-with reflections on Husserl's Fifth cartesian meditation -- For a phenomenology of community.

Aesthetics: 50 Puzzles, Paradoxes, and Thought Experiments is a teaching-focused resource, which highlights the contributions that imaginative scenarios—paradoxes, puzzles, and thought experiments alike—have made to the development of contemporary analytic aesthetics. The book is divided into sections pertaining to art-making, ontology, aesthetic judgements, appreciation and interpretation, and ethics and value, and offers an accessible summary of ten debates falling under each section. -/- Each entry also features a detailed annotated bibliography, making it an ideal companion for courses surveying a broad (...) collection of topics and readings in aesthetics. (shrink)

This seminal, multidisciplinary book shows how mathematics can be used to study the first principles of DNA. Most importantly, it enriches the so-called "Chargaff's grammar of biology" by providing the conceptual theoretical framework necessary to generalize Chargaff's rules. Starting with a simple example of DNA mathematical modeling where human nucleotide frequencies are associated to the Fibonacci sequence and the Golden Ratio through an optimization problem, its breakthrough is showing that the reverse, complement and reverse-complement operators defined over oligonucleotides induce a (...) natural set partition of DNA words of fixed-size. These equivalence classes, when organized into a matrix form, reveal hidden patterns within the DNA sequence of every living organism. Intended for undergraduate and graduate students both in mathematics and in life sciences, it is also a valuable resource for researchers interested in studying invariant genomic properties. (shrink)

"Depuis l'embryon lové dans le ventre de sa mère, jusqu'aux métropoles qui couvrent la Terre de leurs lumières permanentes, les humains ont inventé de nombreuses façons d'habiter. Mais les animaux et, plus étonnant, les végétaux avaient déjà exploré de nombreux modes d'habitat. Michel Serres nous dévoile les secrets de ces architectures séduisantes et multiples, nous en montre le sens et les mots, et esquisse ainsi le monde de demain." Présentation de l'éditeur.

Michel Serres is one of the most influential living theorists in European philosophy. This volume makes available a work which has a foundational place in the development of chaos theory, representing a tour de force application of the principles underlying Serres' distinctive philosophy of science.

The aim of this paper is twofold: The general aim is to shed light on the structure of species discoveries new to biology by bringing together a practice-oriented philosophy of science perspective with a philosophy of language perspective. The more specific aim is to argue that and to show how the overall structure of biological species discoveries comprises aspects of both institutional and non-institutional reality. The author proceeds as follows: he shows that placing the focus on the topic of scientific (...) discoveries enables us to circumvent two long-standing problems. He analyzes three fictional cases of discoveries in order to bring about a greater sensitivity for the concept of discovery. He takes a closer look at a real example – the discovery of a deep-sea anglerfish – and identifies the main structural features of species discovery processes in biology. In order to connect these results with Searle’s account of institutional reality, he provides an overview of the conceptual apparatus needed here. In bringing Searle’s account together with the structural features of species discoveries developed before, he shows to what extent declarative speech acts play a central role in species discovery processes in biology. (shrink)

A part of the “return to religion” now evident in European philosophy, this book represents the culmination of the career of a leading phenomenological thinker whose earlier works trace a trajectory from Marx through a genealogy of psychoanalysis that interprets Descartes’s “I think, I am” as “I feel myself thinking, I am.” In this book, Henry does not ask whether Christianity is “true” or “false.” Rather, what is in question here is what Christianity considers as truth, what kind of truth (...) it offers to people, what it endeavors to communicate to them, not as a theoretical and indifferent truth, but as the essential truth that by some mysterious affinity is suitable for them, to the point that it alone is capable of ensuring them salvation. In the process, Henry inevitably argues against the concept of truth that dominates modern thought and determines, in its multiple implications, the world in which we live. Henry argues that Christ undoes “the truth of the world,” that He is an access to the infinity of self-love, to a radical subjectivity that admits no outside, to the immanence of affective life found beyond the despair fatally attached to all objectifying thought. The Kingdom of God accomplishes itself in the here and now through the love of Christ in what Henry calls “the auto-affection of Life.” In this condition, he argues, all problems of lack, ambivalence, and false projection are resolved. (shrink)

Bd. 1. Georg Lukács' Realismus. Das Frühwerk.

La question du phénomène précède de beaucoup la phénoménologie, elle s'ouvre avec la philosophie et l'accompagne tout au long de son histoire. Mais ce préalable incontournable - car être veut dire apparaître - est surdéterminé par une présupposition irréfléchie. De la Grèce à Heidegger, dans les problématiques classiques de la conscience et de la représentation, dans leurs critiques, dans la phénoménologie de l'intentionnalité et dans ses prolongements, "phénomène" désigne ce qui se montre à l'intérieur d'un horizon de visihilisation, l'Ek-stase d'un (...) Dehors. La mise en cause de ce monisme ontologique établit que l'Ekstase ne subsiste que sur le Fond de son anti-essence : immanence si radicale qu'elle ne se tient jamais à distance, incapable de se voix, âme sans Idée, vie dépourvue d'archétype mais liée à soi invinciblement, s'éprouvant dans le subir, le souffrir et le jouir de son propre pathos. Parce que, avant que ne se lève le monde, une Affectivité transcendantale accomplit en nous son Archi-Révélation en même temps qu'elle engendre notre ipséité, ce sont d'autres catégories, d'autres penseurs, une nouvelle phénoménologie qui sont requis si nous voulons parvenir, enfin, à l'intelligence de ce que nous sommes. (shrink)

Les études que nous rassemblons ici font écho aux débats les plus récents sur la philosophie des mathématiques de Wittgenstein, qui est bien certainement l'aspect le plus controversé de son œuvre. Elles sont, pour l'essentiel, consacrées au statut et aux fonctions des preuves mathématiques et aux "réactions" du philosophe aux théorèmes de Gödel. C'est dire qu'elles tournent autour de l'anti-platonisme foncier de Wittgenstein en philosophie des mathématiques et de son refus catégorique de toute méta-mathématique. E. R.

Julian Dodd has characterized the default position in metaphysics as meta-ontologically realist: the answers to first-order ontological questions are thought to be entirely independent of the things we say and think about the entities at issue. Consequently, folk ontologies are liable to substantial error. But while this epistemic humility is commendable where the ontology of natural kinds is concerned, it seems misplaced with respect to social kinds since their ontology is dependent upon the human social world. Using art and art-kinds (...) as paradigmatic examples of social kinds, I argue that meta-ontological realism sets conditions that are too strict to apply to social kinds. Nevertheless, I argue that we should not be too quick to embrace the conclusion that our folk theories of social kinds cannot err substantially. By modelling the reference of social kind-terms on that of natural kind-terms, it becomes clear that in both cases, our sole epistemic privilege lies in our ability to pinpoint the subject of our inquiries. (shrink)

This paper is part II of a trilogy on the transition from classical particle mechanics to relativistic continuum mechanics that one of the authors is working on. The first part, on the Trouton experiment, was published in the Stachel festschrift (Janssen 2003). This paper focuses on the Lorentz-Poincaré electron, and, in particular, on the "Poincaré pressure" or "Poincaré stresses" introduced to stabilize the electron. It covers both the original argument by Poincaré (1906) and a modern relativistic argument for adding a (...) negative pressure term to the system's energy-momentum tensor inspired by the work of Laue (1911a, b). It highlights the importance of a paper by Lorentz (1899) in this context and of the "electromagnetic mechanics" of Abraham (1903). (shrink)

Cette étude dégage la critique de James de l’ontologie et de la psychologie de la substance en suivant une double piste : après avoir spécifié le contexte dans lequel se déploie l’argumentation jamesienne, on montre les difficultés qu’affronte la pensée substantialiste et la réponse qu’apporte, parfois implicitement, James. On montre particulièrement la corrélation qui existe entre la pensée du processus et une nouvelle conception de la conscience.

In the course of his work on optics and electrodynamics in systems moving through the ether, the 19th-century medium for light waves and electric and magnetic fields, Lorentz discovered and exploited the invariance of the free-field Maxwell equations under what Poincaré later proposed to call Lorentz transformations. To account for the negative results of optical experiments aimed at detecting the earth’s motion through the ether, Lorentz, in effect, assumed that the laws governing matter interacting with light waves are Lorentz invariant (...) as well. Like Lorentz, Einstein first encountered the Lorentz transformations in electrodynamics. Unlike Lorentz, for whom the transformation merely provided convenient mathematical substitutions, but like Poincaré, Einstein recognized that the Lorentz-transformed quantities are the measured quantities for the moving observer. More importantly, Einstein recognized that the Lorentz invariance of all physical laws had nothing to do with electrodynamics per se, but reflected the kinematics in a new relativistic space-time, to be named after Minkowski who worked out its geometry a few years later. (shrink)

I examine critically the application of information‐theoretic ideas to biological communication during embryonic development and in the functioning central nervous system (CNS). I show that intercellular communication relies mostly on simple signals whose role is to effect a selection among predetermined cellular states. Hence, a crucial role is played by cellular memory, which stabilizes such states. Memory in cells is partly located in the nuclear DNA; no less important however is (phenotypic) memory lying in the cell's organelles and compartments. Because (...) of combinatorial effects in gene expression patterns, cell memory is an enormously powerful mechanism, which also underlies plasticity, and thus constitutes the factor unifying genetic determination, plasticity and learning. Communication in the CNS is analyzed in some detail: here, cellular memory is embodied in anatomy (i.e., cell shape) and neurochemistry. These are the major, relatively “static” factors affecting the routing of neural impulses in the adult CNS. In addition, however, faster channeling is also required: action potentials must be directed to their targets along a few of exponentially many paths, and this dynamic routing is crucial for proper operation. I suggest that collective oscillatory modes may play a role in solving this addressing problem, in the same way that the clock signal gates the operation of man‐made computers. BioEssays 25:699–708, 2003. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Contemporary humanitarianism is held in a permanent and tense relationship with the warlike, destructive, and exclusionary strategies of the states which dominate the planet. On the one hand, a politics of the "clenched fist" champion of both holy and just wars, exemplary sanctions, lightning raids and surgical strikes; in other words, the technical arsenal of a police force acting globally on an ad hoc basis and according to the friend /enemy relation, following the principles of partisan fidelity and the vendetta. (...) On the other hand, occupying the place of social politics at the same global scale is a spectacular humanism, manifesting itself through an ensemble of private organisations whose role is to keep the survivors alive, treating them as nameless victims, held at a distance for the sole purpose of salving the conscience of the powerful. However, the displaced and refugee populations are responding to this situation by developing diverse forms of, generally illegal, action and by so doing, are exacerbating the tensions inherent in the humanitarian field. (shrink)

Le symbolisme naît à partir du langage quand l'homme prend conscience qu'il est un être irrémédiablement clivé entre nature et culture, conscient et inconscient, masculinité et féminité, idéal du moi et moi idéal ; une sorte d'animal dénaturé à la recherche d'une unité perdue, que lui prête, provisoirement et superficiellement, le symbolique, ce lieu où il tente de "recoller les morceaux", c'est-à-dire retrouver le monde du prénatal, de l'amniotique qui était le Un et pas encore le Deux. Le symbolisme serait-il (...) la marche vers un Principe unificateur, comme le pense l'Eglise catholique, ou la prise de conscience et l'acceptation d'une vacuité lucide comme le suggère la psychanalyse...? (shrink)

There is one question that any potential reader who suspects that Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) might be important for past, contemporary, and future philosophy inevitably raises: how should I read Whitehead? How can I make sense of this incredibly dense tissue of imaginative systematizing, spread over decades of work in disciplines so different and specialized as algebra, geometry, logic, relativistic physics and philosophy of science? Accordingly, this monograph has two main complementary objectives. The first one is to propose a set (...) of efficient hermeneutical tools to get the reader started. These straightforward tools provide answers that are highly coherent and probably the most applicable to Whitehead's entire corpus. The second objective is to illustrate how the several parts of Process and Reality are interconnected, something that all commentators have either failed to recognise or only incompletely acknowledged. (shrink)

" Pour chanter les vingt ans du Pommier, mon éditrice me demanda d'écrire quelques lignes. Les voici. Pour une fois, j'y entre en morale, comme en terre nouvelle et inconnue, sur la pointe des pieds. On disait jadis de l'Arlequin de mes rêves, bienheureux comédien de l'art, qu'il corrigeait les moeurs en riant. Devenu arrière-grand-père, son disciple a, de même, le devoir sacré de raconter des histoires à ses petits descendants en leur enseignant à faire des grimaces narquoises. Parvenus ensemble (...) à l'âge espiègle, j'en profite pour leur dire de l'austère en pouffant de rire. " Michel Serres. (shrink)

Le parcours de Saint-Amand Bazard, qui sera l’un des deux chefs de l’École des disciples saint-simoniens, représente l’illustration la plus nette des rapports entretenus entre le saint-simonisme et l’utilitarisme benthamien. En effet, avant même de devenir saint-simoniens, Bazard, de 1814 à 1826, acteur de complots républicains contre la Restauration, puis chef carbonariste, entretient comme réfugié à Londres des rapports importants avec Étienne Dumont. Quoique ces rapports n’induisent pas directement une adhésion à l’utilitarisme, ils l’amènent à mettre en avant une interrogation (...) que l’on pourrait appeler historiciste qui va le poursuivre jusqu’à sa mort en 1832. L’adhésion au saint-simonisme, à partir de 1825, ne signifie pas la fin de l’intérêt de Bazard pour Bentham ; au contraire, elle permet l’insertion de l’utilitarisme dans le schéma interprétatif d'une véritable philosophie de l’histoire. L’utilitarisme n’est alors pas réduit à une doctrine propre à l’époque critique, et ai... (shrink)

If through rotation of a hollow sphere one produces a Coriolis field inside of it, then a centrifugal field is produced [...] that is not the same as the one that would occur in a rotating rigid system with the same Coriolis field. One can therefore not think of rotational forces as produced by the rotation of the fixed stars ….

Scientists working on the wave theory of light in the 19 th century took it for granted that there had to be a medium for the propagation of light waves. This medium was called the luminiferous [= “light carrying”] ether. One of the central questions about this medium concerned its state of motion. There were two options: (1) The ether is completely undisturbed by matter moving through it (stationary or immobile ether); (2) Matter drags along the ether in its vicinity (...) and/or in its interior (dragged-along ether). Stellar aberration provided the main argument for the first option (even though a special dragging effect in the case of transparent matter had to be built into the theory to account for refraction). Polarization provided the main argument for the second option. These two options and the arguments pro and con will be explained in more detail below. (shrink)

Michel Weber, Essai sur la gnose de Harvard. Whitehead apocryphe, Louvain-la-Neuve, Les Éditions Chromatika, 2011. (978-2-930517-26-1, 292 p., 20 €) L’objet de ce livre consiste en une éludication croisée de la philosophie organique whiteheadienne et de la gnose thomasienne. Il cherche à répondre à deux questions. La philosophie de l’événement, du processus ou du procès, d’Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) possède-t-elle, volens nolens, un fond gnostique syrien ? L’évangile apocryphe de Thomas, le gnostique juif qui a couché par écrit l’enseignement (...) de Jésus probablement trente ans après son décès, offrant ainsi une source qui pourrait être plus ancienne que les évangiles canoniques et leur hypothétique texte-racine Q, gagne-t-il a être lu à partir de prémisses whiteheadiennes ? Michel Weber dirige le Centre de philosophie pratique « Chromatiques whiteheadiennes » à Bruxelles. Il a publié plus de cinquante ouvrages scientifiques, dont La Dialectique de l’intuition chez A. N. Whitehead (2005), Whitehead’s Pancreativism (2006 & 2011) et L’Épreuve de la philosophie (2008). (shrink)