Context: Varela’s neurophenomenology was conceived from the outset as a criticism and dissolution of the “hard problem” of the physical origin of consciousness. Indeed, the standard (….

Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Volume 45, Issue 3, Page 301-305, September 2022.

There is a striking difference between the methodology of the young Einstein and that of the old. I argue that Einstein’s switch in the late 1910s from a moderate empiricism to an extreme rationalism should at least in part be understood against the background of his crushing personal and political experiences during the war years in Berlin. As a result of these experiences, Einstein started to put into practice what, drawing on Schopenhauer, he had preached for years, namely to use (...) science as his means of escaping from “the merely personal.” Whatever the exact sources of Einstein’s about-face, the older man has left us with a highly misleading picture of how the younger man achieved the successes that we still celebrate today. This has had a harmful influence on theoretical physics. If the young Einstein’s successes are any guide as to how successful theoretical physics is done, close adherence to general features of the empirical data is much more and mathematical elegance is much less important than the old Einstein wanted us to believe. (shrink)

This book is an English-language translation of a bestselling book in France that explores the relationship between humans and new technologies.

ABSTRACT: In the 18th century, Kant evaluated that his historical period was not a time of enlightenment, but rather minority, because of man’s inability to use his own understanding. Adorno updated this problem, interpreting the minority in our presente in terms of loss of experience. Men are no longer apt to experience, because the technical and economic apparatus prevents the clarification and awareness of reality. From this diagnosis, The aim of this article is to investigate Adorno’s educational thought in its (...) possibilities of emancipation. In our point of view, the role of education, in the thoughts of the Frankfurtian, is to recover the critical autonomy of individuals, through dialectical thinking, to rebuild the damaged experience. (shrink)

The Courage of the Truth is the last course that Michel Foucault delivered at the College de France before his death in 1984. In this course, he continues the theme of the previous year's lectures in exploring the notion of "truth-telling" in politics to establish a number of ethically irreducible conditionsbased on courage and conviction.

Toute science, admet-on, commence par détacher un objet en le rendant indépendant des sujets et des situations. Mais cette conception étroite de la connaissance scientifique laisse subsister des zones d'ombre. La conscience n'est pas un objet. Elle est ce sans quoi rien ne pourrait être pris pour objet. La conscience n'est pas détachable des sujets, car elle s'identifie à ce qui est vécu par un sujet. De façon analogue, en physique quantique, un phénomène n'est pas dissociable de son contexte expérimental, (...) car il s'identifie à ce qui se manifeste à grande échelle au laboratoire. Que faire pour ne pas laisser ces cas extrêmes de côté? Généraliser la méthode scientifique. Ne plus la borner à définir et à caractériser des objets, mais l'étendre à la coordination directe des expériences. Telle est la révolution de pensée qu'il faut accomplir pour résoudre, ou plutôt dissoudre, deux questions-limites de la science : le problème de l'origine de la conscience et le paradoxe du "chat de Schrödinger" en physique quantique. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article aims to add an important new dimension to the historical scholarship on early socialism by analysing the Saint-Simonian encounter with Owenism during the first decades of the nineteenth century. The article shows how the Saint-Simonian interpretation of Owenism was shaped by the manner by which the Saint-Simonians disseminated their doctrine. It draws on a number of neglected texts to show what the Saint-Simonians drew from Owen’s work and how they set out to distinguish themselves from Owen and (...) his French followers. The article focuses on key Saint-Simonian publications, including Le Globe and those edited by women members of the movement, Jeanne-Désirée Veret and Marie-Reine Guindorf’s La Tribune des femmes, and its early iterations. The article shows in detail the extent to which the Saint-Simonians saw Owen’s work as threatening to their cause, and how they formulated a thoroughgoing critique of it. (shrink)

Nous publions une inscription connue à Délos depuis le début des années 1990, à la suite de travaux menés par l’École française d’Athènes dans la zone du Portique des Naxiens. La pierre, mise au jour par Alexandre Farnoux, et connue des spécialistes d’épigraphie délienne, est restée inédite jusqu’à ce jour, malgré des mentions ponctuelles dans la bibliographie. Le décret pour Apollônidès de Chersonèsos rejoint le corpus des décrets de la cité indépendante et réactive la question des relations entre Délos et (...) les cités du Pont-Euxin, déjà bien représentées dans le paysage des honneurs déliens. (shrink)

With this profound final work, completed in the days leading up to his death, Michel Serres presents a vivid picture of his thinking about religion—a constant preoccupation since childhood—thereby completing Le Grand Récit, the comprehensive explanation of the world and of humanity to which he devoted the last twenty years of his life. Themes from Serres's earlier writings—energy and information, the role of the media in modern society, the anthropological function of sacrifice, the role of scientific knowledge, the problem (...) of evil—are reinterpreted here in the light of the Old Testament accounts of Isaac and Jonah and a variety of Gospel episodes, including the Three Wise Men of the Epiphany, the Transfiguration, Peter's denying Christ, the Crucifixion, Emmaus, and the Pentecost. Monotheistic religion, Serres argues, resembles mathematical abstraction in its dazzling power to bring together the real and the virtual, the natural and the transcendent; but only in its Christian embodiment is it capable of binding together human beings in such a way that partisan attachments are dissolved and a new era of history, free for once of the lethal repetition of collective violence, can be entered into. (shrink)

This book provides an innovative way to revisit the depth and scope of our moral/post-moral worldviews, while undertaking an ontic reflection about organizational life. The ontic dimension of life refers to existing entities’ lived experiences. It has nothing to do with psychological and relational processes. The ontic level of analysis mirrors a philosophical outlook on organizational life. Unlike moral worldviews, post-moral worldviews oppose the existence of Truth-itself. Post-moral worldviews rather imply that dialogical relationships allow people to express their own truth-claims (...) and welcome others’ truth-claims. The purpose of this book is to explain the philosophical implications of moral and post-moral worldviews and the way to move from a moral to a post-moral worldview. Moreover, this book explores the possibility to transcend the moral/post-moral dualism, through moral deliberation processes and a reinterpretation of the Presence of the Infinite in all dimensions of human life. This book could eventually help to better grasp the basic philosophical challenges behind ethical reflection about organizational issues. (shrink)

Granting that arguments and explanations that answer a why-question are the products of two species of the activity of reason-giving, do they make an exclusive and exhaustive classification? The orthodox distinction between argument and explanation already faces some tough cases, which are discussed. This paper shows that most of the criteria used to distinguish argument and explanation on the basis of the status of their conclusions cause tough cases to proliferate unless a debatable decision is made. This suggests that the (...) orthodox distinction should be improved. (shrink)

These thirteen lectures on the 'punitive society,' delivered at the Collège de France in the first three months of 1973, examine the way in which the relations between justice and truth that govern modern penal law were forged, and question what links them to the emergence of a new punitive regime that still dominates contemporary society. Praise for Foucault's Lectures at the Collège de France Series “Ideas spark off nearly every page...The words may have been spoken in [the 1970s], but (...) they seem as alive and relevant as if they had been written yesterday.”—Bookforum “Foucault is quite central to our sense of where we are...[He] is carrying out, in the noblest way, the promiscuous aim of true culture.”—The Nation “[Foucault] has an alert and sensitive mind that can ignore the familiar surfaces of established intellectual coded and ask new questions...[He] gives dramatic quality to the movement of culture.”—The New York Review of Books. (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)

La danse contemporaine ne cesse d’interroger le corps dans sa prétendue unité et identité substantielle, organique, mécanique et signifiante. Elle déconstruit les conceptions et les gestions du corps. Par cela elle révèle les dimensions et les puissances ignorées du corps. Nous proposons, en nous appuyant sur les travaux fondateurs de M. Bernard, de suivre une ligne conceptuelle des déconstructions du corps susceptible d’éclairer les projets esthétiques de certains chorégraphes contemporains.

According to the traditional view, meaning presents itself under the form of some kind of identity.

À travers le cas clinique d’un jeune homme violent, radicalisé politiquement aux thèses de l’ultra-droite et suivi en psychothérapie à raison de deux fois par semaine pendant près de deux ans, l’article aborde les questions de la radicalisation à travers le prisme de l’effondrement du sentiment de continuité d’être. Ce sentiment s’effondre plus particulièrement au moment de son adolescence du fait d’une histoire traumatique démaillante affectant ses contenants individuels, familiaux et collectifs réactivant ainsi ses angoisses primitives de désunification corporelle. Ce (...) jeune trouvera dans le modèle de la filiation narcissique un « maillage » de substitution pour faire face à ces angoisses primitives. (shrink)

More or less explicitly inspired by the Aristotelian classification of arguments, a wide tradition makes a sharp distinction between argument and proof. Ch. Perelman and R. Johnson, among others, share this view based on the principle that the conclusion of an argument is uncertain while the conclusion of a proof is certain. Producing proof is certainly a major part of mathematical activity. Yet, in practice, mathematicians, expert or beginner, argue about mathematical proofs. This happens during the search for a proof, (...) then when the proof is presented and discussed by experts, and finally when it is taught or used in didactical contexts. (shrink)

In this commentary, I review the articles by CrPEL et al.; LINDEN; Vincent].

En contrepoint à son œuvre mathématique et physique — et en relation avec elle — d'Alembert a développé une théorie de la connaissance influencée par Locke et le sensualisme de Condillac, mais centrée avant tout sur une épistémologie de la physique newtonienne. Réaliste, prônant le recours à l'expérience, il est en même temps profondément rationaliste, et même précisément, quoiqu'il s'en défende plutôt, dans la lignée de Descartes, Mais, bien que la Raison soit sa référence fondamentale, à tel point qu'il voudrait (...) fonder sur ses principes les plus évidents toute la science physico-mathématique — c'est-à-dire par excellence la Mécanique —, son programme ne peut être dit cartésien : non seulement il rejette les idées innées, mais il accepte la critique d'une rationalité apparente requise par la considération de faits irréductibles (l'attraction par exemple). Son épistémologie est un réalisme rationnel référé à l'être même de la Nature (la Raison et la Nature se rejoignent en profondeur). C'est en fonction de ces conceptions qu'il accepte ou rejette certaines notions physiques soit ambiguës, soit incertaines. Son rejet du concept de force comme celui de la considération d'une texture intime des corps semblent en faire, par le refus de ce qui ne serait pas directement mesurable, l'annonciateur du positivisme de Laplace et de Comte : une telle interprétation serait inexacte, et d'Alembert considère que la pensée peut parvenir à la connaissance du réel. Si ses conceptions s'élaborent en contrepoint de son activité scientifique, c'est en même temps en lutte et polémique contre la métaphysique, au sein de son engagement philosophique — il est tête de file, avec Voltaire, du « parti philosophique » — et notamment dans l'Encyclopédie. Bien qu'il se réfère, comme Newton, à une Intelligence suprême à l'œuvre dans l'Univers, il n'est pas déiste et affiche bientôt une position sceptique. Sa recherche et son affirmation de l'autonomie des lois de la Nature sont a-thées au sens privatif qui annonce Laplace. Il s'oppose au matérialisme de d'Holbach ou Helvétius, mais il se rapproche peu à peu — et notamment vers 1765, sans doute sous l'influence de Diderot qui rédigea vers cette époque Le rêve de d'Alembert et avec qui il venait de renouer — d'un matérialisme dynamique : mais, ce matérialisme, il ne le professe qu'en privé (essentiellement dans sa correspondance avec Frédéric de Prusse). L'âme est matérielle, et si « le plus simple raisonnement prouve qu'il y a un être éternel » , ce Dieu est matériel, il « n'est que la matière en tant qu'intelligente » , ce qui rejoint la définition du matérialisme donnée par Diderot dans l'Encyclopédie. Toutefois, refusant de se prononcer sur l'en-soi des choses, et sur la nature de la matière elle-même, comme de se définir métaphysiquement, son matérialisme tardif est encore marqué de scepticisme. (shrink)

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)