À propos de : Norbert Elias, Les Allemands, Paris, Seuil, coll. « La librairie du XXIe siècle », 2017, 592 p. Les Allemands de Norbert Elias a été publié pour la première fois en 1989. Et nous disposons dorénavant d'une traduction française. Le livre réunit plusieurs contributions écrites entre les années 1960 et le milieu des années 1980. L'édition a reçu l'aval de Norbert Elias qui écrit pour l'occasion une introduction indiquant l'unité de l'ensemble. Les Allemands est de ce fait (...) le derni... (shrink)

This book uses the ontological notions of singularity and threshold to deconstruct the myth of the independent individual and address the question of what comes after sovereignty and the subject.

Humanity and the Enemy attempts to show the limits and problems of the current and dominant idea of politics based on the friend-and-enemy logic, typical of the thought of Carl Schmitt. It proposes an alternative view in which politics and ethics are inextricably intertwined. This view entails the overcoming of the Enemy thought, namely, of the notion that there must always be an enemy. This overcoming can only be accomplished through resistance on the basis of radical changes in the material (...) and cultural conditions of social life. These changes include the dismantling of the inherently violent system of capital and its law, the elimination of poverty and fear, the abandonment of the logic of total and permanent war, and the establishment of structures for the flowering of human dignity and freedom. Humanity itself must become a political subject in order to deactivate and reject the conditions of inhumanity characterizing and crippling our present world. (shrink)

The long-enduring coding metaphor is deemed problematic because it imbues correlational evidence with causal power. In neuroscience, most research is correlational or conditionally correlational; this research, in aggregate, informs causal inference. Rather than prescribing semantics used in correlational studies, it would be useful for neuroscientists to focus on a constructive syntax to guide principled causal inference.

A fierce critique of productivity and sovereignty in the world of labor and everyday life, Bruno Gullì’s Earthly Plenitudes asks, can labor exist without sovereignty and without capitalism? He introduces the concept of dignity of individuation to prompt a rethinking of categories of political ontology. Dignity of individuation stresses the notion that the dignity of each and any individual being lies in its being individuated as such; dignity is the irreducible and most essential character of any being. Singularity is a (...) more universal quality. Gullì first reviews approaches to sovereignty by philosophers as varied as Gottfried Leibniz and Georges Bataille, and then looks at concrete examples where the alliance of sovereignty and capital cracks under the potency of living labor. He examines contingent academic labor as an example of the super-exploitation of labor, which has become a global phenomenon, and as such, a clear threat to the sovereign logic of capital. Gullì also looks at disability to assert that a new measure of humanity can only be found outside the schemes of sovereignty, productivity, efficiency, and independence, through care and caring for others, in solidarity and interdependence. (shrink)

Marx ne discute jamais explicitement le concept de « tradition ». Et lorsqu'il le mobilise, il ne fait pas référence aux auteurs l'ayant thématisé. La tradition semble désigner pour lui la continuation du passé au présent, réel­lement ou dans l'imagination des individus. On retiendra deux séries de textes. D'abord, les premières pages du 18 brumaire de Louis Bonaparte ; ensuite, les articles consacrés à la domination britannique de l'Inde dans la New York Daily Tribune, ainsi que la première...

“The moral issues generated by the food supply chain demand attention and analysis. There must be an ethical approach balancing profitability with the welfare of life and the conservation of the environment.” Lorice Stainer is a business ethics consultant and Visiting Fellow at Leicester University Management Centre; Alan Gully is Principal Lecturer in Business Studies, and Member for the Centre for Research in International Economics, at Middlesex University Business School; and Alan Stainer is Head of Engineering Management and Professor (...) of Productivity and Performance Management at Middlesex University. (shrink)

Le concept de civilisation possède deux significations distinctes. Il désigne un ensemble de groupes culturels ayant entre eux un air de famille. C'est l'un des sens que Lucien Febvre reconnaît à la notion : Civilisation signifie simplement pour nous l’ensemble des caractères que présente aux regards d’un observateur la vie collective d’un groupement humain : vie ma­té­rielle ; vie intellectuelle, vie morale, vie politique et - par quoi remplacer cette ex­pression vicieuse? – vie sociale. C...

Le concept de civilisation possède deux significations distinctes. Il désigne un ensemble de groupes culturels ayant entre eux un air de famille. C'est l'un des sens que Lucien Febvre reconnaît à la notion : Civilisation signifie simplement pour nous l’ensemble des caractères que présente aux regards d’un observateur la vie collective d’un groupement humain : vie ma­té­rielle ; vie intellectuelle, vie morale, vie politique et - par quoi remplacer cette ex­pression vicieuse? – vie sociale. C...

Because of the coronavirus pandemic, reminders of death are particularly salient. Although much terror management theory research demonstrates that people engage in defensive tactics to manage mortality awareness, other work shows that existential concerns can motivate growth-oriented actions to improve health. The present study explored the associative link between coronavirus anxieties, fear of death, and participants' well-being. Results, using structural equation modeling, found that increased mortality concerns stemming from COVID-19 were associated with heightened benefit finding from the pandemic. Increased benefit (...) finding, in turn, was related to higher life satisfaction, meaning in life, self-esteem, resilience, and vitality while also correlating negatively with depression and stress scores. There was no evidence for reverse mediation in that fear of mortality did not predict well-being through coronavirus worries. Overall, although many persons have experienced mental health concerns as a function of the COVID-19 pandemic, our findings demonstrate positive benefits that paradoxically follow in terms of an increased appreciation of life, improved relationships, and better health. (shrink)

World Ethics: The New Agenda identifies different ways of thinking about ethics, and of thinking ethically about international and global relations. It also considers several theories of world ethics in the context of issues such as war and peace, world poverty, the environment and the United Nations. The discussion is grounded in an awareness of the post-9/11 world in which we live and offers a more detailed exploration of the idea of global citizenship and a global or cosmopolitan ethic.

Cognitive science has always included multiple methodologies and theoretical commitments. The philosophy of cognitive science should embrace, or at least acknowledge, this diversity. Bechtel’s (2009a) proposed philosophy of cognitive science, however, applies only to representationalist and mechanist cognitive science, ignoring the substantial minority of dynamically oriented cognitive scientists. As an example of nonrepresentational, dynamical cognitive science, we describe strong anticipation as a model for circadian systems (Stepp & Turvey, 2009). We then propose a philosophy of science appropriate to nonrepresentational, dynamical (...) cognitive science. (shrink)

This book uses the philosophy of Wittgenstein as a perspective from which to challenge the idea of a critical social theory, represented pre-eminently by Giddens, Habermas and Bhaskar.

The 'postmodern condition,' in which instrumentalism finally usurps all other considerations, has produced a kind of intellectual paralysis in the world of education. The authors of this book show how such postmodernist thinkers as Derrida, Foucault, and Lyotard illuminate puzzling aspects of education, arguing that educational theory is currently at an impasse. They postulate that we need these new and disturbing ideas in order to "think again" fruitfully and creatively about education.

Against the domination of moral deliberation by rights-talk In Defence of War asserts that belligerency can be morally justified, even while it is tragic and morally flawed. Recovering the early Christian tradition of just war thinking, Nigel Biggar argues in favour of aggressive war in punishment of grave injustice.

Can theories of mental imagery, conscious mental contents, developed within cognitive science throw light on the obscure (but culturally very significant) concept of imagination? Three extant views of mental imagery are considered: quasi‐pictorial, description, and perceptual activity theories. The first two face serious theoretical and empirical difficulties. The third is (for historically contingent reasons) little known, theoretically underdeveloped, and empirically untried, but has real explanatory potential. It rejects the “traditional” symbolic computational view of mental contents, but is compatible with recentsituated (...) cognition and active visionapproaches in robotics. This theory is developed and elucidated. Three related key aspects of imagination (non‐discursiveness, creativity, and seeing as) raise difficulties for the other theories. Perceptual activity theory presents imagery as non‐discursive and relates it closely to seeing as. It is thus well placed to be the basis for a general theory of imagination and its role in creative thought. (shrink)

This book addresses concerns about educational and moral standards in a world increasingly characterised by nihilism. On the one hand there is widespread anxiety that standards are falling; on the other, new machinery of accountability and inspection to show that they are not. The authors in this book state that we cannot avoid nihilism if we are simply _laissez-faire_ about values, neither can we reduce them to standards of performance, nor must we return to traditional values. They state that we (...) need to create a new set of values based on a critical assessment of contemporary practice in the light of a number of philosophical texts that address the question of nihilism, including the work of Nietzsche. (shrink)

What can computers do in principle? What are their inherent theoretical limitations? These are questions to which computer scientists must address themselves. The theoretical framework which enables such questions to be answered has been developed over the last fifty years from the idea of a computable function: intuitively a function whose values can be calculated in an effective or automatic way. This book is an introduction to computability theory (or recursion theory as it is traditionally known to mathematicians). Dr Cutland (...) begins with a mathematical characterisation of computable functions using a simple idealised computer (a register machine); after some comparison with other characterisations, he develops the mathematical theory, including a full discussion of non-computability and undecidability, and the theory of recursive and recursively enumerable sets. The later chapters provide an introduction to more advanced topics such as Gildel's incompleteness theorem, degrees of unsolvability, the Recursion theorems and the theory of complexity of computation. Computability is thus a branch of mathematics which is of relevance also to computer scientists and philosophers. Mathematics students with no prior knowledge of the subject and computer science students who wish to supplement their practical expertise with some theoretical background will find this book of use and interest. (shrink)

The word 'athletics' is derived from the Greek verb 'to struggle for a prize'. After reading this book, no one will see the Olympics as a graceful display of Greek beauty again, but as war by other means. Nigel Spivey paints a portrait of the Greek Olympics as they really were - fierce contests between bitter rivals, in which victors won kudos and rewards, and losers faced scorn and even assault. Victory was almost worth dying for, and a number (...) of athletes did just that. Many more resorted to cheating and bribery. Contested always bitterly and often bloodily, the ancient Olympics were not an idealistic celebration of unity, but a clash of military powers in an arena not far removed from the battlefield. (shrink)

Mental imagery (varieties of which are sometimes colloquially refered to as “visualizing,” “seeing in the mind's eye,” “hearing in the head,” “imagining the feel of,” etc.) is quasi-perceptual experience; it resembles perceptual experience, but occurs in the absence of the appropriate external stimuli. It is also generally understood to bear intentionality (i.e., mental images are always images of something or other), and thereby to function as a form of mental representation. Traditionally, visual mental imagery, the most discussed variety, was thought (...) to be caused by the presence of picturelike representations (mental images) in the mind, soul, or brain, but this is no longer universally accepted. (shrink)

During the past four decades, the Netherlands played a leading role in the debate about euthanasia and assisted suicide. Despite the claim that other countries would soon follow the Dutch legalization of euthanasia, only Belgium and the American state of Oregon did. In many countries, intense discussions took place. This article discusses some major contributions to the discussion about euthanasia and assisted suicide as written by Nigel Biggar, Arthur J. Dyck, Neil M. Gorsuch, and John Keown. They share a (...) concern that legalization will undermine a society's respect for the inviolability and sanctity of life. Moreover, the Report of the House of Lords Select Committee on the Assisted Dying for the Terminally Ill Bill is analyzed. All studies use ethical, theological, philosophical, and legal sources. All these documents include references to experiences from the Netherlands. In addition, two recent Dutch documents are analyzed which advocate further liberalization of the Dutch euthanasia practice, so as to include infants and elderly people "suffering from life". (shrink)

In the recent and not-too-distant past many of our parents, grandparents and forbears believed that a person’s skin colour and physiognomy, gender, or sexuality licensed them being regarded and treated in ways that are now widely recognised as blatantly unjust, disrespectful, cruel and brutal. But the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries have hosted a series of radical changes in attitudes, beliefs, behaviour and institutionalised practices with regard to the fundamental moral equality of what were once seen as different “kinds of (...) people.” This paper explores the social structure of such “moral revolutions,” via the Wittgensteinian- and Kuhnian- inspired concepts moral perception, moral certainty, normal morality, and moral paradigm. (shrink)

This book argues that the institutions of law, and the structures of legal thought, are to be understood by reference to a moral ideal of freedom or independence from the power of others. The moral value and justificatory force of law are not contingent upon circumstance, but intrinsic to its character. Doctrinal legal arguments are shaped by rival conceptions of the conditions for realization of the idea of law. In making these claims, the author rejects the viewpoint of much contemporary (...) legal theory, and seeks to move jurisprudence closer to an older tradition of philosophical reflection upon law, exemplified by Hobbes and Kant. Modern analytical jurisprudence has tended to view these older philosophies as confused precisely in so far as they equate an understanding of law's nature with a revelation of its moral basis. According to most contemporary legal theorists, the understanding and analysis of existing institutions is quite distinct from any enterprise of moral reflection, but the relationship between ideals and practices is much more intimate than this approach would suggest. Some institutions can be properly understood only when they are viewed as imperfect attempts to realize moral or political ideals; and some ideals can be conceived only by reference to their expression in institutions. (shrink)

This paper challenges the notion that Bitcoin is ‘trust-free’ money by highlighting the social practices, organizational structures and utopian ambitions that sustain it. At the paper's heart is the paradox that if Bitcoin succeeds in its own terms as an ideology, it will fail in practical terms as a form of money. The main reason for this is that the new currency is premised on the idea of money as a ‘thing’ that must be abstracted from social life in order (...) for it to be protected from manipulation by bank intermediaries and political authorities. The image is of a fully mechanized currency that operates over and above social life. In practice, however, the currency has generated a thriving community around its political ideals, relies on a high degree of social organization in order to be produced, has a discernible social structure, and is characterized by asymmetries of wealth and power that are not dissimilar from the mainstream financial system. Unwittingly, then, Bitcoin serves as a powerful demonstration of the relational character of money. (shrink)

Alice Crary claims that “the standard view of the bearing of Wittgenstein's philosophy on ethics” is dominated by “inviolability interpretations”, which often underlie conservative readings of Wittgenstein. Crary says that such interpretations are “especially marked in connection with On Certainty”, where Wittgenstein is represented as holding that “our linguistic practices are immune to rational criticism, or inviolable”. Crary's own conception of the bearing of Wittgenstein's philosophy on ethics, which I call the “intrinsically-ethical reading”, derives from the influential New Wittgenstein school (...) of exegesis, and is also espoused by James Edwards, Cora Diamond, and Stephen Mulhall. To my eyes, intrinsically-ethical readings present a peculiar picture of ethics, which I endeavour to expose in Part I of the paper. In Part II I present a reading of On Certainty that Crary would call an “inviolability interpretation”, defend it against New Wittgensteinian critiques, and show that this kind of reading has nothing to do with ethical or political conservatism. I go on to show how Wittgenstein's observations on the manner in which we can neither question nor affirm certain states of affairs that are fundamental to our epistemic practices can be fruitfully extended to ethics. Doing so sheds light on the phenomenon that I call “basic moral certainty”, which constitutes the foundation of our ethical practices, and the scaffolding or framework of moral perception, inquiry, and judgement. The nature and significance of basic moral certainty will be illustrated through consideration of the strangeness of philosophers' attempts at explaining the wrongness of killing. (shrink)

Theories of superior collicular and hippocampal function have remarkable similarities. Both structures have been repeatedly implicated in spatial and attentional behaviour and in inhibitory control of locomotion. Moreover, they share certain electrophysiological properties in their single unit responses and in the synchronous appearance and disappearance of slow wave activity. Both are phylogenetically old and the colliculus projects strongly to brainstem nuclei instrumental in the generation of theta rhythm in the hippocampal EECOn the other hand, close inspection of behavioural and electrophysiological (...) data reveals disparities. In particular, hippocampal processing mainly concerns stimulus ambiguity, contextual significance, and spatial relations or other subtle, higher order characteristics. This requires the use of largely preprocessed sensory information and mediation of poststimulus investigation. Although collicular activity must also be integrated with that of “higher” centres, its primary role in attention is more “peripheral” and specific in controlling orienting/localisation via eye and body movements toward egocentrically labelled spatial positions. In addition, the colliculus may exert a nonspecific influence in alerting higher centres to the imminence of information potentially worthy of focal attention. Nevertheless, it is noteworthy that collicular and hippocampal lesions produce deficits on similar tasks, although the type of deficit is usually different in each case. Functional overlap between hippocampus and colliculus is virtually certain vis-à-vis stimulus sampling, for example in the acquisition of information via vibrissal movements and visual scanning. In addition, insofar as stimulus significance is a factor in collicular orienting mechanisms, the hippocampus — cingulate – cortex — colliculus pathway may play a significant role, modulating collicular responsiveness and thus ensuring an attentional strategy appropriate to current requirements. A tentative “reciprocal loop” model is proposed which bridges physiological and behavioural levels of analysis and which would account for the observed degree and nature of functional overlap between the superior colliculus and hippocampus. (shrink)

This article is an attempt to understand the increasing profile of complexity theory as a geography of dissemination. In the first part I suggest that complexity theory, itself a rhetorical hybrid, takes on new meanings as it circulates in and through a number of actor-networks and, specifically, global science, global business and global New Age. As complexity theory circulates in these networks, so it encounters new conditions, which generate new hybrid theoretical forms. In the second part of the article, I (...) consider how complexity theory might be interpreted as the emergence of a new structure of feeling in Euro-American societies, which frames the future as open and full of productivity. The conclusion offers some words of warning. (shrink)

"The Blackwell Guide to Philosophy of Education" is state-of-the-art map to the field as well as a valuable reference book.

Slavery seems to us to be a paradigm of a morally wrong institutionalized practice. And yet for most of its millennia-long historical existence it was typically accepted as a natural, necessary, and inevitable feature of the social world. This widespread normative consensus was only challenged toward the end of the eighteenth century. Then, within a hundred years of the emergence of radical moral criticism of slavery, the existing practices had been dismantled and the institution itself “abolished.” How do we explain (...) such a “profound transformation in moral perception” (Davis 1975)? It may seem obvious that the moral agency and character of the leaders and activists of the abolition movement, their supporters, and their governmental representatives were the primary motors of change.That is to say, the various actors involved came to see, recognize, or acknowledge the true (morally evil) nature of slavery and were thereby motivated to act against it. This “commonsense,” “moral explanation” is endorsed by most of the philosophers who have reflected on the morality of slavery. But despite the intuitiveness of thinking that it was the moral agency of the actors, pitted against the evil and injustice of slavery, that brought about the latter’s downfall, I will endeavor to show that such thinking is inadequate both to the facts and to the explanatory desiderata. I contend that it was not ignor ance of the supposedly inherent moral status of slavery that maintained people’s complicity with it, but practical barriers to them conceiving it dispensable. (shrink)

Philosophy begins with questions about the nature of reality and how we should live. These were the concerns of Socrates, who spent his days in the ancient Athenian marketplace asking awkward questions, disconcerting the people he met by showing them how little they genuinely understood. This engaging book introduces the great thinkers in Western philosophy and explores their most compelling ideas about the world and how best to live in it. In forty brief chapters, Nigel Warburton guides us on (...) a chronological tour of the major ideas in the history of philosophy. He provides interesting and often quirky stories of the lives and deaths of thought-provoking philosophers from Socrates, who chose to die by hemlock poisoning rather than live on without the freedom to think for himself, to Peter Singer, who asks the disquieting philosophical and ethical questions that haunt our own times. Warburton not only makes philosophy accessible, he offers inspiration to think, argue, reason, and ask in the tradition of Socrates. _A Little History of Philosophy_ presents the grand sweep of humanity's search for philosophical understanding and invites all to join in the discussion. (shrink)

John Dewey stated that ‘[h]owever far apart philosophy and educational theory may later have become, in their beginnings they were strictly identical.' Dewey's ‘progressivism' in Democracy and Education rests on this communion. A self-reflective philosophical education by the community, about the community, for the community, would create the conditions for the advance of social justice. But new progressive ideas championing redistributive justice might appear to be in worryingly short supply. That is one reason, among many, why Philip Kitcher’s The Main (...) Enterprise of the World is to be welcomed. His rethinking about education amounts to a radical re-education of our thinking about social justice, seeking redistribution of wealth, reduction of privilege, and a redefinition of what is valuable for people and planet in regard to production, distribution, and consumption. I will summarize his book and offer critical thoughts on it relating to three themes: the relation of his proposed Deweyan Society to some current and powerful criticisms of Western rationality; his proposals for classrooms; and the extent to which its own pragmatic philosophical justifications are open to deeper philosophical and educational significance. (shrink)

For at least two centuries most social thought has taken the earth to be the stable platform upon which dynamic social processes play out. Both climate change and the Anthropocene thesis – with their enfolding of dramatic geologic change into the space-time of social life – are now provoking social thinkers into closer engagement with earth science. After revisiting the decisive influence of the late 18th-century notion of geological formations on the idea of social formations, this introductory article turns to (...) more recent and more explicit attempts to open up the categories of social thought to a deeper understanding of earth processes. This includes attempts to consider how social and political agency is both constrained and made possible by the forces of the earth itself. It also involves efforts to think beyond existing dependencies of social worlds upon particular geological strata and to imagine alternative ‘geosocial’ futures. (shrink)

A theory of the structure and cognitive function of the human imagination that attempts to do justice to traditional intuitions about its psychological centrality is developed, largely through a detailed critique of the theory propounded by Colin McGinn. Like McGinn, I eschew the highly deflationary views of imagination, common amongst analytical philosophers, that treat it either as a conceptually incoherent notion, or as psychologically trivial. However, McGinn fails to develop his alternative account satisfactorily because (following Reid, Wittgenstein and Sartre) he (...) draws an excessively sharp, qualitative distinction between imagination and perception, and because of his flawed, empirically ungrounded conception of hallucination. His arguments in defense of these views are rebutted in detail, and the traditional, passive, Cartesian view of visual perception, upon which several of them implicitly rely, is criticized in the light of findings from recent cognitive science and neuroscience. It is also argued that the apparent intuitiveness of the passive view of visual perception is a result of mere historical contingency. An understanding of perception (informed by modern visual science) as an inherently active process enables us to unify our accounts of perception, mental imagery, dreaming, hallucination, creativity, and other aspects of imagination within a single coherent theoretical framework. (shrink)