Premier quotidien populaire de masse en France, Le Petit Journal, fondé en 1863 par Millaud, va s'approprier l'affaire Troppmann, un fait-divers criminel survenu en 1869. Au fil de l'enquête, le chroniqueur vedette du Petit Journal, Thomas Grimm, n'a de cesse d'opérer une spectacularisation du journal et de son lectorat. L'analyse de cette exaltation et instrumentalisation du populaire permet d'éclairer les rouages des discours mass-médiatiques réflexifs et autosatisfaits tout en se livrant à une archéologie de notre complexe médiatique contemporain. Car en (...) dépit de sa vétusté stylistique, la chronique de Grimm ici analysée fait de l'argument de l'audience son leitmotiv et jette les bases d'une rhétorique de l'émotion, deux pratiques éditoriales promises à un bel avenir.First mass newspaper in France, Le Petit Journal, founded in 1863 by Millaud, will take advantage of the Troppmann Affair, an assassination which has occurred in 1869, to increase its readership. During the coverage of the investigation, the main columnist of Petit Journal, Thomas Grimm, daily operate a "spectacularisation" of the newspaper and of its readership. The analysis of this exaltation and instrumentalisation of popular makes it possible to throw light on the particularities of the reflexive and selfsatisfied mass-media speeches, and to sketch out an archaeology of our contemporary media field. Indeed, in spite of its outdatedness stylistic, the Grimms column, analyzed here, makes argument of the audience its leitmotiv, and develops a rhetoric of the emotions, two editorial characteristics promised with a brilliant future in the media. (shrink)

Analogies between hearing and seeing already existed in ancient Greek theories of perception. The present paper follows the evolution of such analogies until the rise of 17th century optics, with due regard to the diversity of their origins and nature but with particular emphasis on their bearing on the physical concepts of light and sound. Whereas the old Greek analogies were only side effects of the unifying concepts of perception, the analogies of the 17th century played an important role in (...) constructing optical theories by imitation of acoustic theories, or vice versa. This transition depended on several factors including the changing relations between optics, music, mathematics, and physics, the diversity of early modern concepts of sound, and the rise of a new physics based on experimentation and mechanical explanation. (shrink)

Analogies between hearing and seeing already existed in ancient Greek theories of perception. The present paper follows the evolution of such analogies until the rise of 17th century optics, with due regard to the diversity of their origins and nature but with particular emphasis on their bearing on the physical concepts of light and sound. Whereas the old Greek analogies were only side effects of the unifying concepts of perception, the analogies of the 17th century played an important role in (...) constructing optical theories by imitation of acoustic theories, or vice versa. This transition depended on several factors including the changing relations between optics, music, mathematics, and physics, the diversity of early modern concepts of sound, and the rise of a new physics based on experimentation and mechanical explanation. (shrink)

© 2015, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.Genetic studies have identified single nucleotide polymorphisms associated with the risk of prostate cancer. It remains unclear whether such genetic variants are associated with disease aggressiveness. The NCI-SPORE Genetics Working Group retrospectively collected clinicopathologic information and genotype data for 36 SNPs which at the time had been validated to be associated with PC risk from 25,674 cases with PC. Cases were grouped according to race, Gleason score and aggressiveness. Statistical analyses were used to compare the frequency (...) of the SNPs between different disease cohorts. After adjusting for multiple testing, only PC-risk SNP rs2735839 was significantly and inversely associated with aggressive and high-grade disease in European men. Similar associations with aggressive and high-grade disease were documented in African-American subjects. The G allele of rs2735839 was associated with disease aggressiveness even at low PSA levels in both European and African-American men. Our results provide further support that a PC-risk SNP rs2735839 near the KLK3 gene on chromosome 19q13 may be associated with aggressive and high-grade PC. Future prospectively designed, case-case GWAS are needed to identify additional SNPs associated with PC aggressiveness. (shrink)

Cet article a pour but de donner quelques pistes sur les notions d’espace et de temps chez Maclaurin (1698-1746) à la fois en physique et aussi dans leur représentation mathématique. En s’appuyant essentiellement sur deux de ses ouvrages, l’Account of Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophical Discoveries et le Treatise of Fluxions, nous verrons en quoi il est proche de Newton et nous donnerons en guise d’exemple, l’application à la question de la figure de la Terre.

I formulate a theory of groups based on pluralities and counterparts: roughly put, a group is a plurality of entities at a time. This theory comes with counterpart-theoretic semantics for modal and temporal sentences about groups. So this theory of groups is akin to the stage theory of material objects: both take the items they analyze to exist at a single time, and both use counterparts to satisfy certain conditions relating to the modal properties, temporal properties, and coincidence properties of (...) those items. (shrink)

The thesis defended is that ordinary perception does not present us with the existential independence of its objects from itself. The phenomenology of ordinary perception is mute with respect to the subject-object distinction. I call this view "phenomenal neutral monism" : though neutral monists are wrong about the metaphysics of perception (in every perceptual episode, there is a distinction between the perceptual act and its perceptual objet), they are right about its phenomenology. I first argue that this view is not (...) as counter-intuitive as it might initially seem, by stressing (i) that the lack of presentation of the mind-independence of perceptual objects does not entail their being presented as mind-dependent. (ii) That phenomenal neutral monism is true of ordinary perception in the thin sense, but not in the thick sense (that includes expectations, guesses, feelings etc. grounded on thin perception). (iii) That the concept of a perceptual perspective or point of view should not be confused with the concept of the subject or intentional act of perception. Second, I propose three positive arguments in favor of phenomenal neutral monism. (i) It does justice to the recurring idea that only resistance to our will presents us with the world qua independent from us. (ii) It does justice to the recurring idea that the most natural attitude towards the perceptual world is that of being absorbed in it. (iii) It is entailed by the view that intentional acts are phenomenally transparent (a view held by Russell and Moore, and most contemporary representationalists) together with the view that in order to be presented with a relation (here the act-object distinction) one has to be presented with its relata. (shrink)

The uncertainty concerning the genre of the Ḥorvat ʿUza ostracon 1 is problematized through the lens of linguistic anthropology. Although a denotative approach to the linguistic forms in this Hebrew ostracon is well attested, less attention has been paid to the indexical meaning of specific stylistic features and their semi- otic register implications. Several linguistic-ideological concepts are drawn upon to examine how the act of inscription and specialized linguistic forms align the discursive genre of the ostracon with prophecy. I seek (...) to determine what salient discourse forms in the ostracon index the employment of habitual utterance styles of prophecy that construct context, genre, and social identity. (shrink)

“Irregular auditing” are actions taken by an auditor during an engagement that reduce evidence-gathering effectiveness inappropriately. The paper presents the results of an empirical study of the reasons given by auditors for their own irregular auditing. It is based on a questionnaire survey of 170 audit seniors working in Big Four audit firms in France. The study uses Schlenker’s (1997) triangle model of responsibility as the theoretical framework to analyze the respondents’ explanations of their behavior.

Roughly put, explanatory circles — if any exist — would be propositions such that (i) each explains the next, and (ii) the last explains the first. In this paper, I give two arguments for the view that there are explanatory circles. The first argument appeals to general relativistic worlds in which time is circular. The second argument appeals to special science theories that describe feedback loops. In addition, I show that three standard arguments against explanatory circles are unsuccessful.

If we consider heritage as a process of exhibiting the past and the present to present these for future observers then encyclopedias are good candidates for assessing what constitutes heritage. We propose to study the Fluxion entries in British encyclopaedias over a long period of time. With the help of this corpus of more than thirty articles, it will then be possible to identify several markers that contribute to making mathematics a heritage object—a reference to history, sources of inspiration and (...) bibliographical references. (shrink)

Pierre Bourdieu est plus connu pour son oeuvre sociologique que pour ses prises de position épistémologiques. Si on lui accorde volontiers une certaine habileté théorique, on ne lui reconnaît aucune compétence particulière en matière d'épistémologie des sciences sociales. Prenant le contre-pied de ces critiques, l'auteur montre la cohérence épistémologique du travail du sociologue.

This book recounts a few ingenious attempts to derive physical theories by reason only, beginning with Descartes' geometric construction of the world, and finishing with recent derivations of quantum mechanics from natural axioms.

Starting with the observation that there exist contradictory claims in the literature about the relationship between vitalism and emergentism—be it one of inclusion or, on the contrary, exclusion–, this paper aims at disentangling the vitalism–emergentism knot. To this purpose, after having described a particular form of emergentism, namely Lloyd Morgan’s emergent evolutionism, I develop a conceptual analysis on the basis of a distinction between varieties of monism and pluralism. This analysis allows me to identify and characterize several forms of vitalism (...) and emergentism, and a subsequent comparison between these forms constitutes the occasion for a clarification of the relationship between both doctrines. (shrink)

In the current article and contrary to a widespread assumption, I argue that Humeanism and ontological emergence can peacefully coexist. Such a coexistence can be established by reviving elements of John Stuart Mill’s philosophy of science, in which an idiosyncratic account of diachronic emergence is associated with extensions of the Humean mosaic and the correlative coming into being of new best system laws, which have the peculiarity of being temporally indexed. Incidentally, this reconciliation of Humeanism and emergence allows for conceiving (...) the autonomy of the special sciences in an interesting way, consistently with the reductionist ideal of a unified science. (shrink)

Several strands of contemporary cognitive science and its philosophy have emerged in recent decades that emphasize the role of action in cognition, resting their explanations on the embodiment of cognitive agents, and their embedding in richly structured environments. Despite their growing influence, many foundational questions remain unresolved or underexplored for this cluster of proposals, especially questions of how they can be extended beyond straightforwardly visuomotor cognitive capacities, and what constraints the commitment of embodiment places on the ontology of explanations. This (...) special issue aims to contribute to these foundational debates by drawing on important precursors to embodied cognition in mid-twentieth century gestalt psychology, its immediate successor ecological psychology, and their dialectical counterpart, phenomenology. Gestalt psychologists and phenomenologists wrestled with many of the same foundational questions that still haunt us today, in a manner that seems refreshing in hindsight, and poised to contribute constructively to contemporary debate. Looking back on this history reveals deep commonalities across competing embodied approaches, exposing fundamental tensions that remain unresolved, but also paving the way to a more ecumenical and conciliatory embodied cognitive science. (shrink)

Psychological theories and practices inform the analysis and problem-solving of human and social predicaments. As such, they often have significant sociopolitical implications. The place of prominence enjoyed by cognitivism in psychology requires that we examine its ideological, social and political repercussions. It is argued that the primacy ascribed to the mind and the individual agent in cognitive psychology, in the best Cartesian tradition, tends to reinforce the need to adjust intrapsychic, as opposed to societal structures in the remediation of personal (...) and social problems. Examples to support this argument are drawn from the areas of cognitive theory, research, education and therapy. (shrink)

In his novels B. E. Ellis depicts a generation of bewildered rich young people, who live the easiest of lives, in a wealthy background as one can see in everyday American shows. But they actually suffer from the excess of things, products, luxury; the result for them is that the overall meaning of life is lost. Fink’s phenomenology gives us the interpretation for this nihilistic experience. Humanity is depressed as far as the world is forgotten. Forgetting the world is even (...) more scandalous and serious than the disregard of Being that Heidegger condemns. B. E. Ellis applies the method of reduction: he makes the epoché of the container-world. Consequently, we learn that the idea of the world is the condition for unity, coherence and direction as shows Fink’s Welt und Endlichkeit: Humanity when devoid of the totality (as a synonym for world) is absolutely devoid of meaning. The Cosmos-container comes before Being or the beings (as simple contents). World is the radical source for all data. With the arguments of Fink’s book Spiel als Weltsymbol, we may understand why Ellis’ characters strain to rebuild a world, with their new religion of trade marks and name dropping. But holy objects of consumption and luxury can’t produce an authentic world. (shrink)

De nature homilétique, la prédication de Calvin suit le principe de la lectio continua, proche du commentaire des lectiones. Le réformateur mentionne souvent les philosophes, de manière positive pour les savoirs qu’ils représentent, mais aussi pour les critiquer. La philosophie et les philosophes sont des réalités ambivalentes, comme dans l’ Institution de la religion chrestienne, et désignent les savoirs humains sur le monde et sur l’homme en tant qu’on peut ou qu’on ose envisager ces réalités comme indépendantes de Dieu. Les (...) plus grands éloges de la philosophie donnent lieu aux condamnations les plus vives. Calvin utilise aussi la désignation de philosophes pour critiquer des adversaires contemporains : d’une part la théologie scolastique et tridentine, d’autre part les « moyenneurs » érasmiens. Le réformateur oppose les deux « styles », celui de la philosophie et celui de la révélation scripturaire, à la fois comme deux méthodes discursives, deux styles au sens littéraire, et deux stratégies : seules les Écritures saintes sont capables de conduire efficacement à la vraie sagesse (chrétienne). (shrink)

Dans cet article, je montre que quatre normes de rationalité associées aux intentions peuvent être déduites de normes similaires s’appliquant aux acceptations en contextes délibératifs, un type d’état mental apparenté mais irréductible aux croyances par lequel un agent tient certains faits pour acquis lorsqu’il délibère. Je montre que cette approche, que je nomme le pragmatisme hybride, évite certaines limitations de l’approche la plus prisée dans la littérature, le cognitivisme, et qu’en comparaison avec les approches purement pragmatistes, principales rivales du cognitivisme, (...) le pragmatisme hybride rend mieux justice à nos intuitions relatives aux normes associées aux intentions. Je montre enfin que le pragmatisme hybride permet d’expliquer comment les intentions influencent le raisonnement pratique, et de ce fait, comblent un vide important dans les théories contemporaines.In this paper, I show that four normative requirements on rational intentions follow from similar requirements on acceptations in deliberative contexts, a type of mental state close but irreducible to beliefs by which agents take some facts for granted in deliberation. I show that this approach, which I call hybrid pragmatism, avoid shortcomings of cognitivism, one of the most prominent one in the literature. I show furthermore that in comparison with purely pragmatist approaches, the main rivals of cognitivism, an hybrid form of pragmatism makes better justice to our intuitions regarding the sources of the normative requirements on rational intentions, and that it allows for understanding how intentions influence practical reasoning. (shrink)

Jusqu’à Totalité et Infini compris, la temporalité aura été essentiellement pensée par Lévinas, au seuil de l’événement qu’est l’Autre, comme ouverture d’un avenir pur, jusqu’à la rémission d’un présent, qui nous relèverait alors de notre passé. À partir de sa méditation toujours plus insistante de la « Trace de l’Autre », Lévinas est toutefois amené à repenser cette ouverture elle-même depuis un passé toujours déjà passé et dont nous aurions à jamais à répondre, échapperait-il à toute expérience dans l’entre-temps de (...) son passage. Du Visage à la Trace – jusqu’au visage comme trace –, l’avenir ne s’ouvrirait à nous que dans la déchirure de notre réponse à ce passé immémorial d’où l’Autre nous appellerait sans cesse, déjà parti avant d’être venu. Arrachés à nous-mêmes, nous voici, dans la « honte de survivre », ordonnés à l’avenir par l’accusation d’un passé qui toujours se dérobe, sans qu’il nous soit jamais possible de nous y dérober. À partir de sa pensée de la trace de l’Autre et de sa mortalité, Lévinas inscrit sa propre méditation du temps et de l’histoire dans la trace de l’immémorial – impossible mémoire, à la mémoire de l’impossible, dont la signifiance éthique ne saurait se réduire à un improbable « devoir de mémoire ». « Une voix vient de l’autre rive. Une voix interrompt le dire du déjà dit », qui nous voue, à présent, à ce qui ne cesse de venir, selon une vocation, une dévotion, qui est le temps lui-même.Up to and including Totality and Infinity, temporality has been thought by Levinas, on the threshold of this incident which is the Other, as the opening of a pure future, up to the remission of the present, which would then recover us from our past. Nevertheless, from his more and more insistent meditation upon the « Trace of the Other », Levinas has been led to re-examine that opening itself from a past for ever past and for which we would be answerable, were it to escape our experience in the interval of its crossing. From the Face to the Trace – up to the face considered as a trace –, future would be opened for us only in the tear of our answer to this immemorial past, from where the Other would call us incessantly, already gone off before he came. Uprooted from ourselves, here we are, in the « shame of survival », ordered to the future by the charge of an ever-escaping past, from which we can never escape ourselves. From his thought of the Other’s trace and mortality, Levinas includes his own meditation of time and history within the trace of the immemorial – impossible memory, to the memory of the impossible, the ethical sense of which is irreducible to an improbable « duty of memory ». « A voice comes from the other side. A voice breaks in the saying of what is already said », that vows us, just now, to what is constantly to come, under a vocation, a devotion, which is time in itself. (shrink)

The German synthesis of evolutionary theory that grew out of opposition to idealistic morphology has been anchored in the systematic work at the species level and below pursued by the Berlin School around Erwin Stresemann (involving Bernhard Rensch and Ernst Mayr), in the 1939 German translation of Dobzhansky’s Genetics and the Origin of Species, and in a 1943 anthology on evolution edited by Gerhard Heberer. The latter volume opened with a philosophical essay written by Hugo Dingler that was intended to (...) provide the theoretical foundation for the theory of descent. Dingler and Heberer not only shared a commitment to the Darwinian evolutionary mechanisms of random mutation and natural selection, but also drew from Darwinism the justification for racial hygiene and eugenics. Dingler’s “unequivocal-methodological system” is a meta-scientific construct that offers no ontological grounding of evolutionary theory. Dingler’s voluntarism is subjectivist and stipulative and for those reasons ineffective in a critique of idealistic morphology. Dingler claimed descent with modification as a historical fact, but dealt only marginally with evolutionary mechanisms, and did not touch on issues of phylogeny reconstruction. (shrink)

The philosopher David Lewis is credited by many social scientists, including mainstream economists, with having founded the modern (game-theoretical) approach to conventions, viewed as solutions to recurrent coordination problems. Yet it is generally ignored that he revised his approach, soon after the publication of his well-known book. I suggest that this revision has deep implications (probably not perceived by Lewis himself) on the analytical links between coordination, uncertainty and rationality. Thinking anew about these issues leads me to map out an (...) alternative social scientific research programme. The traditional ontological equipment of methodological individualism should be reinforced in order to admit the existence of an “intersubjective” world beside the two familiar worlds: the “objective” world of observable things, and the “subjective” world of expectations and individual beliefs. In particular, language becomes necessary to understand coordination via conventions, rather than the other way round. That has led a group of institutionalist economists and pragmatist sociologists to develop an enlarged model of rationality, no longer isolated from questions of coordination and values. This model is the basis for the “Economics of Conventions”. (shrink)