... of Dubois) and in the authorized Preface to the Pensées from the pen of ... Pensées de M. Pascal sur la religion et sur quelques autres sujets, ...

In “The Immorality of Horror Films,” philosopher and film scholar Gianluca Di Muzio proposes an analytic argument that aims to prove horror narratives, particularly slashers, unethical. His Argument from Reactive Attitudes contests slashers encourage pleasurable responses towards depictions of torture and death, which is possible only by suspending compassionate reactions. Doing so degrades sympathy and empathy, causing desensitization. This article will argue Di Muzio’s ARA, while valuable to discussion of art horror and morbidity, fails to meet its intended aim. The (...) ARA contains structural flaws in its logic, compounded by reliance on insufficient evidence. Additionally, Di Muzio does not adequately consider or rebut prominent aesthetic concerns, including ontological and moral distance of representations. Lastly, the argument utilizes a flawed classificatory schema that undermines its primary goal. Even narrowly confined to slashers, the ARA cannot explain alternative reasons for engaging with horror, nor does it account for those nuanced slasher works designed to foster compassion. The project concludes by offering a modified ARA with greater potential to accurately analyze the interrelation between art horror and morality. (shrink)

Excerpt from Selections From Pascal Blaise pascal was born at Clermont - Ferrand, in the center of F rance, on June 19, 1623. Three years later his mother died, and his father, taking the family duties most seriously, decided to be his son's own educator. At this time the father occupied a judicial position of considerable importance, but in 1630 he retired from it, moved the household to Paris, and gave himself up entirely to his work of preceptor. He taught (...) Blaise Latin and Greek, Mathematics and Physics, Logic and Philoso phy. For scientific studies the; boy showed unusual aptitude. At the age of twelve he was so far advanced as to write an essay on acoustics, which was followed at fifteen by treatise on conic sections. At eighteen he invented machine for count ing numbers. So great was his zeal for learning that he over taxed his strength by too steady application. Disorders ap peared, headaches and neuralgia, and his sister, Mme Perier, is authority for the statement that, from this time on, he rarely passed day without pain. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

This article explores how Levinas’s analysis of family relations (paternity, filiality, fecundity, and maternity) and the ethical relationship to the other (requiring both a paradoxical process of separation and the aptitude to be ethically ordained) can retrospectively enlighten our understanding of King Lear. It first shows how, in the Shakespearean tragedy, Levinas’s ethical answer, “here I am,” cannot be dissociated from fearless speech, which becomes the manifestation of the ethical relationship to the other. It then focuses on the Levinasian paradox (...) of “separation” as a prerequisite to the ethical relationship, and sees how this is radically distorted in the families presented in King Lear. It finally considers Levinas’s idea of maternity as a responsibility for others to the point of substitution, to questions the absence of mothers in King Lear and argue that the denouement of the tragedy can be regarded as a gender-reversed variation on the mater dolorosa motif. (shrink)

In this brilliant essay, Jacques Derrida explores issues of vision, blindness, self-representation, and their relation to drawing, while offering detailed readings of an extraordinary collection of images. Selected by Derrida from the prints and drawings department of the Louvre, the works depict blindness—fictional, historical, and biblical. From Old and New Testament scenes to the myth of Perseus and the Gorgon and the blinding of Polyphemus, Derrida uncovers in these images rich, provocative layers of interpretation. For Derrida drawing is itself blind; (...) as an act rooted in memory and anticipation, drawing necessarily replaces one kind of seeing with another. Ultimately, he explains, the very lines which compose any drawing are themselves never fully visible to the viewer since they exist only in a tenuous state of multiple identities: as marks on a page, as indicators of a contour. Lacking a "pure" identity, the lines of a drawing summon the supplement of the word, of verbal discourse, and, in doing so, obscure the visual experience. Consequently, Derrida demonstrates, the very act of depicting a blind person undertakes multiple enactments and statements of blindness and sight. _Memoirs of the Blind_ is both a sophisticated philosophical argument and a series of detailed readings. Derrida provides compelling insights into famous and lesser known works, interweaving analyses of texts—including Diderot's _Lettres sur les aveugles_, the notion of mnemonic art in Baudelaire's _The Painter of Modern _ _Life_, and Merleau-Ponty's _The Visible and the _ _Invisible_. Along with engaging meditations on the history and philosophy of art, Derrida reveals the ways viewers approach philosophical ideas through art, and the ways art enriches philosophical reflection. An exploration of sight, representation, and art, _Memoirs of the Blind_ extends and deepens the meditation on vision and painting presented in _Truth and _ _Painting_. Readers of Derrida, both new and familiar, will profit from this powerful contribution to the study of the visual arts. (shrink)

L’inégalité est une thématique sociale, abordée de façon récurrente dans les médias. Appliquant une approche de « sémantique discursive », nous examinerons l’usage d’inégalité(s) dans le discours de presse en circonscrivant les principales dimensions sémantiques du nom à travers ses fonctionnements préférentiels en cotexte, étroit ou élargi. Après quelques questionnements sémantico-référentiels autour du mot, l’étude du corpus – constitué d’articles issus des journaux Le Monde, Libération et Le Figaro – montrera qu’inégalité(s) fonctionne, à la fois, comme un lieu d’observation, d’évaluation (...) et de revendication. L’analyse conduit également à penser que l’usage partagé et consensuel du segment lutte contre les inégalités dans le corpus fait apparaître une forme de « langue de bois ». (shrink)

Cet article compare deux interprétations de l’amour chez Antigone, celle de Martha Nussbaum, d’un côté, et celle de Simone Weil, de l’autre. Nussbaum considère qu’Antigone est froide, fermée et excessive, tandis que Weil observe chez Antigone une très rare et exigeante forme d’amour. Alors que Nussbaum défend une vision émotive et presque romantique de l’amour, Weil évoque un amour « impersonnel », dont l’ancrage n’est pas émotif. Ce type d’amour décentre de soi-même et a un effet extatique : il sort (...) l’individu de lui-même. À l’instar d’Antigone qui résiste au pouvoir, cet amour ouvre à de nouvelles configurations éthiques et politiques. (shrink)

L’absurdité du monde et l’inquiétude face au sens de l’existence semblent être des affects négatifs. Par un dialogue entre Albert Camus et Jacques Lavigne, nous tenterons d’explorer le caractère créatif de ces affects. Camus et Lavigne partent d’une critique du matérialisme et de l’idéalisme afin d’ancrer leur théorie dans l’existence , en pensant conjointement les idées et la matérialité. Ils découvrent le rôle précieux de l’absurde et de l’inquiétude. Ces affects agissent comme vecteurs de l’action humaine et permettent d’initier le (...) sujet à la solidarité. Néanmoins, la société est organisée de telle manière que le sujet doit constamment s’opposer à la possibilité d’une neutralisation de ses affects. En ce sens, rester inquiet et conscient de l’absurdité de l’existence appelle une résistance du sujet. (shrink)

Shakespeare n'est pas philosophe. Et nombre de ses pointes ironiques à l'égard des philosophes témoignent de la défiance qu'ils lui inspiraient. Mais outre qu'il aura été influencé par diverses traditions philosophiques, provenant de l'Antiquité comme de la Renaissance, son oeuvre, depuis le XVIIIe siècle jusqu'à nos jours, n'a cessé d'inspirer celles des philosophes. Aussi, interroger Shakespeare au risque de la philosophie n'est pas l'aborder avec la volonté de soumettre son théâtre au règne du concept dans l'espoir secret de le démythifier. (...) C'est à l'inverse le prendre au sérieux, sans complaisance et jusque dans ses provocations, afin de faire entendre son propos et ses questions. Fruit d'une collaboration originale entre anglicistes et philosophes, cet ouvrage constitue un apport inédit aux études shakespeariennes de langue française."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

This article seeks to explain how and why groups and networks of undocumented migrants mobilizing in Berlin, Montréal, and Paris since the beginning of the 2000s construct different types of claims. The authors explore the relationship between undocumented migrants and state authorities at the local level through the concept of the citizenship regime and its specific application to undocumented migrants. Despite their common formal exclusion from citizenship, nonstatus migrants experience different degrees and forms of exclusion in their daily lives, in (...) terms of access to certain rights and services, recognition, and belonging within the state. As a result, they have an opportunity to create different, specific forms of leeway in the society in which they live. The concurrence of these different degrees of exclusion and different forms of leeway defines specific conditions of mobilization. The authors demonstrate how the content of their claims is influenced by these conditions of mobilization. (shrink)

The Pāli tradition presents a diverse and often contradictory picture of women. This book examines women's roles as they are described in the Pāli canon and its commentaries. Taking into consideration the wider socio-religious context and drawing from early brahmanical literature and epigraphical findings, it contrasts these descriptions with the doctrinal account of women's spiritual abilities. The book explores gender in the Pāli texts in order to delineate what it means to be a woman both in the context in which (...) the texts were composed and in the context of their ultimate goal - that of achieving escape from the round of rebirths. The critical investigation focuses on the internal relationships and dynamics of one tradition and employs a novel methodology, which the author calls "critical sympathy". This assumes that the tradition's teaching is valid for all, in particular that its main goal, nibbāṇa, is accessible to all human beings. By considering whether and how women's roles fit within this path, the author examines whether women have spiritual agency not only as bhikkhunīs (Buddhist nuns), but also as wives and mothers. It offers a new understanding that focuses on how the tradition construes women's traditional roles within an interdependent community. It aims to understand how what many scholars have seen as contradictory and inconsistent characterizations of women in Buddhism have been accepted and endorsed by the Pāli tradition. With an aim to show that the Pāli canon offers an account of women that is doctrinally coherent and consistent with its sociological facts, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of Buddhism and Asian Religion. (shrink)

What is the connection between causation and responsibility? Is there a best way to theorize philosophically about causation? Which factors determine and influence what we judge to be the cause of something? Bringing together interdisciplinary research from experimental philosophy, traditional philosophy and psychology, this collection showcases the most recent developments and approaches to questions about causation. Chapters discuss the diverse theoretical ramifications of empirical findings in experimental philosophy of causation, providing a comprehensive survey of key issues such as the perception (...) and learning of causal relations, omission, normative considerations, mechanism, voluntariness and legal theories of causation. With novel contributions from both experts and rising stars, Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Causation demonstrates the value of empirical work and opens new domains of inquiry at the cutting edge of the field. (shrink)

Recent research on thick terms like “rude” and “friendly” has revealed a polarity effect, according to which the evaluative content of positive thick terms like “friendly” and “courageous” can be more easily canceled than the evaluative content of negative terms like “rude” and “selfish”. In this paper, we study the polarity effect in greater detail. We first demonstrate that the polarity effect is insensitive to manipulations of embeddings (Study 1). Second, we show that the effect occurs not only for thick (...) terms but also for thin terms such as “good” or “bad” (Study 2). We conclude that the polarity effect indicates a pervasive asymmetry between positive and negative evaluative terms. (shrink)

The standard view in philosophy is that responsibility entails causation. Most philosophers treat this entailment claim as an evident insight into the ordinary concepts of responsibility and causation. Further, it is taken to be equally obvious that the reversal of this claim does not hold: causation does not entail responsibility. In contrast, Sytsma and Livengood have put forward an account of the use of ordinary causal attributions (statements like “X caused Y”) that contends that they are typically used interchangeably with (...) responsibility attributions (statements like “X is responsible for Y”). Put in terms of the concepts at play in these attributions, this account suggests that the reversal of the entailment claim may also hold, and, a fortiori, there would be mutual entailment between the ordinary concepts of responsibility and causation. Using the cancellability test, we report the results of three pre-registered studies providing empirical evidence that causation and responsibility are mutually entailed by each other. (shrink)

Deceptive implicatures are a subtle communicative device for leading someone into a false belief. However, it is widely accepted that deceiving by means of deceptive implicature does not amount to lying. In this paper, we put this claim to the empirical test and present evidence that the traditional definition of lying might be too narrow to capture the folk concept of lying. Four hundred participants were presented with fourteen vignettes containing utterances that communicate conversational implicatures which the speaker believes to (...) be false. We further collected several potential proxy measures of lying, to get a better understanding of when a deceptive implicature is considered a case of lying. The results indicate that most implicatures (ten out of fourteen) were evaluated as lies and that lie ratings were closely tracked by the degree to which speakers were considered to have committed themselves to the truth of the content conveyed by their deceptive implicatures. (shrink)

The most common approach to understanding the semantics of the concept of pain is third-person thought experiments. By contrast, the most frequent and most relevant uses of the folk concept of pain are from a first-person perspective in conversational settings. In this paper, we use a set of linguistic tools to systematically explore the semantics of what people communicate when reporting pain from a first-person perspective. Our results suggest that only a pluralistic view can do justice to the way we (...) talk about pain from a first-person perspective: The semantic content of the folk concept of pain consists of information about both an unpleasant feeling and a disruptive bodily state. Pain linguistics thus provides new insights into ordinary pain language and poses an interesting challenge to the dominant unitary views of pain. (shrink)

Pascal was a scientist and man of the world who came to be a passionately devout Christian. The fragments of his great defense of Christianity, left unfinished at his death in 1662, survive in the form of the Pensees. This series of brief, dramatic notes on his religious convictions are here translated into English. These thoughts expose Pascal's vision of the world and display powerful reasoning and a profound faith.

"I know of no religious writer more pertinent to our time."—T. S. Eliot, Introduction to Pensees Intended to prove that religion is not contrary to reason, Pascal's Pensees rank among the liveliest and most eloquent defenses of Christianity. Motivated by the seventeenth-century view of the supremacy of human reason, Pascal (1623–1662) had intended to write an ambitious apologia for Christianity in which he argued the inability of reason to address metaphysical problems. His untimely death prevented the work's completion, but the (...) fragments published posthumously in 1670 as Pensees remain a vital part of religious and philosophical literature. W. F. Trotter translation. Introduction by T. S. Eliot. (shrink)

This assignment is to be worked alongside other homework and is due at the class period following the midterm exam. Though you should do reading and start thinking about the issues right away, details will make most sense after we have made some progress with other assignments.

Livres [1] P. Engel, Identité et référence, la théorie des noms propres chez Frege et Kripke, Paris : Presses de l’École normale supérieure. [2] P. Engel, La Norme du vrai, philosophie de la logique, Paris : Gallimard, 3e éd. [3] P. Engel, The Norm of Truth, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Logic, New York : Harvester Wheatsheaf. Traduction en anglais de [2] par P. Engel & M. Kochan. [4] P. Engel, États d’esprit, questions de philosophie de l’esprit, Aix-en-Pro...

PREFACE When in the year 1940 I ventured a small volume under the title The Secret of Pascal, I honestly did not expect to write further on the topic. But circumstances ordered otherwise. The needs of Cambridge students and the difficulty, ...

The effects of aging on the cognitive and affective dimensions of theory of mind , and on the latter’s links with other cognitive processes, such as information processing speed, executive functions and episodic memory, are still unclear. We therefore investigated these effects in young , middle-aged and older adults , using separate subjective and objective assessment tasks. Furthermore, a novel composite task probed participants’ abilities to infer both cognitive and affective mental states in an interpersonal context. Although age affected the (...) objective ToM tests, results revealed a direct aging effect on the second-order ToM, but an indirect one on the first-order cognitive ToM, mediated mainly by age-related declines in executive functions. This study supports the notion of an age-related distinction between subjective and objective assessments of ToM, and confirms that ToM is a complex mental ability with several characteristics reliant to some extent on executive processes. (shrink)

This book explores the contributions to the philosophy of mind made by the Tibetan Buddhist thinker Phya pa Chos kyi seng ge (1109–1169) in his seminal text, the “Dispeller of the Mind’s Darkness.” This study, which includes a critical edition and English translation of those portions of the “Dispeller” devoted to explicating the nature of mental episodes and their objects, contributes to a deeper understanding of Tibetan intellectual history, while also facilitating a wider appreciation of both Phya pa’s theory of (...) mind and its significance within the global history of philosophy. (shrink)

Marie-Michèle Blondin et Pascale Devette.

L'impérieux amour de Pascal. - Discours sur les passions de l'amour. - Lettres de Pascal à Charlotte de Roannez. - Pensées de Pascal sur l'amitié. - Pensées de Pascal sur le coeur. - Pensées de Pascal sur l'amour. - Pensées de Pascal sur la concupisence.

There is growing interest in the effect of sound on visual motion perception. One model involves the illusion created when two identical objects moving towards each other on a two-dimensional visual display can be seen to either bounce off or stream through each other. Previous studies show that the large bias normally seen toward the streaming percept can be modulated by the presentation of an auditory event at the moment of coincidence. However, no reports to date provide sufficient evidence to (...) indicate whether the sound bounce-inducing effect is due to a perceptual binding process or merely to an explicit inference resulting from the transient auditory stimulus resembling a physical collision of two objects. In the present study, we used a novel experimental design in which a subliminal sound was presented either 150 ms before, at, or 150 ms after the moment of coincidence of two disks moving towards each other. The results showed that there was an increased perception of bouncing when the subliminal sound was presented at or 150 ms after the moment of coincidence compared to when no sound was presented. These findings provide the first empirical demonstration that activation of the human auditory system without reaching consciousness affects the perception of an ambiguous visual motion display. (shrink)