In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Martha Nussbaum on Dickens's Hard TimesPaulette KidderAt the heart of Martha Nussbaum's work in capability ethics is a rejection of utilitarianism. Nussbaum has repeatedly recounted a pivotal moment in Dickens's Hard Times (1854), in which the young Sissy Jupe delivers an innocent but devastating critique of the utilitarian system.1 Nussbaum's most extended and compelling reading of Hard Times appears in Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life.2 Nussbaum (...) convincingly shows that Dickens's novel is a "deep attack" on utilitarianism, going to the heart of the assumption that the human good consists in maximizing the satisfaction of preferences of the greatest aggregate of persons.In what follows, I will review Nussbaum's philosophical reading of the novel and its critique of utilitarianism, and then return to Hard Times to show that Nussbaum has systematically omitted references to the Biblical themes and references that pervade the novel. Arguing that Dickens's attack on utilitarianism draws much of its power from the resonance of these historically rooted symbols of transcendence, I will conclude with a reflection on the reasons for Nussbaum's avoidance of these themes in her own reading of the book.Hard Times, which focuses on a set of characters living in the polluted and class-divided manufacturing city of "Coketown," is known as Dickens's most polemical novel. The novel announces its central theme immediately in the opening speech by Thomas Gradgrind to the young students of the Gradgrind School: "Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach [End Page 417] these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else...."3From the youngest age, the children in Gradgrind's school are taught to avoid wonder and imagination and only to focus on science and mathematics—the study of what is observable and measurable. This education leaves his two eldest children, Tom and Louisa, miserably unequipped for the choices they face as adults. Young Tom Gradgrind grows up to be an undisciplined wastrel, incurring gambling debts that lead him to embezzle money and then to frame a factory worker, Stephen Blackpool, for the crime. Louisa Gradgrind endures a miserable marriage to her father's wealthy friend, Josiah Bounderby.At the moral center of the novel is Sissy Jupe, a girl who proves impervious to Gradgrind's educational system. Sissy, the daughter of a horse trainer who works for Sleary's Circus, is abandoned by her father and taken into the Gradgrind home. Sharing the moral center with Sissy is Stephen Blackpool, a weaver whose honesty and conviction cause him to run afoul of both his employer Bounderby and the demagogic Slackbridge, organizer for the trade union.In her reading of Hard Times, Nussbaum identifies four elements of utilitarianism: commensurability, aggregation, maximizing, and exogenous preferences, all of which are both dramatized in the novel and critiqued by it (PJ, p. 14). Commensurability means that "all the valuable things under consideration [are regarded as] valuable because they contain some one thing that itself varies only in quantity" (PJ, p. 14). Characters that Dickens presents as memorable individuals are seen by Gradgrind's system as "parcels of human nature." Students in Gradgrind's School are called by number instead of name, and the workers of Coke-town are seen as "hands and stomachs," and are likened to "ants and beetles." Individuality is erased by what Nussbaum terms Gradgrind's "abstracting mathematical mind" (PJ, p. 21).Aggregation, the second utilitarian element, means that data about individual lives is pooled, "without regarding the boundaries between lives as especially salient for the purposes of choice" (p. 14). Louisa Gradgrind is taught, for example, to view the working classes as "Something to be worked so much and paid so much, and there ended; something to be infallibly settled by laws of supply and demand; something that blundered against those laws, and floundered into difficulty; something that was a little pinched when wheat was dear, and overate itself when wheat was cheap... But, she had scarcely thought more of separating [End Page 418] [the people of Coketown] into units, than of separating the sea itself into its... (shrink)

Historien – ses thèses sur l’archéologie de la Grande-Bretagne romaine font encore autorité – philosophe, penseur engagé, analyste intransigeant de la barbarie, en particulier nazie, R.G. Collingwood (1889-1943) connaît aujourd’hui en Angleterre un regain de renommée. Ses œuvres – dont on croyait la plus importante, The Principles of History, disparue – sont rééditées; de nombreux critiques les commentent. The New Leviathan, rédigé à Londres sous les bombes, a été traduit en français (Kimé, 2001). Les philosophes français commencent enfin à s’intéresser (...) à ce penseur prophétique. De nombreux manuscrits inédits, en particulier sur la magie, sont stimulants. (shrink)

Au centre de ce livre : la différence sexuelle dans les écrits d'Emmanuel Levinas. Différence qui hante la philosophie depuis ses débuts mais dérange les systèmes de pensée. Le féminin serait alors un nom pour ce reste qui échappe aux systèmes de pensée. L'enjeu de Levinas consistant à penser l'Autre comme irréductible au Même, il rompt avec l'apparente neutralité du sujet philosophique. Il établit corrélativement un rapport entre la femme, le féminin et l'hospitalité. A travers l'irruption du féminin, de la (...) voix féminine dans le champ philosophique, le présent ouvrage propose une nouvelle image de la pensée. A partir de l'examen de la " différence des sexes " comme " douce défaillance ", se trouve dégagée la " subjectivité au féminin " qui ramène à l'immémorial. De cet examen à la fois précis et vivant de ses occurrences dans le texte de Levinas, émerge la trace du féminin dans l'un des textes majeurs de la philosophie contemporaine de l'altérité. (shrink)

Si les sympathies de Toland pour le régime «républicain» (en anglais de l’époque, « commonwealthman » pour le substantif, « republican » pour l’adjectif ou le substantif) ne sont guère mises en doute aujourd’hui, encore faut-il s’entendre sur ce que signifie ce terme de «républicain». Les éditions que donna Toland d’ouvrages dont les thèses antiabsolutistes étaient connues de tous et les préfaces dont il les munit sont un argument sérieux en faveur d’un Toland « républicain ». Il faut cependant mettre (...) en lumière les différents sens que Toland accepterait ou refuserait de donner à la notion de « république ». De nombreuses thèses de l’auteur sont communes aux whigs et aux républicains, et pourtant il manifeste sa méfiance à l’égard des partis. Ce qui est certain, c’est que Toland défend vivement les libertés – liberté de conscience, liberté de la presse, liberté du commerce – et aussi l’idée d’équilibre tant à l’intérieur des divers pouvoirs de l’État que dans le concert des nations. (shrink)

Robin George Collingwood , né dans une famille de musiciens, de peintres et d’archéologues, fit toute sa carrière à l’Université d’Oxford, comme archéologue, historien et philosophe. Il fut fellow et tutor au collège de Pembroke puis à celui de Lincoln, de 1912 à 1928, puis University..

"In Poverty: A Philosophical Approach, the author studies various philosophical issues concerning poverty in the Program for Education, Health and Food (PROGRESA) that was in effect in Mexico, from 1997 to 2002, and shows how theoretical discussion is necessary to clarify some ideas concerning the application of a social policy." "The book considers social policies applied to poverty, and their occasional abuse of utilitarian instruments. Many are implemented without considering cultural differences, including varying patterns of conduct in diverse communities."--BOOK JACKET.

Chapitre. VII. LES. ROUAGES. DE. LA. VIE. POLITIQUE. L'homme raffiné et prospère que nous venons de rencontrer est le produit des gouvernements avancés. Ces gouvernements, résultats de techniques tâtonnantes, tiennent leur  ...

Cet ouvrage, centré sur la question interdisciplinaire de la rencontre entre les animaux humains et non humains, cherche à créer des passerelles entre les différents courants des études animales. Des chercheurs issus des sciences de l'homme et des sciences de la nature questionnent les grandes étapes historiques, politiques et philosophiques qui ont marqué les relations que nous entretenons avec les animaux non humains depuis le Moyen Âge. Ce volume s'attache à mettre au jour les moments de rupture ainsi que le (...) rôle de certains précurseurs de la révolution animale. Il interroge également la notion d'anthropomorphisme, centrale pour repenser la relation homme-animal. Il se termine par une ouverture sur le domaine artistique, à travers la bande-dessinée, la poésie et la sculpture. (shrink)

Contemporary ideas of nature were largely shaped by schools of thought from Western cultural history and philosophy until the present-day concerns with environmental change and biodiversity conservation. There are many different ways of conceptualising nature in epistemological terms, reflecting the tensions between the polarities of humans as masters or protectors of nature and as part of or outside of nature. The book shows how nature is today the focus of numerous debates, calling for an approach which goes beyond the merely (...) technical or scientific. It adopts a threefold - critical, historical and cross-disciplinary - approach in order to summarise the current state of knowledge. It includes contributions informed by the humanities (especially history, literature and philosophy) and social sciences, concerned with the production and circulation of knowledge about "nature" across disciplines and across national and cultural spaces. The volume also demonstrates the ongoing reconfiguration of subject disciplines, as seen in the recent emergence of new interdisciplinary approaches and the popularity of the prefix "eco-" (e.g. ecocriticism, ecospirituality, ecosophy and ecofeminism, as well as subdivisions of ecology, including urban ecology, industrial ecology and ecosystem services). Each chapter provides a concise overview of its topic which will serve as a helpful introduction to students and a source of easy reference. This text is also valuable reading for researchers interested in philosophy, sociology, anthropology, geography, ecology, politics and all their respective environmentalist strands. (shrink)

This article is a phenomenological study of students' lived experience in a computer conference learning environment. Issues for students in computer conferences revolved around spatial disorientation: existential location, appearances in space, imagined space, word space, secret space, and being alone within a group. Within these spatial issues the students grappled with getting into a computer space, familiarity of use, getting stuck, and the class as a "necessary evil. " The article poses critical questions for educators to consider the use of (...) computer conferencing as a learning environment. (shrink)

This essay explores the impact of Kierkegaard’s work on the thought of Stanley Cavell. Cavell identifies two central themes in Kierkegaard’s philosophy: first, rather than concerning itself with problems of logic or with abstract questions, philosophy is concerned with ordinary life and its lived spiritual questions; second, there are things that can only be understood by participating in them. Therefore, the task of the philosopher is not to explain or define ideas but to dramatize for the reader that the choice (...) of one’s inward way of life is of vital importance. These two themes, along with Kierkegaard’s account of repetition, are fundamentally important in Cavell’s own work in the philosophy of film, specifically in what Cavell calls the “comedies of remarriage” and the “melodramas of the unknown woman.”. (shrink)