When do children become aware of themselves as differentiated and unique entity in the world? When and how do they become self-aware? Based on some recent empirical evidence, 5 levels of self-awareness are presented and discussed as they chronologically unfold from the moment of birth to approximately 4-5 years of age. A natural history of children's developing self-awareness is proposed as well as a model of adult self-awareness that is informed by the dynamic of early development. Adult self-awareness is viewed (...) as the dynamic flux between basic levels of consciousness that develop chronologically early in life. (shrink)

Teilhard has never given up on permanence behind change, whereas Blondel, although interested by permanence, presents a very keen consciousness of irreversibility. Blondel attempts to construct an ontology that integrates this fact of change or becoming. Would this have satisfied Teilhard? Blondel develops a "logic of moral life" insisting on the initial option right to the end of our destiny. Teilhard develops a consciousness of time with a direct hold on a world apprehended first by the senses, whereas Blondel is (...) suspicious of the sometimes misleading testimony of the senses. We thus see a Blondelian attempt to see where the will reach its limits from this only standpoint, while Teilhard admits the influence of a mystical vision. We thus find in both thinkers a primacy of eternal light and truths, strongly affirmed by Blondel, although present in Teilhard; a specificity of evolution, and the necessity of a complement to prevent thought to close itself off. Both thinkers agree on the idea that "Everything holds from above." They recognize that our humanity represents only a sketch, that it is infra-substantial. (shrink)

In abstract argumentation, each argument is regarded as atomic. There is no internal structure to an argument. Also, there is no specification of what is an argument or an attack. They are assumed to be given. This abstract perspective provides many advantages for studying the nature of argumentation, but it does not cover all our needs for understanding argumentation or for building tools for supporting or undertaking argumentation. If we want a more detailed formalization of arguments than is available with (...) abstract argumentation, we can turn to structured argumentation, which is the topic of this special issue of Argument and Computation. In structured argumentation, we assume a formal language for representing knowledge and specifying how arguments and counterarguments can be constructed from that knowledge. An argument is then said to be structured in the sense that normally, the premises and claim of the argument are made explicit, and the relationship between the premises and claim is formally defined (for instance, using logical entailment). In this introduction, we provide a brief overview of the approaches covered in this special issue on structured argumentation. (shrink)

The informational content conveyed by utterances has two sources:meaning as it is encoded in words and rules of semantic composition (often called literal or semantic meaning) and further inferences that may be obtained by reasoning on the speaker's motives (the conjunction of these inferences with the literal meaning is often called the strengthened or pragmatic meaning of the sentence). While in simple cases the difference can seem obvious enough, in general this is not so, and the investigation of the semantics–pragmatics (...) interface has proven to be one of the most vibrant areas of research in contemporary studies of meaning. We will survey three domains – scalar implicatures, presuppositions, and conventional implicatures – in which there are considerable empirical benefits to be obtained from this enterprise. However, it is also of foundational and methodological interest: knowledge of semantic meaning is part of knowledge of language; by contrast, pragmatic inferences are derived in part from the assumption that the speaker obeys certain rules of behavior – typically ones dictated by rationality (which may, for instance, lead to the maximization of the utility of an utterance to the speaker or to others). Owing to foundational interest in the interaction between language and reasoning, the study of the semantics– pragmatics interface originated in philosophy; however, it quickly became a central topic within linguistics and psycholinguistics, and the convergence of results from these last two fields has resulted in rich cross-disciplinary exchanges. For reasons of space, we do not consider psycholinguistic results in this survey, but it should be said at the outset that they have changed the face of the field by providing new and more reliable data (for instance, on processing and language acquisition) and sometimes by challenging data that had too quickly become solidified on the basis of unsystematic introspection alone. -/- As we will see, the debates are more open than ever. Scalar implicatures, which were usually considered a staple of pragmatic reasoning, have recently been reassigned to the semantics or even to the syntax by proponents of locally computed implicatures (‘localists’ for short). (shrink)

If the new and rapidly expanding discipline of neuroethics is to have a signii cant impact on patient care, the neuroscience clinicians must become familiar with the discipline, and be competent and comfortable in applying its cognitive base and principles to clinical decisionmaking. Familiarity with and practical experience in the application of basic biomedical knowledge and principles to clinical decision- making in the neurosciences becomes the essential foundation on which to begin to integrate neuroethics into medical education. The place where (...) the building of this foundation and the initial exposure to neuroethics must begin is in the residency program. This article describes the approach developed in the neurology residency education program at the University of Calgary to move toward achieving this goal. The key elements for the development and successful implementation of the program are outlined and a brief overview of the topics covered in the sessions is described. (shrink)

Le dépassement phénoménologique du substantialisme métaphysique devrait permettre aujourd’hui d’envisager une refondation de la notion de personne, laquelle s’était quelque peu immobilisée depuis Boèce. Sur ce nouvel horizon, le retour à la fondation première, celle d’Augustin, s’impose. Celui-ci est le premier en effet, pour l’essentiel dans son traité de la Trinité, à avoir clairement pensé la personne comme relation et non comme substance. La réduction augustinienne de la personne à l’ego ou à « l’homme intérieur » ouvre la possibilité d’ (...) « analogies subjectives » avec la Trinité : pensée, amour, connaissance ; mémoire, intelligence, volonté. Cependant, la spéculation augustinienne trouve sa limite en échouant à penser une personne de chair – et, qui plus est, une telle personne comme « en relation ». Ce qui était relation en Dieu reste, en l’homme, substance pensante, seule face à son Dieu.Phenomenology has overcome the old substance of metaphysics and then should permit us today to refound the idea of the person which was in a way, since Boethius, brought to a standstill. Therefore we must to go back to St. Augustine who was actually the first, in his De Trinitate, to conceive, the person as a relation and not as a substance. The person so confined to the ego or to the « inner man » allows some possible « subjective analogies » with the Trinity : thought, love, knowledge, memory, intelligence and will. However the Augustinian theory fails to conceive first the person in her own flesh and blood – a bodily person – and secondly such a person as being « in relation » : man is a thinking substance, alone facing her God. (shrink)

By most measures, French labor is among the weakest in the industrialized world. Yet it has retained a high level of mobilizing and institutional power. This unusual position is partly due to the historical role of labor courts, one of France’s oldest and most influential labor institutions. Based on a range of historical and contemporary evidence, this article shows that the involvement of the state and labor in these courts over the past two centuries has played a crucial role in (...) the evolution of French industrial relations. This process unfolded along three main dimensions: the early establishment of labor courts strongly and durably influenced the mobilization patterns of the emergent labor movement, France’s labor relations model was largely inspired by the judicialism embedded in labor courts, and a combination of more contingent events led to the emergence of a problematic notion of union“representativeness.” These patterns have contributed to shape French labor into its present condition of both weakness and strength. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Nobel Rhetoric; or, Petrarch's PendulumPhilippe-Joseph SalazarVery many authors who have their roots in other countries work in Europe, because it is only here where you can be left alone and write, without being beaten to death. It is dangerous to be an author in big parts of Asia and Africa.1The ceremony of [Petrarch's] coronation was performed on the Capitol, by his friend and patron the supreme magistrate of the (...) republic... and thrice repeating his vows for the prosperity of Rome, he knelt before the throne and received from the senator a laurel crown, with a more precious declaration, "This is the reward of merit."(Gibbon 1952, 2:573)§1.I would like to address a simple question: what is a Nobel laureate's speech?2 With a corollary: how does it provide an opportunity to perform as a public intellectual, a "philosopher" of sorts? And a further corollary: what does it say about intellectual compliance or resistance? There is a play on words in the title of this essay, made to draw attention to the rhetorical construction of a commonplace, mass media-induced belief: that Nobel laureates are, in essence, "noble minds."3 For brevity's sake this essay focuses mainly on the literature prizes and, to a lesser extent, the peace prizes. [End Page 373]§2.At face value, a Nobel Prize is a rhetorical event (from the time the winner is announced to the moment of the Nobel address): over the recent years, rituals attached to the Nordic apotheosis have attracted growing media interest—they belong to "breaking news"—lending laureates a public exposure that, in turn, has led them to perform a public role or to publicly decline this performance, literally to "dispose of " it—"disposure" as the antistrophe of exposure. The public is usually aware of the announcement of the name of the winner, who instantly becomes a global "brand." Publicity and news programs follow suit, and if a recipient's ethical qualities resonate with the ethical preoccupations of the day (gender is one) the better the news value. Arguments are built on the announcement and often recur when, in early December, recipients deliver their Nobel addresses.This rhetorical event may indeed take the shape of a "rhetorical situation" if national pride or state concerns impose an exigency onto laureates—it is interesting to note that the media are complicit in stressing the national value of an award. The exigency resembles the one applied by them to sport performances. However, while the practices of public reward and public performance no longer allow a sportsperson to decline a medal or to express personal views on a podium to the public strains of a national hymn,4 they do still allow Nobel laureates to absent themselves, as André Gide did in 1947 (this strategy gave him the opportunity, in a terse banquet speech read on his behalf, to express his view that Paul Valéry had been overlooked by the Nobel, thus turning the award into a muted invective; see Gide 1947), to say they don't care, that their country of origin did little for them, and even, although rarely, to decline or to express amusement at the award.5 In short, beside "disposure," they can perform "exposure" through acceptance or dismissiveness, thus drawing a merciful line between reward (in sport) and award (the Nobel).A rhetorical situation is indeed created when a Nobel winner is seen as betraying state or nation by accepting the prize. In one reverse case, French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre was berated for not accepting it (in 1964), in spite of the fact that, at that time, his philosophy and political engagement made clear to the French state and the French public that he abhorred them both. In 2003, South Africans learned at their expense how reward and award are borderline and therefore not on the same side: they failed to thank J. M. Coetzee for his temperance, when, having resettled in Australia at the time of his award, he waited for a while before taking Australian citizenship.6 The Nobel Foundation's rightful insistence on disregarding [End Page 374] nationality does not mean nationality... (shrink)

Jusqu’à Blaise Pascal, le hasard désigne ce qui se produit en dehors de tout dessein humain ou divin et de tout ordre stable. Après lui, on cherche à préciser de façon constructive ces trois types d’exclusion, ce qui amène à définir les événements merveilleux, les événements aléatoires et les événements accidentels. Chacune de ces trois démarches a ses avantages et ses inconvénients. La première rend compte de tout ce qui étonne, mais écarte la liberté et le miracle et ne permet (...) ni vérification, ni prévision, ni décision. La seconde permet des prévisions et des vérifications expérimentales, mais son emploi ne peut se généraliser sans entrer en conflit avec le déterminisme, qui la considère comme une illusion. La troisième explique beaucoup de choses par la rencontre de séries causales indépendantes, mais ce faisant elle exclut toute finalité. Il faut faire très attention à ne pas les confondre. Until Blaise Pascal, chance meant what happens outside any human or divine design or any stable order. Attempts are made, ever since, to set down in a constructive fashion those three types of exclusion : what it is that leads to define marvellous events, chance events and accidental events. Each of those three endeavours has its advantages and its drawbacks. The first accounts for everything that amazes, but it sets aside freedom and miracle, and does not allow any verification, prevision, or decision. The second permits previsions and experimental verifications, but its use cannot be generalized without entering into conflict with determinism, which considers it an illusion. The third explains a number of things through the encounter of independent causal series, but, while so doing, it excludes all finality. One must be very cautious not to confuse the three. (shrink)

The problem of unification in a normal modal logic $L$ can be defined as follows: given a formula $\varphi$, determine whether there exists a substitution $\sigma$ such that $\sigma $ is in $L$. In this paper, we prove that for several non-symmetric non-transitive modal logics, there exists unifiable formulas that possess no minimal complete set of unifiers.

Le rôle du facteur temps et la question des temporalités constituent un analyseur particulièrement pertinent de la courte guerre franco-allemande de 1939-1940. La rapide défaite française s’explique en effet principalement par la discordance et la dissonance des temporalités à l’œuvre. L’opposition de doctrines et de stratégies militaires au regard de la dimension temporelle trouve son origine dans l’expérience commune et partagée de la Grande Guerre comme longue « guerre d’usure » dont il faut éviter la répétition. Mais les enseignements tirés (...) l’ont été dans des sens radicalement différents. Cette explication doit cependant être complétée par le jeu de facteurs de nature différente, d’ordre organisationnel voire contingent, mais qui ont eu néanmoins des effets d’amplification sur les temporalités de la conduite des opérations. (shrink)

The principal argument advanced here is that the principle of immanence, common to Deleuze and Spinoza, will — if we follow its political radicalism — lead to a revalorization of existing Western democracy, to the degree that it allows for an internal and permanent self-reflexivity . The principle of the discontinuity of spheres of rationality, the emotive basis of all political power, and the principle of multiple and incomplete association distinguishes this idea from the Habermasian public sphere. Confrontation with the (...) void of the political, as much as the absence of a substantive People and knowledge of justice, is the key aspect of a democratic politics of multiplicity and heterogeneity. (shrink)

When, on 4 July 2014, the leader of the Islamic State, Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi, preached in the venerable mosque of Mosul the restoration of the caliphate, his homily ushered in far more than a new phase in jihadist warfare against Western values. His oratory launched on the world scene a new culture that instantly began to shape, solidify, and even sublimate the caliphate as the most arresting rhetorical performance of radical and militant Islam. However, despite this self-proclamation, political commentators (...) failed to accurately size up the emerging culture of the new caliphate, and we find ourselves faced now with an alternative, global culture that draws irresistibly more and more converts and partisans into its orbit. The most perilous form of underestimating adversaries is to reduce their cultural complexity to a few, unreflective clichés, a telling sign of our own cultural illiteracy. (shrink)

We give a simplified version of the system introduced in ‘Non-Redundancy’, presented here as a Modal Logic whose primitive elements are finite sequences. It includes a treatment of Condition C, Condition B, Condition A, and the Locality of Variable Binding, but disregards quantification and Weak and Strong Crossover effects, which are treated in the longer paper.

The paper revisits the rationality principle from the particular perspective of the unity of social sciences. It has been argued that the principle was the unique law of the social sciences and that accordingly there are no deep differences between them (Popper). It has also been argued that the rationality principle was specific to economics as opposed to the other social sciences, especially sociology (Pareto). The paper rejects these opposite views on the grounds that the rationality principle is strictly metaphysical (...) and does not have the logical force required to deliver interesting deductions. Explanation in the social sciences takes place at a level of specialization that is always higher than that of the principle itself. However, what is peculiar about economics is that it specializes the explanatory rational schemes to a degree unparalleled in history and sociology. As a consequence, there is a backward-and-forward move between specific and general formulations of rationality that takes place in economics and has no analogue in the other social sciences. (shrink)

La théorie politique élaborée par Hobbes dans le Léviathan substitue le schème de la représentation à celui de l’Incarnation, hérité de saint Paul et saint Jean, qui avait permis jusqu’alors de penser l’unité d’une communauté. Ainsi, c’est moins l’extension politique du christianisme qui est affectée par cette substitution que sa nature même. L’objet de cet article est de le montrer à travers le cas privilégié de la Trinité, figure protypique de la « communauté » . En redéfinissant la notion de (...) personne à partir de la représentation, Hobbes défait la figure traditionnelle de la périchorèse et rend impossible de conceptualiser le dogme trinitaire. L’obstacle théorique qu’il place au cœur de la Trinité est ici examiné dans son impact sur la controverse socinienne des années 1690, chez William Sherlock, Robert South et John Wallis. Elle révèle alors de manière lumineuse l’état du christianisme après le tournant hobbesien.The political theory developed by Hobbes in the Leviathan substitutes representation for Incarnation as a pattern of civil unity. As a consequence, this substitution alters not so much Christian policy than christianism itself, in its very nature. And it is best illustrated by the doctrine of the Trinity, which used to be a prototype of « community » . Hobbes redefines the concept of a person as an intelligent being that represents itself or another, and thus undoes the traditional conception of perichoresis and makes it impossible to rationalize the Trinity. The theoretical obstacle that Hobbes places in the core of the doctrine of the Trinity is analysed here in its impact on the Socinian controversy of the 1690s, in William Sherlock, Robert South and John Wallis, and it sheds a light on the condition of Christianism after the Hobbesian moment. (shrink)

In modern economics, the use of sympathy and empathy shows significant ambiguity. Sympathy has been used in two different senses. First, it refers to cases where the concern for others directly affects an individual's own welfare . Second, the term has served the purposes of welfare economics, where it is associated with interpersonal comparisons of the extended sympathy type, that is, comparisons between one's own situation in a social state and someone else's in a different social state . On the (...) other hand, empathy has been used interchangeably with sympathy either to render the idea of interdependent utility functions , or to convey the imaginative process of imagining oneself in someone else's place. (shrink)

In this paper, we show that the implication fragment of classical propositional logic is finitary for unification with parameters.

This paper develops an account of the normative basis of priority setting in health care as combining the values which a given society holds for the common good of its members, with the universal provided by a principle of common humanity. We discuss national differences in health basket in Europe and argue that health care decision-making in complex social and moral frameworks is best thought of as anchored in such a principle by drawing on the philosophy of need. We show (...) that health care needs are ethically ‘thick’ needs whose psychological and social construction can best be understood in terms of David Wiggins’s notion of vital need: a person’s need is vital when failure to meet it leads to their harm and suffering. The moral dimension of priority setting which operates across different societies’ health care systems is located in the demands both of and on any society to avoid harm to its members. (shrink)

Quelques années avant sa mort, Sartre soutient que, même s’il lui est arrivé d’écrire sur de tels sujets, il ignore aussi bien l’angoisse que le désespoir. Avec la sincérité – semble-t-il – d’un homme délivré du qu’en-dira-t-on, l’auteur de L’Être et le néant déclare : « j’ai parlé de désespoir, mais c’est de la blague, j’en ai parlé parce qu’on en parlait, parce que c’était la mode : on lisait Kierkegaard », et il ajoute à propos de l’angoisse : « (...) je n’ai jamais eu d’angoisse. Ce sont des no... (shrink)

In his article How Did Marx Invent the Symptom? Žižek discusses his project of a critique of ideology, he proposes, since the concept of real abstraction by Sohn-Rethel, that are a virtual dimension that structure the practices, which, in turn, the beliefs or the subjectivity is submitted to. On contrary to the classical critique of ideology, that step in the levels of practices or the subjectivity, in Žižek’s project the subjectivity is just a rebound effect of the practices and the (...) the practice is what are ideological, then the critique of ideology must to act over the practices, nor on the believes. And, the way to do this is acting over the real abstraction, or, the phantasy, the ideological phantasy. Our propose in this article is to show how this project of a critique of ideology fits in the lacanian structure known as Graph of Desire. In this way, the lacanian graph will be a generic topology to a critique of ideology or phantasy. (shrink)

Il est courant de rappeler que l’Union européenne a un défaut d’intelligibilité et que sa forme politique demeure hésitante. Les catégories les plus prégnantes demeurent issues de la théorie de l’État et imposent une alternative insatisfaisante entre confédération d’États souverains et État fédéral. Afin d’y échapper, certains auteurs suggèrent de penser l’UE à partir du paradigme cosmopolitique. Le propos de cet article est de souligner l’intérêt mais aussi les contradictions du modèle cosmopolitique appliqué à l’UE en raison de l’essentielle finitude (...) du projet européen. Nous suggérons de chercher plus loin la spécificité formelle de l’UE, telle qu’elle se présente concrètement et réellement. Il apparaît alors que le schème de la construction remplace celui de la fondation, que la parité entre les deux ordres juridiques se substitue à l’exclusivité de la souveraineté et que les principes finissent par faire place aux valeurs. (shrink)

Dans la relation éducative coexistent transfert et relation. Dans la relation familiale vont exister une dépendance et une relation réelles évoluant progressivement vers la construction d’imagos parentales. Les parents peuvent transmettre à leurs enfants un certain nombre de codes et de règles à condition de s’en sentir les dépositaires et les garants. À travers l’éducation de leurs enfants les parents doivent pouvoir assumer une façon de faire sous-tendus par une façon d’être. Ceci ne peut se comprendre qu’à la faveur d’un (...) véritable processus de filiation. (shrink)

Comment la préoccupation ordinaire pour la santé rencontre-t-elle des enjeux biopolitiques, liés à la transformation historique de la médecine en une fonction sanitaire et sociale majeure? Dans cette étude, nous revenons sur la tension et l’équivoque où se trouve prise la notion de santé dans la mesure où celle-ci renvoie aussi bien à un sentiment intime de bien-être qu’à la dimension normative d’injonctions publiques, sociales relevant de ce que l’on pourrait nommer le paradigme biopolitique du sanitaire.Filoso.

Name der Zeitschrift: Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie Jahrgang: 65 Heft: 6 Seiten: 1134-1140.

La question qu’on nomme aujourd’hui des « genres naturels » en métaphysique porte sur les « jointures » du monde : quelles classes de choses constituent le monde et existent réellement? Si nominalistes et réalistes s’opposent depuis longtemps sur la possibilité même de répondre à cette question, les sciences modernes proposent des découpages en genres naturels qui contrastent souvent avec l’image naturelle du monde. Cet article se concentre sur les genres naturels en biologie. Après avoir présenté le principe de réponse (...) offert par la biologie évolutive, à savoir la systématique cladistique, j’expose le paradoxe du poisson, puisque « poisson » n’y est pas un nom de classe objectif, et semble donc aussi peu réel que « légume ». Je montre ensuite comment ce paradoxe est abordé différemment par des conceptions réalistes ou pragmatistes des genres naturels, et, en distinguant plusieurs sortes de pragmatismes en fonction des pratiques sociales auxquelles ils réfèrent la vérité des énoncés, je défendrai un pragmatisme modéré quant aux genres naturels en biologie. (shrink)