_Democracy Past and Future_ is the first English-language collection of Pierre Rosanvallon's most important essays on the historical origins, contemporary difficulties, and future prospects of democratic life. One of Europe's leading political thinkers, Rosanvallon proposes in these essays new readings of the history, aims, and possibilities of democratic theory and practice, and provides unique theoretical understandings of key moments in democracy's trajectory, from the French Revolution and the struggles for universal suffrage to European unification and the crises of the (...) present. In so doing, he lays out an influential new theory of how to write the history of politics. Rosanvallon's historical and philosophical approach examines the "pathologies" that have curtailed democracy's potential and challenges the antitotalitarian liberalism that has dominated recent political thought. All in all, he adroitly combines historical and theoretical analysis with an insistence on the need for a new form of democracy. Above all, he asks what democracy means when the people rule but are nowhere to be found. Throughout his career, Rosanvallon has resisted simple categorization. Rosanvallon was originally known as a primary theorist of the "second left", which hoped to stake out a non-Marxist progressive alternative to the irresistible appeal of revolutionary politics. In fact, Rosanvallon revived the theory of "civil society" even before its usage by East European dissidents made it globally popular as a non-statist politics of freedom and pluralism. His ideas have been shaped by a variety of influences, ranging from his work with an influential French union to his teachers François Furet and Claude Lefort. Well known throughout Europe as a historian, political theorist, social critic, and public intellectual, Pierre Rosanvallon was recently elected to a professorship at the Collège de France, Paris, a position held at various times by Claude Lévi-Strauss, Michel Foucault, and Pierre Bourdieu. _Democracy Past and Future_ begins with Rosanvallon's groundbreaking and synthetic lecture that he delivered upon joining this institution. Throughout the volume, Rosanvallon illuminates and invigorates contemporary political and democratic thought. (shrink)

An English translation of Pierre Bayle's posthumous last book, Entretiens de Maxime et de Themiste (1707), in which Bayle defends his skeptical position on the problem of the evil. This book is often cited and attacked by G.W. Leibniz in his Theodicy (1710). Over one hundred pages of original philosophical and historical material introduce the translation, providing it with context and establishing the work's importance.

As is often the case when scientific or engineering fields emerge, new concepts are forged or old ones are adapted. When this happens, various arguments rage over what ultimately turns out to be conceptual misunderstandings. At that critical time, there is a need for an explicit reflection on the meaning of the concepts that define the field. In this position paper, we aim to provide a reasoned framework in which to think about various issues in the field of distributed cognition. (...) We argue that both relevant concepts, distribution and cognition, must be understood as continuous. As it is used in the context of distributed cognition, the concept of distribution is essentially fuzzy, and we will link it to the notion of emergence of system-level properties. The concept of cognition must also be seen as fuzzy, but for a different reason: due to its origin as an anthropocentric concept, no one has a clear handle on its meaning in a distributed setting. As the proposed framework forms a space, we then explore its geography and visit famous landmarks. (shrink)

Letter to du Faur de Pibrac, 1621.--Exercises against the Aristotelians, 1624.--Letter to Diodati, 1634.--De motu, 1642.--The rebuttals against Descartes, 1644.--The syntagma, 1658.

This paper draws from critical data studies and related fields to investigate police officer-involved homicide data for Los Angeles County. We frame police officer-involved homicide data as a rhetorical tool that can reify certain assumptions about the world and extend regimes of power. We highlight the possibility that this type of sensitive civic data can be investigated and employed within local communities through creative practice. Community involvement with data can create a countervailing force to powerful dominant narratives and supplement activist (...) projects that hold local officials accountable for their actions. Our analysis examines four Los Angeles County police officer-involved homicide data sets. First, we provide accounts of the semantics, granularity, scale and transparency of this local data. Then, we describe a “counter data action,” an event that invited members of the community to identify the limits and challenges present in police officer-involved homicide data and to propose new methods for deriving meaning from these indicators and statistics. (shrink)

Pierre Soulages : régulièrement j’élimine des toiles, inabouties ou qui ont “tourné mal ”, banales, sans rien qui m’excite et qui sont d’ailleurs des sortes d’aventures avortées… Alors qu’à un moment, il y avait quelque chose qui était apparu, qui me paraissait intéressant à pousser, à intensifier, et puis ça s’est détourné, ça s’est terminé par quelque chose de morne, pas vraiment inachevé parce que l’inachevé c’est par rapport à un modèle parfait ou… qui n’est pas du tout ce (...) que je poursuiv... (shrink)

The French philosopher and intellectual historian Pierre Hadot (1922-2010) is known primarily for his conception of philosophy as spiritual exercise, which was an essential reference for the later Foucault. An aspect of his work that has received less attention is a set of methodological reflections on intellectual history and on the relationship between philosophy and history. Hadot was trained initially as a philosopher and was interested in existentialism as well as in the convergence between philosophy and poetry. Yet he (...) chose to become a historian of philosophy and produced extensive philological work on neo-Platonism and ancient philosophy in general. He found a philosophical rationale for this shift in his encounter with Wittgenstein's philosophy in the mid-1950s (Hadot was one of Wittgenstein's earliest French readers and interpreters). For Hadot, ancient philosophy must be understood as a series of language games, and each language game must be situated within the concrete conditions in which it happened. The reference to Wittgenstein therefore supports a strongly contextualist and historicist stance. It also supports its exact opposite: presentist appropriations of ancient texts are entirely legitimate, and they are the only way ancient philosophy can be existentially meaningful to us. Hadot addresses the contradiction by embracing it fully and claiming that his own practice aims at a coincidence of opposites (a concept borrowed from the Heraclitean tradition). For Hadot the fullest and truest way of doing philosophy is to be a philosopher and a historian at the same time. (shrink)

Many papers have been devoted to the semantic turn Carnap took in the late 1930s after Tarski had explained to him his method for defining truth and his work on the establishment of scientific semantics. Commentators have often argued that the major turn in Carnap’s approach to languages had already been taken in the Logical Syntax of Language, but they have usually assumed that Carnap was happy to subsequently follow Tarski and adopt Tarskian semantics. In this paper, it is argued (...) that this assumption needs to be qualified and that Carnap was actually far from following Tarski when he decided to complement his syntactic method with a semantic one. Carnap and Tarski had different goals, divergent programs, and dissenting views on truth and semantics. After exploring several possible methods for the explication of logical concepts such as L-truth and L-implication, Carnap opted for definitions based on concepts he had found in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and Waismann’s work on a logical interpretation of probability. Carnap’s reasons for taking a semantic turn are to be understood in the context of his principle of tolerance. He first hoped he could use Tarski’s technique to recover in the semantic setting the completeness result he had tried to establish in the Logical Syntax. His eventual adoption of non-Tarskian semantics can be accounted for by his program of a logical analysis of science—including empirical science—and his ambition to elaborate a unified logical framework for deductive, inductive, and modal logic, and for explicating analyticity. (shrink)

This classic work in the philosophy of physical science is an incisive and readable account of the scientific method. Pierre Duhem was one of the great figures in French science, a devoted teacher, and a distinguished scholar of the history and philosophy of science. This book represents his most mature thought on a wide range of topics.

L’étrange histoire du jeune Damon de Chéronée, le « dernier des Péripoltides », et de son masque de suie, que Plutarque a placée en introduction à ses Vies de Cimon et de Lucullus, a suscité des interprétations fort diverses : dernier avatar du « Chasseur noir », témoignage sur les luttes féroces entre factions pro-romaines et pro-pontiques aux temps de la première guerre de Mithridate… On cherche ici surtout à montrer ce que Plutarque a voulu faire en écrivant cette biographie (...) miniature en écho à celle de Lucullus, le sauveur de sa patrie. Entre des figures de fondateur ou de refondateur qui se substituent les unes aux autres, raconter le passage et l’intégration d’une cité grecque dans l’empire romain, faire un travail de mémoire qui conjure les fantômes du passé et contribue à l’homonoia dans la petite cité. Avec une question centrale : Rome cité-tyran ?Plutarch and Damon of Chaironeia: a story, a myth, a text, or something more? The strange story of young Damon of Chaironeia, the ‘last of the Peripoltids’, with his soot-smeared face, which Plutarch placed as an introduction to his Lives of Cimon and Lucullus, has given rise to various interpretations: from a last avatar of the Black Hunter to evidence for the fierce struggle between pro-Roman and pro-Pontic factions at the time of the First Mithridatic War… In this paper we have tried to show what Plutarch’s intention may have been when he wrote this miniature biography, echoing that of Lucullus, the saviour of his home city. Between figures of founders or re-founders substituting for each other, the task was to tell of the passing and integration of a Greek city into the Roman Empire, to make a work of memory, liable to ward off ghosts from the past and to contribute to homonoia in the little city, with a central question : was Rome a tyrant-city? (shrink)

A magisterial mappa mundi of the terrain that Pierre Hadot has so productively worked for decades, this ambitious work revises our view of ancient philosophy- ...

En dessinant et réalisant les aventures de Gaston, Franquin n'a pas fait qu'oeuvre artistique et humoristique. Dans ce nouveau livre, Pierre Ansay s'emploie à montrer l'incroyable richesse philosophique de cette BD à mettre dans les mains de ceux qui veulent penser leur vie. Comment résister aux impositions mortifères qui parsèment notre vie quotidienne? Comment concilier créativité et poésie personnelle avec les exigences normatives de la vie moderne? Comment vivre à la fois en nomade et en sédentaire? La mise en (...) regard des apports de la philosophie, notamment Spinoza, Deleuze et Guattari avec l'oeuvre de Franquin jette un triple éclairage, sur l'oeuvre de Franquin, sur les philosophes convoqués pour cette rencontre et surtout sur ce qui défait mais fait aussi le tissu de notre vie quotidienne. (shrink)

This work by Pierre Bourdieu develops the anthropological theory which has formed the basis of his scientific research. It discusses the problems posed by "structuralist" philosophers in order to solve or dissolve them.

L'actualite du kantisme n'est plus a demontrer. Que l'on songe a l'ethique de la discussion, a la theorie de la justice, a la philosophie des relations internationales, au probleme des arguments dits transcendantaux ou encore a la theorie de l'experience esthetique, la pensee de Kant temoigne aujourd'hui d'une incontestable vigueur et d'une etonnante jeunesse. Cette contemporaneite de Kant se traduit par de multiples tentatives de dialogue avec cette oeuvre afin d'en degager la pertinence pour le debat actuel. L'oeuvre de (...) class='Hi'>Pierre Laberge a su repondre de maniere exemplaire a ses ordres de preoccupations dans l'etude de Kant. Les auteurs sollicites ont eu l'occasion de collaborer avec Pierre Laberge et lui rendent ici un hommage posthume. Ce recueil reflete ainsi cette double exigence d'actualiser le kantisme et d'en analyser les textes. (shrink)

Jean-Pierre Vernant delineates a compelling new vision of ancient Greece that takesus far from the calm and familiar images of Polykleitos and the Parthenon, and reveals a culture ofslavery, of blood sacrifice, of perpetual and ritualized warfare, of ceremonial hunting andecstasies.In his provocative discussions of various institutions and practices including war,marriage, and the city state, Vernant unveils a complex and previously unexplored intersection ofthe religious, social, and political structures of ancient Greece. He concludes with a genealogy ofthe study of (...) myth from antiquity to the present, and offers a critique of structuralism.Jean-PierreVernant is Professor Emeritus of Comparative Study of Ancient Religions at the College de France inParis. (shrink)

The present volume consists of diverse individual texts, produced between 1980 and 1986, which take two forms: interviews in which Bourdieu confronts a series of probing and intelligent interviewers, and conference papers that clarify and extend specific areas of his research. Now that Bourdieu's work has achieved wide diffusion and celebrity, this is an appropriate time for this volume, a pause for retrospection and resynthesis, for corrections of misreadings and extension of previous insights, and for projection of the next stages (...) of his work. For this English edition, Bourdieu's celebrated inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, Leçon sur la Leçon, has been added. The texts fall into two fundamental areas. The first area provides an overview of Bourdieu's central concepts, never before clearly explained. The second area clarifies the philosophical presuppositions of Bourdieu's studies and gives an account of his relations with the series of thinkers who formulated the problems in social and cultural theory that still preoccupy us: Kant, Hegel, Marx, Durkheim, Wittgenstein, Weber, Parsons, and Lévi-Strauss. Bourdieu's visions of these figures is personal and penetrating, and in his vivacious, spontaneous responses one sees at work a mode of thought that can in itself be a liberating tool of social analysis. Bourdieu applies to himself the method of analyzing cultural works that he expounds, evoking the space of theoretical possibilities presented to him at different moments of his intellectual itinerary. (shrink)

This book presents a history of spiritual exercises from Socrates to early Christianity, an account of their decline in modern philosophy, and a discussion of ...

Barthélemy Baudrand (1701 – 1787) was a Jesuit theologian and writer. One work is often cited and associated with the Abbé: Réflexions sur le tolérantisme, which is in fact an extract from L’Âme affermie dans la foi. In this part of the work, which was distributed separately, the Abbé, like the rest of Catholic apologetics, opposes the emergence of a "system of toleration", i.e. an excessive tolerance, both civil and ecclesiastical, which brings together the "enemies of God" and tends towards (...) the destructive indifference of the Christian religion. Conversely, this leads him to rehabilitate a certain religious and ecclesiastical intolerance. (shrink)

La 4e de couverture indique :"Nous n'avons rien à apprendre des idiots, c'est évident! D'ailleurs, ne sommes-nous pas de plus en plus intelligents, malins, calculateurs, performants? En tout état de cause une chose est certaine : malheur à ceux qui ne le sont pas. Dans ce paysage, la figure de l'idiot n'est même plus interrogée, elle est purement et simplement effacée, confondue avec celle de l'imbécile, de l'abruti, du demeuré... Pourtant, lorsque Pierre J. Truchot s'arrête, et... nous arrête, sur (...) le personnage remarquable de l'Idiot, nous reconnaissons des visages rares, mais familiers. Des figures croisées au cours de notre existence. Des sourires d'une audacieuse franchise, des paroles étranges à force de sincérité, des accoutrements vestimentaires qui affirment l'incontournable singularité du goßt, des oeuvres poétiques, picturales, musicales, généreuses et désarmantes. Oui, assurément, à une époque où certains, frustrés par les limites de l'être humain nous promettent déjà des prothèses, implants et autres nanoaugmentateurs d'humanité, l'idiot continue à s'émerveiller d'une fleur ou du bruissement d'un ruisseau, trouve encore le temps de parler aux enfants, devine la tristesse ou partage les joies de ses interlocuteurs, rit sans méchanceté (pour lui c'est possible) de nos illusions rationnelles. Oui, assurément, l'Idiot n'a rien à nous apprendre.". (shrink)

El autor se propone, en Sartre-Foucault (una oposición tergiversada) , resolver el enigma planteado por el rechazo foucaultiano de la filosofía contemporánea . Rechazo casi endógeno y no exógeno, rechazo por conocimiento interiorizado y no desconocimiento exterior. Se analizan las dos fuentes de hostilidades flagrantes. 1) El rechazo foucaultiano de los privilegios del Cogito en beneficio de una consideración de la especialización del pensamiento. 2) La evidencia que posee de la normatividad, sin moral teorizada , de esta filosofía contemporánea y (...) particularmente en el caso de Sartre, el más existencialistamente moralista de entre todos los contemporáneos citados por Foucault: Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Sade, Nietzsche, Artaud, Bataille. «El pensamiento desde su forma más temprana es una acción – un acto peligroso» (Les Mots et les Choses , p. 339). También lo sabían Hegel, Marx, Freud, nos dice. El enigma surge precisamente del poder totalizante de comprensión que manifiesta con relación a este gran cuadro de la filosofía contemporánea. En general una oposición procede, en efecto, de una incomprensión del autor criticado o de una comprensión tergiversada. (shrink)

Résumé Cet article présente pour la première fois une étude exhaustive d’un pratique de savoir fondamentale de l’Antiquité hellénistique et romaine : la pratique des logoi philosophoi, « discours » puisés à cette immense réserve de savoir encyclopédique qu’était la philosophia (qui était donc loin de se réduire à l’image « disciplinaire » que nous en avons aujourd’hui). L’examen des sources permet de dégager trois grands usages de ces logoi : un usage épidictique (où les logoi servent à « faire (...) montre » de son savoir dans le cadre d’une conférence-spectacle) ; un usage éthique (où les logoi servent à « rester droit ») ; un usage social (où les logoi servent à « être ensemble »). (shrink)

Highlighting the social tensions that confront the liberal tradition, Pierre Manent draws a portrait of what we, citizens of modern liberal democracies, have become. For Manent, a discussion of liberalism encompasses the foundations of modern society, its secularism, its individualism, and its conception of rights. The frequent incapacity of the morally neutral, democratic state to further social causes, he argues, derives from the liberal stance that political life does not serve a higher purpose. Through quick-moving, highly synthetic essays, he (...) explores the development of liberal thinking in terms of a single theme: the decline of theological politics. The author traces the liberal stance to Machiavelli, who, in seeking to divorce everyday life from the pervasive influence of the Catholic church, separated politics from all notions of a cosmological order. What followed, as Manent demonstrates in his analyses of Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau, Guizot, and Constant, was the evolving concept of an individual with no goals outside the confines of the self and a state with no purpose but to prevent individuals from dominating one another. Weighing both the positive and negative effects of such a political arrangement, Manent raises important questions about the fundamental political issues of the day, among them the possibility of individual rights being reconciled with the necessary demands of political organization, and the desirability of a government system neutral about religion but not about public morals. (shrink)