L'état de crise générale qui règne aujourd'hui dans la société française, comme l'a révélé, entre autres, l'ampleur sans précédent de la "manif pour tous", menace aujourd'hui l'universalité même de notre modèle sociopolitique national. Depuis que les trois notions qui fondent nos "valeurs républicaines" - liberté, égalité, fraternité - ont été détournées de leur sens véritable. La "liberté", devenue illimitée, consacre un sujet dominé par son seul ego, l'"égalité" est désormais synonyme d'une abolition de toute différence, fût-elle biologique, et la "fraternité" (...) se réduit à des promiscuités imposées. D'une promesse d'élévation citoyenne passant par l'accession de tous à l'autonomie, les principes des Lumières semblent bien conduire aujourd'hui à la négation même de ce qui définit notre humanité. Comment pareille grandeur humaniste a-t-elle pu dégénérer, en moins de trois siècles, en humanitarisme hygiénique de base? Ne faut-il pas chercher dans l'échec métapolitique du libéralisme mondialisé la réponse à cette question, qui dépasse de loin la banale scission gauche/droite? Paul-François Paoli passe au crible les mensonges et les contradictions criantes de la "religion laïque" en convoquant tour à tour dans le débat saint Augustin, Nietzsche, Raymond Boudon ou encore Pierre Manent. (shrink)

Né à Blois en 1886 et enterré au Caire sous le nom d'Abd el-Wâhed Yahiâ en 1951, René Guénon est l'homme par qui le scandale arrive. Il dénonce la décadence de l'Occident moderne, fruit d'une lente dégénérescence de son héritage métaphysique et se tourne, au grand dam des catholiques, vers l'Orient devenu, selon lui, le refuge ultime de la "Tradition". Cette dernière notion, centrale chez Guénon, élève toutes les traditions religieuses de l'humanité au même niveau de transcendance tout en reconnaissant (...) à chacune d'entre elles sa dimension spirituelle spécifique. Un point de vue tout simplement révolutionnaire dans les années 30. Dès lors, il appartient à l'individu de se déterminer spirituellement par un processus de connaissance graduée qui dépasse largement le seul exercice d'un rite religieux. C'est la voie ésotérique par essence, qui suscitera l'émergence à travers le monde (Europe, Etats-Unis, Russie, etc) d'innombrables"chapelles" initiatiques se réclamant de Guénon, avec notamment les groupes soufis dirigés par Schuon, Vâlsan ou Pallavicini. Chose frappante, un lien inextricable s'est peu à peu tissé entre cette perspective ésotérique et l'horizon politique. En témoignent la "spiritualité héroïque" de Julius Evola dans l'Italie des années trente mais aussi les résonances guénoniennes qu'on découvre dans l'engagement politique de Simone Weil ou de Carl Schmitt. Parallèlement à l'activité des revues Le Voile d'Isis/Etudes Traditionnelles, les apports de Mircea Eliade, d'Henry Corbin ou de Raymond Abellio achèvent de perpétuer le rayonnement guénonien, si controversé soit-il. Cette mise en perspective monumentale de l'oeuvre de René Guénon révèle, de manière décisive, une figure cardinale du XXe siècle et dévoile l'étendue de son rôle dans la construction de la pensée occidentale moderne. (shrink)

1. Philosophie de l'éducation populaire. [2. éd]--2. L'organisation officielle de léducation populaire en Belgique, état, provinces and internationalement, en fonction des loisirs des travailleurs.--3. Les principales æuvre libres d'éducation populaire en Belgique en fonction des loisirs de travailleurs.

This book is vigorous in its arguments, displays an impressive historical sweep, and on several occasions gets in the perfect skewering criticism.

There is a well-entrenched schism on the frequency, intensity, and evolutionary significance of warfare among hunter-gatherers compared with large-scale societies. To simplify, Rousseauians argue that warfare among prehistoric and contemporary hunter-gatherers was nearly absent and, if present, was a late cultural invention. In contrast, so-called Hobbesians argue that violence was relatively common but variable among hunter-gatherers. To defend their views, Rousseauians resort to a variety of tactics to diminish the apparent frequency and intensity of hunter-gatherer warfare. These tactics include redefining (...) war, censoring ethnographic accounts of warfare in comparative analyses, misconstruing archaeological evidence, and claiming that outside contact inflates the intensity of warfare among hunter-gatherers. These tactics are subject to critical analysis and are mostly found to be wanting. Furthermore, Hobbesians with empirical data have already established that the frequency and intensity of hunter-gatherer warfare is greater compared with large-scale societies even though horticultural societies engage in warfare more intensively than hunter-gatherers. In the end I argue that although war is a primitive trait we may share with chimpanzees and/or our last common ancestor, the ability of hunter-gatherer bands to live peaceably with their neighbors, even though war may occur, is a derived trait that fundamentally distinguishes us socially and politically from chimpanzee societies. It is a point often lost in these debates. (shrink)

An introduction to the various logics of truth and modality as part of a foundation for the construction of theories of knowledge representation. The book reviews various semantic theories and employs them as the basis for the development of logics of truth and modality.

Taken at face value, a programming language is defined by a formal grammar. But, clearly, there is more to it. By themselves, the naked strings of the language do not determine when a program is correct relative to some specification. For this, the constructs of the language must be given some semantic content. Moreover, to be employed to generate physical computations, a programming language must have a physical implementation. How are we to conceptualize this complex package? Ontologically, what kind of (...) thing is it? In this paper, we shall argue that an appropriate conceptualization is furnished by the notion of a technical artifact. (shrink)

A lucid, elegant, and complete survey of set theory, this three-part treatment explores axiomatic set theory, the consistency of the continuum hypothesis, and forcing and independence results. 1996 edition.

Over the past 40 years, the sense of place concept has been well-established across a range of applications and settings; however, most theoretical developments have ‘privileged the slow’. Evidence suggests that place attachments and place meanings are slow to evolve, sometimes not matching material or social reality (lag effects), and also tending to inhibit change. Here we present some key blind spots in sense of place scholarship and then suggest how a reconsideration of sense of place as ‘fast’ and ‘slow’ (...) could fill them. By this, we mean how direct and immediate perception-action processes presented in affordance theory (resulting in immediately perceived place meanings) can complement slower forms of social construction presented in sense of place scholarship. Key blind spots are that sense of place scholarship: 1) rarely accounts for sensory or immediately perceived meanings; 2) pays little attention to how place meanings are the joint product of attributes of environmental features and the attributes of the individual; and; 3) assumes that the relationship between place attachment and behaviour is linear and not constituted in dynamic relations among mind, culture and environment.. We show how these blind spots can begin to be addressed by reviewing key insights from affordance theory, and through the presentation of applied examples. We discuss future empirical research directions in terms of: 1) how sense of place is both perceived and socially constructed; 2) whether perceived and socially constructed dimensions of place can relate to one another when perceived meanings become unsituated, and; 3) how place attachment may change over different stages of the life course based upon dynamic relationships between processes of perception-action and social construction. We conclude with insights into how processes of perception-action and social construction could be included in the design and management of urban landscapes. (shrink)

This text aims to provide a contribution to the analysis of beliefs and, through the elaboration of the notion of good reasons, to make a significant contribution to the theory of rationality. It examines the main theories that have been used in the social sciences and psychology for the explanation of beliefs. The author develops a particular model which enables him to show that people often have good reasons to believe in false ideas. The central idea of this model is (...) that people often draw controversial conclusions from valid arguments because they introduce implicit statements which they do not perceive, since they treat them - with good reasons - as self-evident. Hence they can hold doubtful, or even false, conclusions and regard them as solidly grounded. Boudon shows that this model can be used to reinterpret many findings from the sociology of religion and the sociology of knowledge, as well as from cognitive psychology. (shrink)

In his recently published paper, ‘The Nature of Possibility,’ David Armstrong presents an account of possibility which, he correctly claims, is partly an elaboration of the early Wittgenstein's. Both are combinatorialists. That is to say, both hold that there is a fixed ontology of individuals, properties and relations whose combinations determine the range of all possible states of affairs, and therewith the range of all those totalities of states of affairs which they call possible worlds.But Armstrong's account, I believe, is (...) fatally flawed in ways that Wittgenstein's isn't. And this, I shall argue, is mainly because Armstrong is both an actualist, whose fixed ontology is one of actual individuals, properties and relations, and a reductionist, who tries to reduce the notion of possibility to that of ߢallߣ their combinations. Armstrong seems to think that Wittgenstein at least shares his actualism, and perhaps even his reductionism. (shrink)

This book presents a systematic, unified treatment of fixed points as they occur in Godels incompleteness proofs, recursion theory, combinatory logic, semantics, and metamathematics. Packed with instructive problems and solutions, the book offers an excellent introduction to the subject and highlights recent research.

This chapter describes some of the important research in experimental pragmatics, most notably studies related to recovering speakers’ intentions, inferring conversational implicatures, and the role of common ground in discourse understanding. My aim is to demonstrate the utility of different experimental methods for studying pragmatics, and how research findings in the field are relevant to traditional concerns within the linguistic pragmatics community. But I will also argue that experimental pragmatic studies show great regularities and significant variation, both within and across (...) individuals, in the ways people speak and understand language. My alternative view claims that dynamical, self-organizing processes form the critical background from which meaningful pragmatic actions emerge. The implications of this position for interdisciplinary pragmatic research will be discussed. (shrink)

This paper argues that humans possess unique cognitive abilities due to the presence of a functional system that exists in the human brain that is absent in the non-human brain. This system, the frontal feedback system, was born in the hominin brain when the great phylogenetic expansion of the prefrontal cortex relative to posterior sensory regions surpassed a critical threshold. Surpassing that threshold effectively reversed the preferred direction of information flow in the highest association regions of the neocortex, producing the (...) frontal feedback system. This reversal was from the caudo-rostral bias characteristic of non-human, or pre-human, brain dynamics to a rostro-caudal bias characteristic of modern human brain dynamics. The frontal feedback system works through frontal motor routines, or action schemes, manipulating the release and reconstruction of stored sensory memories in posterior sensory areas. As an obligatory feature of frontal feedback, a central character, or self, emerges within this cortical network that manifests itself as agent in these reconstructions as well as in the experience of sensory perceptions. Dynamical-systems modeling of cortical interactions is combined in the paper with recent neuroimaging studies of “resting-state” brain activity to bridge the gap between microscopic and macroscopic levels of cortical behavior. This synthesis is used to support the proposal of an information flow reversal occurring in the hominin brain and also to explain how such a reversal generates the wide variety of cognitive and experiential phenomena that many consider to be uniquely human. (shrink)

Modern logicians have sought to unlock the modal secrets of Aristotle's Syllogistic by assuming a version of essentialism and treating it as a primitive within the semantics. These attempts ultimately distort Aristotle's ontology. None of these approaches make full use of tests found throughout Aristotle's corpus and ancient Greek philosophy. I base a system on Aristotle's tests for things that can never combine (polarity) and things that can never separate (inseparability). The resulting system not only reproduces Aristotle's recorded results for (...) the apodictic syllogistic in the Prior Analytics but it also generates rather than assumes Aristotle's distinctions among 'necessary', 'essential' and 'accidental'. By developing a system around tests that are in Aristotle and basic to ancient Greek philosophy, the system is linked to a history of practices, providing a platform for future work on the origins of logic. (shrink)

In Britain, policy‐makers tend to view racism as a social attitude rather than an institutional/structural phenomenon. Not until the publication of the MacPherson Report (1999) was the idea of ‘institutional racism’ officially recognised. According to Jules Holroyd, implicit bias as a concept can help us understand and combat the kind of unwitting prejudice the Macpherson report describes. This article explores whether implicit bias is indeed a viable framework for understanding institutional/structural racism. To do so, I bring together Charles Mills’ notion (...) of ‘global white ignorance’ and Lewis Gordon's interpretation of ‘bad faith’. Through Mills’ and Gordon's analyses, which together illuminate both the structural and psychic dimensions of racism I offer an account of the psychodynamics of racism far more consistent with our observations of how racism actually operates in Britain. Specifically, we see that institutional/structural racism is neither unconscious nor is it unmotivated as implicit bias would suggest. As such, I reject implicit bias as a useful or necessary explanatory framework for helping us understand institutional racism as a structural phenomenon. (shrink)

The term “exchange paradox” refers to a situation in which it appears to be advantageous for each of two holders of an envelope containing some amount of money to always exchange his or her envelope for that of the other individual, which they know contains either half or twice their own amount. We review several versions of the problem and show that resolving the paradox depends on the specifics of the situation, which must be disambiguated, and on the player's beliefs. (...) The latter psychological variables are part and parcel of the resolution. Assuming reasonable subjective distributions, exchanging cannot always be advantageous for both players. We suggest several deep-rooted psychological reasons for the considerable difficulty people demonstrably have in dealing with this problem. Implicit widespread and compelling assumptions—that affect judgement in diverse contexts—obstruct the solution. Analysing this paradox underscores the close connection between psychology and probability theory. (shrink)

Non-racialism is examined in relation to the concepts of race, generic humanism and universalism in order to establish conditions under which non-racialism can be implemented as an emancipatory concept. Denial of the salience or even the existence of the concept 'race' and also tendencies to organise on the basis of race essentialism are examined. It is accepted that race does not exist at an ontological level, in that it is not required for the constitution of the human subject. But race (...) does exist historically and socially. To ignore its existence in addressing the question of non-racialism would be to deny the validity of the experience of racial inequality. At the same time, organisation on the basis of race, while sometimes motivated by strategic considerations, carries the danger of slippage and a permanent racialised identity. The post-1994 period is seen as opening the road to universalism and thus removing the basis for strategic essentialism. (shrink)

We agree with Barsalou's claim about the importance of perceptual symbols in a theory of abstract concepts. Yet we maintain that the richness of many abstract concepts arises from the metaphorical mapping of recurring patterns of perceptual, embodied experience to provide essential structure to these abstract ideas.