Interview with Renaud Barbaras, conducted on May 18, 2011.

Bobier argued that hope is necessary for practical deliberation. I will demonstrate that Bobier’s argument for this thesis fails. The problem is that one of its main premisses rests on a sufficient condition for hoping that is subject to counterexamples. I consider two ways to save the argument, but show that they are unsuccessful in doing so.

In Introduction to a Phenomenology of Life, renowned French philosopher Renaud Barbaras aims to construct the basis for a phenomenology of life. Called an introduction because it has to deal with philosophical limits and presuppositions, it is much more, as Barbaras investigates life in its phenomenological senses, approached through the duality of its intransitive and transitive senses. Originally published in French (Introduction à une phénoménologie de la vie) Introduction to a Phenomenology of Life first defines the problem of life (...) phenomenologically, then studies the failures of the phenomenological movement to adequately think about life, and finally elaborates a new, original, and productive approach to the problem. He engages "object-oriented" philosophies with this approach and concludes that they are far more phenomenological than previously believed. Combining original interpretations and expert readings of philosophers such as Kant and Husserl and contemporary thinkers such as Bergson, Badiou, and Deleuze, Barbaras offers here a powerful and important contribution to phenomenology and continental thought. (shrink)

Peu à peu, tandis que Virgile achève la description ethnographique de la ruche, un glissement s’opère dans son propos : il célèbre d’abord la chasteté des abeilles, et le renouvellement de l’espèce par une miraculeuse génération spontanée ; il explique ensuite leur admirable organisation sociale par un lien privilégié avec la divinité, puisque les abeilles posséderaient une « parcelle d’intelligence divine » ; après ce bref aperçu d’une mystique panthéiste, i...

Can the state, as opposed to its individual human members in their personal capacity, intelligibly seek to avoid blame for unjustified wrongdoing by invoking excuses (as opposed to justifications)? Insofar as it can, should such claims ever be given moral and legal recognition? While a number of theorists have denied it in passing, the question remains radically underexplored. -/- In this article (in its penultimate draft version), I seek to identify the main metaphysical and moral objections to state excuses, and (...) begin to investigate their strength. I work from the ecumenical assumption that general understandings of modern states as group moral agents proper or as mere fictional points of imputation for individual behaviour are both plausible, and that the question of state excuses should be asked in terms of both paradigms. Issues addressed include: the lack of state consciousness/affect, the nature and relevance of developmental and executive defects in group agents, the value of state interests and how interests relate to plausible claims of excuses, the shortfall of responsibility argument for group responsibility and its interface with state excuses, the symbolic and consequential (dis)value that state excuses may have, as well as concerns that states are entities that should live up to outstandingly high virtuous standards of impartiality and equanimity. -/- I conclude that even if the range of excuses available to states does not overlap neatly with excuses available to ordinary individuals, some excuses may still be morally available to states. More generally, I emphasize the need for a systematic discussion of group excuses writ large, and of their relationship with the wider question of when group entities may legitimately be singled out to bear adverse normative consequences for wrongdoing. (shrink)

The Being of the Phenomenon opens European post-structuralism to further study and is certain to inspire new thinking about the origins of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology.

I will argue for a novel variant of the knowledge norm for practical reasoning. In Sect. 2, I will look at current variations of a knowledge norm for practical reasoning and I will provide reasons to doubt these proposals. In Sects. 3 and 4, I develop my own proposal according to which knowledge is the norm of apt practical reasoning. Section 5 considers objections. Finally, Sect. 6 concerns the normativity of my proposed knowledge norm and its significance.

If we supply a missing connection in the master text of English Renaissance poetic theory, we can bring the dilemma posed by political poetry into sharp relief. Sidney’s Defence of Poesie seeks to confirm the supremacy of the poet’s power over human minds by invoking the celebrated three-way distinction between poetry, philosophy, and history in the Poetics. According to Sidney, the proper question to ask of poetry is not “whether it were better to have a particular act truly or falsely (...) set down” but “whether it be better to have it set down as it should be, … for your own use and learning.” On this criterion, the philosopher shows himself too devoted to “knowledge” that “standeth upon the abstract and general,” to the “precept,” to “what should be.” The historian attends too much to “the particular truth of things and not to the general reason of things,” to the “example,” to “what is.” Only the poet “coupleth the general notion with the particular example” in “the speaking picture of poesy,” thus synthesizing through his “imaginative and judging power” the best that the philosophical and historical domains can offer. “Aristotle himself,” concludes Sidney, “plainly determineth this question, saying that poetry … is more philosophical and more studiously serious than history … because poesy dealeth with … the universal consideration, and the history with … the particular.” Yet in mounting his Defence of Poesie, Sidney fails to give due force to a related and equally important distinction drawn from the Poetics. Aristotle ranks poetry below philosophy—and, by implication, history as well—at the crucial juncture where ontology and epistemology meet. He exclusively credits philosophical universals with rational “necessity.” Poetic universals are recognized as having imaginative “likelihood,” but no more than this.1 Under this second three-way distinction, the domain proper to poetry turns out to be neither the realm of historical fact nor that of philosophical truth but some half-region of the truthlike, the verisimilar, disjoint from the plane of knowledge.[…]Milton coped with the questions intrinsic to political poetry during the decade from 1642 to 1652 when he rose to prominence as a pamphleteer on public issued and concurrently pioneered the writing of political sonnets in English. This essay examines the responses he made, in part in his prose but mainly in the composition of seven sonnets. Political poems in a root sense, these sonnets concern themselves with human agency channeled into the functions of the state, with power manifested through governance. After exploratory and uneven beginnings, the group as a whole goes a fair way toward vindicating the enterprise of political poetry and offering one set of criteria for a good political poem. 1. The core distinctions are drawn by Aristotle in chap. 9, secs. 2-4, of the Poetics; also see chap. 1, sec. 1 of the Topics on the distinction between demonstration, based on reasoning from true knowledge, and dialectic, based on reasoning from what is generally accepted as probable. The quotations in this paragraph are from Sidney: A Defence of Poetry, ed. J. A. Van Dorsten , pp. 35, 32, 33, 35. Janel Mueller is professor of English and humanities at the University of Chicago. She has published mainly on poetry and prose of the earlier English Renaissance, culminating in her book The Native Tongue and the Word: Developments in English Prose Style, 1380-1580. An interest in Milton, however, has drawn her more recently to work in the later part of this period. She is writing a book on nature, culture, and gender in Milton’s major poems. (shrink)

Developing Global Health Programming: A Guidebook for Medical and Professional Schools , edited by Jessica Evert, Paul Drain, and Thomas Hall, is reviewed. In spite of some editorial shortcomings, the book is a terrific aggregation of resources and reflections on the state of global health education that leaves readers with a multitude of useful and diverse tools, as well as directions about where to find additional ones.

Média a priori étranger à l’univers d’un cours universitaire en gestion des ressources humaines, la bande dessinée peut pourtant constituer un outil précieux permettant une distanciation et un décalage des représentations habituelles des étudiants. L’objectif de cet article est de décrire l’utilisation de l’album Obélix et Compagnie comme métaphore de la place du travail dans la société, et d’en discuter les apports et les limites.Although comic strips are, on the face of it, alien to the world of university classes in (...) human resources management, they can become a valuable tool in helping students to achieve the necessary distance from their usual representations. This article describes the use of the album “Obélix et Compagnie” as a metaphor of the workplace in society, and to discuss its contributions and limitations. (shrink)

This article draws on ethnographic field data collected during an investigation of the informed consent process and AIDS clinical trials. It describes the involvement of care providers (physicians, nurse practitioners, physician assistants) during the enlistment, or recruitment, phase of the informed consent process. It shows that sometimes care providers are involved in the receipt, evaluation and distribution of information on clinical trials through their interactions with research professionals and patients. It suggests that the involvement of care providers has the potential (...) to influence the informed consent process. Some of the ethical and practice considerations of this are discussed. (shrink)

The basic hypothesis of this book is that linguistic reference to kinds should be seen as reference to sortal concepts, i.e. cognitive categories for identifying and classifying objects. Viewed that way, kinds serve as the interface between the conceptual system and the grammatical system. Kind-level predicates differ as to whether they presuppose (e.g. to be extinct) or entail (e.g. to invent) the existence of objects, with crucial consequences for the interpretation of indefinite argument noun phrases. Moreover, object reference always involves (...) underlying kind reference, but kind reference does not always involve object reference. This asymmetry, once recognized, proves useful in solving otherwise puzzling problems in semantic composition. (shrink)

La première partie du livre IV met apparemment en œuvre le programme didactique des Géorgiques, Virgile multipliant les conseils à l’apiculteur, quant au choix du lieu pour la ruche, à la sélection des espèces, aux aliments à mettre à disposition, à la récolte du miel, mais surtout aux précautions à prendre pour éloigner les abeilles des nombreux dangers potentiels qui les menacent, qu’il s’agisse du climat trop rigoureux ou de prédateu...

La philosophie de Souriau a pour objet ce qu’il appelle les existences virtuelles, un mode d’existence fragile et précaire qui concerne tout processus d’instauration. Ces virtualités sont en état d’abaliété, elles existent « en et par autre chose », de manière relationnelle et indéterminée. Ces particularités ontologiques posent un problème de connaissance : celui de connaître de telles singularités, aussi appelées « âmes ». De nouveaux outils, issus de l’esthétique, accompagnent la connaissance. La fiction et la dramatisation viennent jouer un (...) rôle épistémique. Les êtres de fiction, qui existent selon un mode spécifique d’existence, font naître un sentiment esthétique, qui devient la base créatrice de la philosophie et de la connaissance. (shrink)

The past 20 years have seen dramatic rises in suicide rates in the United States and other countries around the world. These trends have been identified as a public health crisis in urgent need of new solutions and have spurred significant research efforts to improve our understanding of suicide and strategies to prevent it. Unfortunately, despite making significant contributions to the founding of suicidology – through Emile Durkheim’s classic Suicide (1897/1951) – sociology’s role has been less prominent in contemporary efforts (...) to address these tragic trends, though as we will show, sociological theories offer great promise for advancing our understanding of suicide and improving the efficacy of suicide prevention. Here, we review sociological theory and empirical research on suicide. We begin where all sociologists must: with Durkheim. However, we offer a more comprehensive understanding of Durkheim’s insights into suicide than the prior reviews provided by those in other disciplines. In so doing, we reveal the nuance and richness of Durkheim’s insights that have been largely lost in modern suicidology, despite being foundational to all sociological theories of suicide – even those that have moved beyond his model. We proceed to discuss broadly acknowledged limitations to Durkheim’s theory of suicide and review how more recent theoretical efforts have not only addressed those concerns, but have done so by bringing a larger swatch of sociology’s theoretical and empirical toolkit to bare on suicide. Specifically, we review how recent sociological theories of suicide have incorporated insights from social network theories, cultural sociology, sociology of emotions, and sociological social psychology to better theorize how the external social world matters to individual psychological pain and suffering. We conclude by making explicit bridges between sociological and psychological theories of suicide; by noting important limitations in knowledge about suicide – particularly regarding the roles of organizations, inequality, and intersectionality in suicide – that sociology is well situated to help address. (shrink)

Cette introduction explique la perception, reconnue par Husserl sous le titre de "donation par esquisses". Il s'agit d'opérer une réduction radicale qui va de la critique du néant au monde comme a priori de tout apparaître. A ce monde correspond un sujet dont le sens d'être fait problème puisqu'il est à la fois un moment du monde et en rapport avec la totalité comme telle.

Genetic modification of crop plants is frequently described by its proponents as a continuation of the ancient process of domestication. While domestication, crop breeding, and GM all modify the genomes and phenotypes of plants, GM fundamentally differs from domestication in terms of the biological and sociopolitical processes by which change occurs, and the subsequent impacts on agrobiodiversity and seed sovereignty. We review the history of domestication, crop breeding, and GM, and show that crop breeding and GM are continuous with each (...) other in many important ways, but represent a momentous break from domestication because they move plant evolution off of farms and into centralized institutions. The social contexts in which these processes unfold dictate who holds rights to germplasm and agricultural knowledge, shape incentives to effect particular kinds of changes in our crops, and create or constrict biodiversity. Presenting GM as a continuation of domestication puts forward a false equivalency that fundamentally misrepresents how domestication, crop breeding, and GM occur. In doing so, this narrative diminishes public understanding of these important processes and obscures the effects of industrial agriculture on in situ biodiversity and the practice of farming. This misrepresentation is used in public-facing science communication by representatives of the biotechnology industry to silence meaningful debate on GM by convincing the public that it is the continuation of an age-old process that underlies all agricultural societies. (shrink)

In this article, I seek to make sense of the oft-invoked idea of 'public emergency' and of some of its (supposedly) radical moral implications. I challenge controversial claims by Tom Sorell, Michael Walzer, and Giorgio Agamben, and argue for a more discriminating understanding of the category and its moral force.

This paper delves into the work of Clive L. Spash, a British radical ecological economist well-known in his field who currently holds a professorship at the Vienna University of Economics and Business. We start with an examination of the principles of his “social ecological economics.” We then critically evaluate his attack on economic growth and his perspective on the standard economic models of climate change. Lastly, we explore his approach to science as a theoretical pursuit and his policy recommendations. The (...) first version of this paper was given as a keynote lecture at the 7th Austrian Economics Meeting Europe, May 12-13, 2023, Université Catholique de l’Ouest, Angers, France, and a second version at the Summer University in Political Economy, July 20-22, 2023, Aix-Marseille University, France. I wish to thank the organizers of these conferences, and also the anonymous referees whose remarks have been taken into account to improve the paper. (shrink)

It is a popular thought that emotions play an important epistemic role. Thus, a considerable number of philosophers find it compelling to suppose that emotions apprehend the value of objects and events in our surroundings. I refer to this view as the Epistemic View of emotion. In this paper, my concern is with a rivaling picture of emotion, which has so far received much less attention. On this account, emotions do not constitute a form of epistemic access to specific axiological (...) aspects of their objects. Instead it proposes that they are ways of taking a stand or position on the world. I refer to this as the Position-Taking View of emotion. Whilst some authors seem sympathetic to this view, this it has so far not been systematically motivated and elaborated. In this paper, I fill this gap and propose a more adequate account of our emotional engagement with the world than the predominant epistemic paradigm. I start by highlighting the specific way in which emotions are directed at something, which I contrast with the intentionality of perception and other forms of apprehension. I then go on to offer a specific account of the valence of emotion and show how this account and the directedness of emotions makes them intelligible as a way of taking a position on something. (shrink)

ObjectiveTo identify the ethical challenges associated with the development and implementation of new tuberculosis drugs and diagnostics.MethodsTwenty-three semi-structured qualitative interviews conducted between December 2015 and September 2016 with programme administrators, healthcare workers, advocates, policymakers, and funders based in the Americas, Europe, and Africa. Interviews were analysed using thematic analysis.ResultsDivergent interests and responsibilities, coupled with power imbalances, are a primary source of ethical challenges; the uncertain risk profiles of new drugs present an additional one. Although this challenge can be partially mitigated (...) through stringent pharmacovigilance, respondents highlighted that high-burden countries tend to lack the resources to facilitate safe implementation. Increased advocacy and community engagement are considered an ethical imperative for future TB development and implementation.ConclusionsThis project helps identify some of the ethical challenges of new TB technologies. It demonstrates that investigating ethical challenges through qualitative research is one way to apprehend the difficulty of implementing new TB technologies. Addressing this difficulty will require that those in positions of power reconsider their interests in relation to disempowered communities.Policy implicationsEfforts to build consensus regarding what values should underpin the global governance of TB research, prevention, and care are essential to facilitate the ethical implementation of new TB technologies. (shrink)

El artículo no se hace la pregunta de si el mundo existe, sino que cuestiona el sentido del ser del mundo desde Husserl y explora, desde el pensamiento de Patočka, y a diferencia de Husserl, la posibilidad de una donación no ideal del mundo que permita poner en cuestión el enfoque neorrealista de la existencia de éste. Se trata de denunciar el conflicto que opera en el Husserl de las Ideen 1, entre la fenomenología de la percepción y la fenomenología (...) de la razón, y de hacer valer la posibilidad de una dimensión caótica del mundo, irreductible a un puro cosmos. En realidad, la crítica de este conflicto, que procede de la concepción intuicionista de la evidencia, abre el camino a la alternativa de una donación no intuitiva del mundo. Esta tesis inspirada en la concepción merleau-pontyana de lo infinito permite criticar la perspectiva realista y hacer valer la novedosa propuesta de un archi-realismo del mundo. (shrink)

The poetic names our capacity to transcend our finitude as subject and rejoin our worldly ground, that which links us to our origin despite the evential separation. It is the dimension of our existence which opens us to that from which our existence is nonetheless radically exiled, going, as it were, against the stream of the subject’s enclosure; it is that which, in us, reverses the evential separation, the only recourse against this separation. It is thus what makes it possible (...) to apprehend being from the viewpoint of the world, whose product and ostention it is, and not only from our viewpoint as separated beings.Le poétique désigne l’aptitude que nous avons à transcender notre finitude de sujet et à rejoindre notre sol mondain, ce qui nous relie à notre origine en dépit de la séparation événementiale. Il est la dimension de notre existence qui nous ouvre à cela dont elle est pourtant radicalement exilée, à contre-courant pour ainsi dire de la clôture du sujet; il est en nous ce qui inverse la séparation événementiale, le seul recours contre cette séparation. Il est donc ce qui permet de saisir l’étant du point du vue du monde dont il est le produit et l’ostension et non plus seulement du nôtre, comme êtres séparés.Il poetico designa la capacità di trascendere la nostra finitezza di soggetti e a ricongiungerci col nostro suolo mondano, è ciò che ci riconnette alla nostra origine a dispetto della separazione evenemenziale. È la dimensione della nostra esistenza che ci apre a ciò da cui essa è tuttavia radicalmente esiliata, risalendo controcorrente, per così dire, la chiusura del soggetto; è ciò che in noi rovescia la separazione evenemenziale, solo soccorso contro quella separazione. È dunque ciò che ci consente di cogliere l’ente dal punto di vista del mondo, di cui esso è il prodotto e l’ostensione, e non più soltanto dal nostro punto di vista di esseri separati. (shrink)