Descartes est, dans le fait, le vrai fondateur de la philosophie moderne, en tant qu'elle prend la pensée pour principe. L'action de cet homme sur son siècle et sur les temps nouveaux ne sera jamais exagérée. C'est un héros ; il a repris les choses par les commencements, et il a retrouvé de nouveau le vrai sol de la philosophie, auquel elle est revenue après un égarement de mille ans. 1637, c'est la date de la publication du Discours de la (...) méthode, de René Descartes - véritable déclaration des droits et des pouvoirs de la Raison sur un monde qu'elle domine et organise. Toute la pensée moderne est née de cet ouvrage dont la langue, dense mais toujours claire, n'a pas vieilli. (shrink)

This article sets down the foundations of a research project on Health and Physical Education (HPE) teachers’ job satisfaction and job embededness. According to the literature, HPE teachers has a weak status inside and outside school which may conduct to professional marginalization. After describing the situation of the teaching profession in the province of Québec, the focus is directed toward HPE as a teaching specialty. A conceptual framework that articulates job satisfaction and job embededness models is then proposed. In conclusion (...) of this theoretical reflexion, considering the actual teacher shortage, school organizations are invited to adhere to a more sustainable approach of teaching resources management. (shrink)

The involvement of developing countries in international clinical trials is necessary for the development of appropriate medicines for local populations. However, the absence of appropriate structures for ethical review represents a barrier for certain countries. Currently there is very little information available on existing structures dedicated to ethics in western and central Africa. This article briefly describes historical milestones in the development of networks dedicated to capacity building in ethical review in these regions and outlines the major conclusions of two (...) workshops on this issue, which were held in September and October 2002 in Libreville, Gabon, and Paris, France. The workshops were the culmination of collaboration between the African Malaria Network Trust (AMANET) and the Pan African Bioethics Initiative (PABIN). They produced an update on ethics organizations with regard to mission, function, activities, members, and contact people, in eight countries within the regions discussed. As a result of the commitment of mandated delegates, a further prominent outcome followed these workshops: the creation of national structures, where none existed before, dedicated to the ethical review of clinical trials. (shrink)

Gauge symmetries play a central role, both in the mathematical foundations as well as the conceptual construction of modern (particle) physics theories. However, it is yet unclear whether they form a necessary component of theories, or whether they can be eliminated. It is also unclear whether they are merely an auxiliary tool to simplify (and possibly localize) calculations or whether they contain independent information. Therefore their status, both in physics and philosophy of physics, remains to be fully clarified. In this (...) overview we review the current state of affairs on both the philosophy and the physics side. In particular, we focus on the circumstances in which the restriction of gauge theories to gauge invariant information on an observable level is warranted, using the Brout-Englert-Higgs theory as an example of particular current importance. Finally, we determine a set of yet to be answered questions to clarify the status of gauge symmetries. (shrink)

New concepts may prove necessary to profit from the avalanche of sequence data on the genome, transcriptome, proteome and interactome and to relate this information to cell physiology. Here, we focus on the concept of large activity-based structures, or hyperstructures, in which a variety of types of molecules are brought together to perform a function. We review the evidence for the existence of hyperstructures responsible for the initiation of DNA replication, the sequestration of newly replicated origins of replication, cell division (...) and for metabolism. The processes responsible for hyperstructure formation include changes in enzyme affinities due to metabolite-induction, lipid-protein affinities, elevated local concentrations of proteins and their binding sites on DNA and RNA, and transertion. Experimental techniques exist that can be used to study hyperstructures and we review some of the ones less familiar to biologists. Finally, we speculate on how a variety of in silico approaches involving cellular automata and multi-agent systems could be combined to develop new concepts in the form of an Integrated cell (I-cell) which would undergo selection for growth and survival in a world of artificial microbiology. (shrink)

This article reports on a historical investigation carried out on the conical object MIN000-3519 preserved in the mineralogy collections of the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle at Paris (France). The mineralogist René-Just Haüy (1743-1822) included this object, cut in a single pyrite (FeS2) crystal, in his working collection with the references ‘Sulphured iron, mirror of the Incas, of Peru, M. de Jussieu’. All of the research lines followed lead the author to Joseph de Jussieu (1704-1779) and his shipments of botanical specimens (...) and various other samples from South America. As a member of the Godin-La Condamine-Bouguer geodesic expedition on the equator (1735-1743), he returned to France only after 36 years (1771), ill, exhausted and dispossessed of the scientific product of his Andean collections. This pyrite mirror is important because, in addition to appearing to be the only archaeological object that can be linked to Joseph's peregrinations in America, it resembles other specimens found at sites of the Cañaris culture (500-1500 AD) in Ecuador. Preserved within the de Jussieu family, this object would presumably have been given to Haüy by Joseph's heirs, his nephews Antoine-Laurent (1748-1836) or Laurent-Pierre (1792-1866), with whom he had close ties. (shrink)

François Nault | Résumé : Dans cet article, je vais aborder la question de l’identité du théologien : qui est théologien dans l’Église ? Je vais aborder les positions du dernier Concile, de Jean-Luc Marion, d’Yves Congar, de Karl Barth et enfin de René-Michel Roberge. |: In this paper, I will address the question of the identity of the theologian : who may pretend to be theologian in the Church ? I will present the positions of Vatican II, Jean-Luc Marion, (...) Yves Congar, Karl Barth and René-Michel Roberge. (shrink)

According to a broadly accepted interpretation, the doubt of the First Meditation gets stronger due to an increasing effectiveness of the reasons for said doubt. I defend a deflationary reading of the doubt of the Meditations insofar as the sceptical arguments used by René Descartes gradually lose power. This reading is obviously not without consequences, which will be mentioned in the conclusion, for the interpretation of the exercise of doubt and, more fundamentally, of the Cartesian doctrine of knowledge.

Summary At the beginning of the 1730s René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur published two long memoirs on a new type of thermometer equipped with a specially calibrated scale — known ever since as the Réaumur scale. It became one of the most common ‘standardized’ thermometers in Europe until the late nineteenth century. What made this thermometer so successful? What was it specifically? I will first argue that the real Réaumur thermometer as an instrument was a fiction, a ghost — an (...) idealized instrument. On paper, it was theoretically flawless. In reality, the standardized Réaumur thermometer was most likely never achieved. This article shows that its success was essentially due to a recontextualisation from theoretical natural philosophy — Réaumur's principle of uniformity — to: 1) the context of artisanal knowledge and practices and 2) the context of making and reporting in the Mémoires de l'Académie royale des sciences actual measurements done in the field (in Paris at the Observatory, in Provincial France, in the Colonies, and in the rest of Europe). Réaumur's thermometer was essentially a theoretical method to which was associated a particular scale. It was the instrument's reification for market consumption and fieldwork that gave this specific type of thermometer materiality and authority. Although most Réaumur thermometers ever made were strikingly different from one another, over time the thermomètre de Réaumur designation became a brand, a seal of approval born from customary artisanal practices and cultural habitudes. (shrink)

The rise of big digital data is changing the framework within which linguists, sociologists, anthropologists, and other researchers are working. Semiotics is not spared by this paradigm shift. A data-driven computational semiotics is the study with an intensive use of computational methods of patterns in human-created contents related to semiotic phenomena. One of the most promising frameworks in this research program is the Semantic Vector Space (SVS) models and their methods. The objective of this article is to contribute to the (...) exploration of the SVS for a computational semiotics by showing what types of semiotic analysis can be accomplished within this framework. The study is applied to a unique body of digitized artworks. We conducted three short experiments in which we explore three types of semiotic analysis: paradigmatic analysis, componential analysis, and topic modelling analysis. The results reported show that the SVS constitutes a powerful framework within which various types of semiotic analysis can be carried out. (shrink)

In the concluding pages of his first major book, Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque, René Girard asserts that “Toutes les conclusions romanesques sont des conversions. Personne ne peut en douter” (All novelistic conclusions are conversions; it is impossible to doubt this).1 By this he means simply that there comes a moment when both the great novelists whom he studies and their characters recognize a fundamental truth that dramatically changes them: a life founded on human desire alone can end only in (...) misery and failure. Although not necessarily religious in nature, this novelistic conversion, as Robert Doran puts it in his recent edition of Girard’s uncollected writings on literature and literary theory .. (shrink)

Many contemporary social epistemologists take themselves to be combatting an individualist approach to knowledge typified by Descartes. Although I agree that Descartes presents an individualist picture of scientific knowledge, he does allow some practical roles for reliance on the testimony and beliefs of others. More importantly, however, his reasons for committing to individualism raise important issues for social epistemology, particularly about how reliance on mere testimony can propagate prejudices and inhibit genuine understanding. The implications of his views are worked out (...) more fully by some of his immediate successors; I examine how François Poulain de la Barre, and (briefly) Mary Astell analyze the social conditions for epistemic agency in a Cartesian vein. (shrink)

"Au cœur de la Révolution scientifique, philosophes et naturalistes tentent de concevoir les modèles les plus aptes à rendre compte du vivant. Les schèmes hérités de l'Antiquité médicale et philosophique sous-tendent encore les théories originales de Van Helmont et de Harvey. Si le mécanisme s'instaure avec le modèle de l'animal-machine chez Descartes, les audaces et les limites du projet cartésien infléchiront toute démarche ultérieure, comme en témoigne la notion spinoziste d'intégration corporelle. Gassendi suggère, pour sa part, d'associer la modélisation mécaniste (...) et la téléologie immanente des processus. Les néo-platoniciens More et Cudworth évoquent le 'principe hylarchique' ou la 'nature plastique', afin de traduire, por delà les insuffisances du mécanisme, l'émergence des organisations vitales. Lorsque le débat se transpose aux microstructures, Malpighi promeut l'analyse physiologique selon le modèle de 'petites machines' diversement combinées et emboîtées ; Glisson attribue la perception et la réactivité aux fibres élémentaires. Les phénomènes de la génération, que l'on a d'abord expliqués par l'épigenèse, s'interprètent principalement en termes de préformation et de préexistence des germes. Mais, à l'encontre de toute construction hypothétique, Locke privilégie une médecine limitée à l'observation des seuls phénomènes vitaux. La critique de mécanisme suscite en outre les modèles 'animistes' de Perrault et de Stahl. En une remarquable tentative, Leibniz repense alors les concepts fondamentaux de la théorie physiologique et suggère les voies d'analyse pur une science de l'organisme'."--taken from back cover. (shrink)

François Duchesneau. cité de construire un jeu d'expressions symboliques s' emboîtant par paliers et répondant à une norme analogiquement combinatoire. Au sommet de la construction et en assurant l'intégration, figurent des expressions ...