Apres Les malheurs de Sophie et Les aventures de Sophie, la nouvelle Sophie dont Gilson plaint les malheurs n'est ni une petite fille ni une allegorie, elle n'est autre que la Sagesse, sophia. Cette sagesse qui tient ses principes de la science de Dieu, il est difficile au simple croyant de savoir ce qu'elle enseigne, car la Sagesse se desagrege en sagesses differentes, voire ennemies. La reflexion entamee dans les trois Lecons sur le thomisme et sa situation presente, qui ouvrent (...) ce volume, amene l'auteur a se confronter a la pensee fuyante de Theilard de Chardin, et a entamer un dialogue difficile avec la propagande comuniste vehiculee par le pamphlet de Roger Garaudy. Du renouveau thomiste aux consequences du concile Vatican II, Gilson revient sur un siecle de mutations au sein de l'Eglise catholique. (shrink)

This paper explores the claim made by Thomas Aquinas in Summa Theologiae, I, q. 1, a. 3 that ‘sacred doctrine’ is ‘scientific.’ After reviewing some of the key historical commentators on the question, I propose an examination of Thomas' treatment of the gift of prophecy as providing an important clue into discerning more clearly his evolution from an Aristotelian understanding of knowledge or ‘science’ to a fuller sense of the term scientia as used by Thomas. Chief among these is a (...) clue into how Thomas resolves the difficulty between necessity and history. His treatment of prophecy in the Summa Theologiae gives one a glimpse into how Thomas is a historical thinker, despite weighty authorities such as Etienne Gilson arguing otherwise. Closer attention to prophecy permits one to rethink Thomas' account of sacred doctrine in Question One and appreciate how pivotal the fact of divine revelation having been made to prophets in history is for its ‘scientific’ character. (shrink)

Édition du troisième sophisma « Omnis homo de necessitate est animal » du ms. Paris, BnF Lat. 16135. Le texte anonyme, contenu aux f. 99rb-103vb, appartient à la seconde collection de sophismata transmis dans ce codex légué à l’Université de Paris par Étienne de Genève socius du Collège de Sorbonne, après avoir été maître ès arts à Paris dans les années 1270. Il offre un panorama des principales positions soutenues au xiiie siècle par les Antiqui et les Moderni sur la (...) sémantique des termes vides, la distinction entre l’esse essentiae et l’esse existentiae, l’être effectif et l’être logique, le temps et la modalité. (shrink)

Les archives, bien que fondamentales dans la pratique des historiens, tiennent une faible place dans leur réflexion épistémologique, alors que la notion, employée le plus souvent au singulier, a été davantage analysée par certains philosophes, dont en dernier lieu Paul Ricoeur. Il s'agira donc de comprendre l'usage que ce dernier fait du concept d'archive dans son dernier ouvrage, La Mémoire, l'histoire, l'oubli, puis de montrer sa filiation avec les travaux de Michel Foucault et de Michel de Certeau. Enfin, on voudrait (...) montrer en quoi cette« archive», liée intimement à la notion de témoignage, peut conduire à des difficultés du point de vue de l'épistémologie historique, et qu'il semble possible de lui opposer un autre usage de la notion, soucieux d'en souligner l'historicité et la matérialité face à une interprétation plus textuelle et herméneutique. (shrink)

A proposal for a new model of the evolution of gene regulation networks and development that draws on work from artificial intelligence and philosophy of mind. Each of us is a collection of more than ten trillion cells, busy performing tasks crucial to our continued existence. Gene regulation networks, consisting of a subset of genes called transcription factors, control cellular activity, producing the right gene activities for the many situations that the multiplicity of cells in our bodies face. Genes working (...) together make up a truly ingenious system. In this book, Roger Sansom investigates how gene regulation works and how such a refined but simple system evolved. Sansom describes in detail two frameworks for understanding gene regulation. The first, developed by the theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman, holds that gene regulation networks are fundamentally systems that repeat patterns of gene expression. Sansom finds Kauffman's framework an inadequate explanation for how cells overcome the difficulty of development. Sansom proposes an alternative: the connectionist framework. Drawing on work from artificial intelligence and philosophy of mind, he argues that the key lies in how multiple transcription factors combine to regulate a single gene, acting in a way that is qualitatively consistent. This allows the expression of genes to be finely tuned to the variable microenvironments of cells. Because of the nature of both development and its evolution, we can gain insight into the developmental process when we identify gene regulation networks as the controllers of development. The ingenuity of genes is explained by how gene regulation networks evolve to control development. (shrink)

This article sketches how liberal principles can be coherently set alongside the stewardship responsibilities of regulators. It indicates how this bears on the legitimacy of public health interventions in general and interventions of the kind associated with New York City’s public health programme in particular. The key idea is that stewardship responsibilities relate to the essential infrastructural conditions for human well-being; these conditions need to be protected because they are the staging for all human activity. Liberal principles, by contrast, presuppose (...) that the basic conditions for human well-being are in place; and, given this presupposition, they present a view about how humans should live, about how they should interact and transact and about how they should flourish. Where regulators are guided by a liberal ethic, they act illegitimately if they try to dictate how individuals should lead their lives; but, acting under their stewardship jurisdiction, regulators may legitimately intervene if they are trying to protect the conditions that are essential for any kind of human life. The article concludes by suggesting that while it is a good thing that New York City’s policies provoke debate about the legitimacy of public health interventions, it is the infrastructural conditions, and not the superstructural activities, that are the regulatory priority. (shrink)

Wittgenstein's contribution to musical aesthetics is not often discussed, which is surprising, given his rare musicality and musical connections. His distinctive achievement is to have focused on the question of musical understanding, and to have connected this with two other philosophical problems: the nature of the first-person case, and the understanding of facial expressions. Wittgenstein's third-person approach to philosophical psychology leads him to emphasize the role of performance in the understanding of music, and also to introduce an ‘intransitive’ concept of (...) expression. At times Wittgenstein seems to be arguing for an entirely non-relational account of musical meaning; however, a proper analysis of the first-person case shows that his theory of musical understanding might allow that, at some level, you understand a piece of music only if you imaginatively grasp the state of mind expressed by it. (shrink)

In his own time, Lao Sze-Kwang formulated his own intra-cultural approach to the philosophy of culture that begins from the interdependence and organic nature of our cultural experience. In this essay, I address three questions: Why did Lao abandon his early reliance on the Hegelian model of philosophy of culture and formulate his own “two- structured” theory? Again, given Lao’s profound commitment and contribution to Chinese philosophy and its future directions, why is it not proper to describe him as a (...) “Chinese philosopher?” And why is the much accomplished Lao Sze- Kwang not installed in the CUHK pantheon as yet one more of the great “New Confucian” philosophers (xinruxuejia 新儒學家) to be associated with this institution? (shrink)