The Repugnant Conclusion served an important purpose in catalyzing and inspiring the pioneering stage of population ethics research. We believe, however, that the Repugnant Conclusion now receives too much focus. Avoiding the Repugnant Conclusion should no longer be the central goal driving population ethics research, despite its importance to the fundamental accomplishments of the existing literature.

Local sustainable food systems have captured the popular imagination as a progressive, if not radical, pillar of a sustainable food future. Yet these grassroots innovations are embedded in a dominant food regime that reflects productivist, industrial, and neoliberal policies and institutions. Understanding the relationship between these emerging grassroots efforts and the dominant food regime is of central importance in any transition to a more sustainable food system. In this study, we examine the encounters of direct farm marketers with food safety (...) regulations and other government policies and the role of this interface in shaping the potential of local food in a wider transition to sustainable agri-food systems. This mixed methods research involved interview and survey data with farmers and ranchers in both the USA and Canada and an in-depth case study in the province of Manitoba. We identified four distinct types of interactions between government and farmers: containing, coopting, contesting, and collaborating. The inconsistent enforcement of food safety regulations is found to contain progressive efforts to change food systems. While government support programs for local food were helpful in some regards, they were often considered to be inadequate or inappropriate and thus served to coopt discourse and practice by primarily supporting initiatives that conform to more mainstream approaches. Farmers and other grassroots actors contested these food safety regulations and inadequate government support programs through both individual and collective action. Finally, farmers found ways to collaborate with governments to work towards mutually defined solutions. While containing and coopting reflect technologies of governmentality that reinforce the status quo, both collaborating and contesting reflect opportunities to affect or even transform the dominant regime by engaging in alternative economic activities as part of the ‘politics of possibility’. Developing a better understanding of the nature of these interactions will help grassroots movements to create effective strategies for achieving more sustainable and just food systems. (shrink)

En este artículo se desea mostrar la distinción que Jean-Luc Marion realiza entre fenómenos de derecho común y fenómenos saturados, se refleja de manera paradigmática su concepción de arte al presentar el ídolo como una modalidad saturada de los fenómenos; a su vez se presenta la diferencia entre los objetos construidos o los fenómenos constituidos por un sujeto que son presentados como principio y fundamento. Desde aquí se considera la pintura como una experiencia fenoménica de anamorfosis, donde la mirada del (...) espectador se somete al fenómeno, planteando la posibilidad de recibir aquello que se quiere ver. Además, busca mostrar cómo desde el arte, el proceso de la visibilidad es presentado como construcción del fenómeno que opera desde lo invisible. Se mostrará, entonces, cómo la reflexión artística de Jean-Luc Marion permite entrar en el corazón de su obra, observando cómo se puede modificar los conceptos de donación y de sujeto. (shrink)

In this short piece I defend my position on self-consciousness against the objections raised by Dow and Musholt to a paper in the same issue. These are that (1) Bermudez’s (1998) The Paradox of Self-Consciousness broadly supports the CP Hypothesis; (2) the self-concept requires no further complexity than knowledge of one’s own existence and capacity to take deliberate action; (3) understanding the idea of a perceiver requires understanding the concept of an agent that performs the action of perception; (4) Dow (...) dismisses the possibility of scrub jay self-consciousness too readil. (shrink)

The article aims at assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the objections to Habermas’s epistemic conception of democracy raised by Thomas McCarthy in some of his essays. The author defends two ideas. First, he contends that McCarthy is mistaken in believing that democratic debates would not be a matter of consensus. In this regard, two arguments are raised, showing that the search for agreement and consensus by citizens in public forums can hardly be dismissed and that consensus can be invested (...) with many meanings in democratic life. Secondly, however, the author approves McCarthy when challenging Habermas’s epistemic claims regarding his theory of democracy. Not all democratic deliberations can be analysed in epistemic terms, in particular, debates on values. The pitfalls of any epistemic account of this form of deliberation are pointed out in the end of the essay. (shrink)

La Déclaration des droits de l'homme nous est familière. Mais de quel homme parle-t-on? L'homme/esprit des Lumières ou l'homme/matière des sciences? En discutant ces deux approches, l'objectif de cet ouvrage est de réfléchir sur la particularité ontologique de chaque existence humaine. À partir d'exemples tirés de l'actualité juridique et politique, ce livre insiste sur la quête de sens inhérente à toute entreprise humaine. Être humain est un effort pour chacun, ce n'est pas un acquis. " Devenir humain " signifie lutter (...) pour trouver les valeurs de l'existence humaine. Le but de l'auteur est de montrer que l'être humain est constitué par le devenir. Sa vision du vivant redonne alors une place au finalisme : la vie n'est pas due au hasard. (shrink)

A trop vouloir en faire le discours écologique ne risque-t-il pas d’exaspérer, d’éveiller la méfiance et de décourager toutes les bonnes volontés? S’il y a un sens à vouloir préserver la planète pour les générations futures et à prendre soin de ne pas épuiser les ressources non-renouvelables, n’est-il pas tout simplement grotesque de parler de « devoirs » envers la nature, du « respect » qu’il lui serait dû, et à élaborer une « éthique environnementale », comme si les problèmes (...) environnementaux constituaient une nouvelle sorte de problèmes de moralité? L’objectif de ce livre est de prouver que cette approche des problèmes – qui s’est développée en Amérique du Nord depuis plus d’une trentaine d’années,n’a non seulement rien d’absurde, mais qu’elle dispose de moyens théoriques raffinés permettant de comprendre les enjeux de la crise écologique à laquelle nous sommes confrontés en s’interrogeant sur ses causes profondes. (shrink)

Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenology reveals two attitudes regarding the classification of phenomena. On the one hand, they are classified by type. On the other, the “banality of saturation” reduces these types topossibleinterpretations, in which case saturation isn’t a qualitative rupture anymore, but a possible hermeneutic attitude to any phenomenon. Hence, there is, in Marion’s phenomenology, a tension between a metaphysical attitude that maintains categorial discontinuities, and a hermeneutic temptation driven by the recovery of quantitative continuities between all phenomena. Yet, Marion does (...) not push this quantitative temptation to its limits; he steps back in front of a specifically saturated phenomenon: the icon. (shrink)

The article takes up Foucault’s analysis of neoliberalism in the 1970s. It begins by showing how this analysis represents an unforeseen effect of his introduction of the new category of biopower. It goes on to propose a hypothesis suggesting that, if we are to reappropriate the explanatory potential of the latter notion, it is advisable that we leave aside the political and cultural problematic of neoliberalism, focusing on the specific locus of the economic evolutions which are involved. Biopower has in (...) fact largely become a constitutive function of neocapitalism, and must be examined as such. (shrink)

C’est dans les premiers essais théoriques d’Erich Fromm publiés par la Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung au début des années 1930 que l’on trouve une première élaboration des notions de « personnalité autoritaire » et de « caractère autoritaire ». Une sociologie psychanalytique, explique Fromm, ne saurait se ramener, comme le suggère une..

L'évolution de la clinique psychiatrique a mis au centre de ses recherches l'écoute et la parole du patient. Cependant le plus souvent la parole échoit dans les discours et l'écoute se décentre vers la vérification des a priori théo­riques. L'empathie ou les règlements qui incitent le clinicien à mettre le patient au centre de ses préoccupations apportent confort et sécurité mais ratent la rencontre clinique qui échoit dans le relationnel. Une relation n'est pas une rencontre. Le contexte de...

Since at least the mid-1980s claims have been made for rationality in rats. For example, that rats are capable of inferential reasoning (Blaisdell, Sawa, Leising, & Waldmann, 2006; Bunsey & Eichenbaum, 1996), or that they can make adaptive decisions about future behavior (Foote & Crystal, 2007), or that they are capable of knowledge in propositional-like form (Dickinson, 1985). The stakes are rather high, because these capacities imply concept possession and on some views (e.g., Rödl, 2007; Savanah, 2012) rationality indicates self-consciousness. (...) I evaluate the case for rat rationality by analyzing 5 key research paradigms: spatial navigation, metacognition, transitive inference, causal reasoning, and goal orientation. I conclude that the observed behaviors need not imply rationality by the subjects. Rather, the behavior can be accounted for by noncognitive processes such as hard-wired species typical predispositions or associative learning or (nonconceptual) affordance detection. These mechanisms do not necessarily require or implicate the capacity for rationality. As such there is as yet insufficient evidence that rats can reason. I end by proposing the ‘Staircase Test,’ an experiment designed to provide convincing evidence of rationality in rats. (shrink)

Our contribution concerns the continuous training of teachers that will be forming future teachers during their traineeship. It aims to describe how the professional development of the trainees’ coaches, both the training supervisors as well as the supervisors form the trainees’ schools, was used during a course proposed by a university and during meetings where practices were shared by the participants. In this manner, we identified the ideal moments for development of the trainees, as well as the most important levers (...) for the transformation of the coaches. We paid particular attention to the reflexive contract co-defined by the group, as well as to the principle of social moderation at the heart of the collaborative group’s dynamic. (shrink)

This paper seeks to answer the following question: does it still make sense today to speak of political emancipation, in particular in the sense bequeathed to us by Marx, as emancipation from capitalism? I consider three serious objections to this possibility: the objection that reference to “capitalism” is unduly essentialist in view of the multiplicity of historical situations; the anti-utopian objection according to which the programme of emancipation from capitalism lacks any precise, practical content; and the normative objection that emancipation (...) in and of itself does not specify the norms of the putative post-capitalist society. In the final section of the paper, I attempt to respond to these three objections, and seek to outline the different levels at which something like an emancipatory project, understood as a surpassing of capitalism, can still make sense today. (shrink)

Nous philosophons, psychanalysons et écrivons dans un monde. Il arrive qu'on l'oublie. On peut nommer politique l'inquiétude devant ce qui arrive dans le monde et au monde. A ce qui arrive au monde au nom du Califat, seul le politique peut faire réponse. Dans cette optique il s'agira de dégager le minimal du politique, en vue de sa relance. Apparaît alors une quasi synonymie entre psychanalyse et politique : l'une et l'autre ont en commun de faire avec l'impossible. Ni psychanalyse (...) appliquée, ni psychanalyse du politique, mais penser avec la psychanalyse, s'en servir, faire travailler ses notions, parler ses langues, l'altérer aussi, la déplacer. Arendt nous apprend que dès qu'il est question de langage, le politique est engagé. Mais dès qu'il est question de langage, c'est le vif de la psychanalyse qui est également mis en jeu. Nouage inextricable de la psychanalyse et du politique, donc. Si la psychanalyse ne sort pas de ses institutions, de ses dispositifs, et, partant, ne se mêle pas au politique, alors nous tenons qu'il n'y a pas de psychanalyse qui vaille une minute de peine. A la vérité, une psychanalyse qui n'est pas sollicitée par le monde et ne le sollicite pas en même temps ne peut encore s'appeler psychanalyse. (shrink)

La question des instincts est une voie d’entrée privilégiée pour le rapport du pragmatisme au naturalisme. Le problème que soulève la théorie des instincts de William James et John Dewey vient du maintien, à première vue surprenant, de l’idée d’une « nature humaine ». Je soutiens que c’est au sein même de la théorie pragmatiste des instincts que l’on trouve des arguments pour montrer que la nature humaine ne détermine pas univoquement la conduite. Bien comprendre la naturalité de l’être humain (...) suffit à défaire toute tentative pour l’ériger en source d’autorité des principes de la conduite. (shrink)

In this paper, I defend the view that our knowledge of our desires is inferential and based on the consciousness we have of our emotions, and on our experiences of pain and pleasure.

This essay connects the theme of the nature of the world in Kant's pre-critical works with the examination of the problem of causality. Grasping Kant's position from this gradually evolving perspective enables us to present a unified account of the precritical period. It also helps us to see his Critical revolution as an evolutionary turn, in which there is a growing awareness that the connection between substances must emphasize a real connection whose grounding does not depend in an indirect manner (...) on a transcendent being named God. (shrink)

La fuite des cerveaux est-elle un phénomène individuellement légitime, mais socialement fâcheux ou bien enveloppe-t-elle une forme d’injustice à l’égard des populations qui en subissent les effets ? Nous construisons un modèle simplifié de ce phénomène permettant de faire apparaître ce qu’il y a d’éthiquement problématique dans la fuite des cerveaux et quels types de remèdes pourraient y être apportés.

ABSTRACT: The aim of this article is to assess the coherence of the metaethical positions on which discourse ethics as developed by Habermas and Apel rests. After showing that one is faced here with a non-descriptivist, anti-realist but cognitivist moral theory, I examine whether a non-descriptivist cognitivism, on the one hand, and an anti-realist cognitivism, on the other hand, can consistently be held. I maintain that the problem of the relation between cognitivism and non-descriptivism is adequately solved by the two (...) authors, but that the problem of the relation between cognitivism and anti-realism is still waiting for an appropriate answer, which I put forth in my article. (shrink)

We should not understand in this title "What does not return to the same" the announcement of a return to Levinas, but rather of what the word or concept of "return" could mean in Levinas's work. There is perhaps no better way of misunderstanding Levinas than imposing on his philosophical gesture the interpretative grid of a "horizon of return". This article will attempt to dismantle the strategies of reading which stipulate that Levinas's philosophy is one of "return". In this way (...) we shall reveal the complexity of Levinasian thought, and that, beyond the numerous slogans, there are the ones of a "return" or of its simple contrary, the ones of a "philosophy of exile". (shrink)

In what sense could discourse ethics be linked with normative problems raised by the ecological crisis? Even if Apel and Habermas have not really addressed this question extensively, and even if their position in moral philosophy seems to develop and reinforce a neo-Kantian anthropocentric point of view, one can find in their works some evidence for the possibility of connecting a dialogical view with an ecological one. In order to defend the philosophical interest in highlighting this possibility, this essay analyses (...) Habermas' position concerning the moral and ontological status of animality in particular, and attempts to situate this position within the history of Critical Theory. (shrink)

This article aims at showing that in spite of Michel Foucault’s violent rejection of phenomenology, this discipline never ceased to bear a crucial significance for his archaeological and genealogical analyses, in that it can be construed as a symptom indicating the most serious challenge that the contemporary philosophy has to meet: thinking together Experience and Knowledge. The author intends to prove, by resorting to the Marxian concept of ‘objectively necessary appearance’, that Foucault’s main opposition to phenomenology stems from his original (...) conception of the theory as a sort of experiment made by the philosopher on himself and on his own historical a priori. (shrink)

L’ambition de ce livre est de présenter les éléments d’une réévaluation de l’aveu. Introduit par une réflexion sur son usage contemporain dans le droit, il croise des approches philosophiques profondément distinctes si ce n’est opposées. La phénoménologie, la psychanalyse et la philosophie analytique sont autant d’éclairages sur ce phénomène multiforme.

Nous jugeons les réponses émotionnelles comme plus ou moins raisonnables étant donné leur objet et le contexte. Je soutiens que la légitimité de ces jugements repose sur le caractère raisonnable des désirs ou des dispositions émotionnelles qui expliquent ces réponses émotionnelles. Il est déraisonnable d’être triste de ne pas satisfaire un désir déraisonnable. Mais comment un désir peut-il être déraisonnable ? Je rejette l’idée selon laquelle les désirs seraient raisonnables parce que cohérents. Je suggère que nos désirs et nos dispositions (...) émotionnelles sont raisonnables à deux conditions : premièrement, qu’ils contribuent à une vie subjectivement heureuse ; deuxièmement, qu’ils soient moralement justifiés. (shrink)