Les rapports de pouvoir irradient notre société : sont-ils inéluctables? Nous nous apercevons qu'ils ont été construits pour asseoir la domination d'une minorité sur le reste de la population. Cet ouvrage démonte et analyse les mécanismes qui sont à l'origine des relations de pouvoir. Le point de départ de cette étude réside dans la volonté d'interroger la croyance, aussi répandue que massive, selon laquelle la domination serait naturelle aux hommes et aux animaux. En effet, lorsqu'on examine les opinions habituelles portant (...) sur la domination se distingue ordinairement la certitude quasi indéracinable qu'elle ne serait rien que l'expression d'une force naturelle et que, s'il y a des forts et des faibles, c'est parce que force et faiblesse, puissance et soumission seraient inscrites dans un ordre naturel des choses. À la faveur d'une alliance entre philosophie et biologie, il s'agit ici de se demander quelle est l'origine de la domination, et de comprendre les mécanismes des relations de pouvoir. Au fond, y a-t-il une légitimité de nature à poser ou réclamer l'inégalité? Où l'on voit que l'enjeu de ce livre réside dans l'effort pour résoudre scientifiquement et philosophiquement le problème du statut des phénomènes de domination dans le monde, et pour poser les bases à partir desquelles peut s'édifier une pensée de l'émancipation authentique. (shrink)

Here, I propose a new hypothesis: sex originated from an archaic gene transfer process among prebiotic bubbles without the prerequisite for reproduction. This de‐coupling from reproduction might make the thorny problem of accounting for the evolution of sex, despite the apparent advantages of parthenogenicity, more tractable.

The complex issue of fake news has been approached extensively by many disciplines in academia. Despite this variety of approaches, the concept of fake news still lacks a reasonable degree of definitional unicity. This paper critically analyzes a sample of definitions from the current literature. By diving into the set of definitions, it will exhibited a total of ten necessary conditions that scholars generally consider: imitation, falsity, deception, bullshit, purpose, morality, assessability, virality, channel, and appeal. Current definitions of fake news (...) have certain blindspots and leave too much leeway for interpretation. This leeway is utterly problematic because it creates a grey zone in which articles are left stranded halfway between fake news and factual news articles. However, it has the crucial advantage of opening up new epistemic paths of inquiry regarding fake news. As a conclusion, we will summarize the conditions one can accept or reject to define fake news. (shrink)

In the debate on whether to ban LAWS, moral arguments are mainly used. One of these arguments, proposed by Sparrow, is that the use of LAWS goes hand in hand with the responsibility gap. Together with the premise that the ability to hold someone responsible is a necessary condition for the admissibility of an act, Sparrow believes that this leads to the conclusion that LAWS should be prohibited. In this article, it will be shown that Sparrow’s argumentation for both premises (...) is not convincing. If one interprets the thesis that responsibility (first premise) is necessary in a descriptive sense, this assertion clashes with military theory and practice. And even if you focus on the normative interpretation, that claim does not stand. The second premise for Sparrow’s conclusion, namely that you cannot hold anyone responsible for LAWS’ (mis)deeds, is based on the idea that control is a necessary condition for responsibility. It will be shown that this idea too is not correct, which means that Sparrow’s control argument does not do the work it should do. From this, we can conclude that Sparrow’s justification for his claim that LAWS should be banned is insufficient, and neither can we conclude that the thesis of a responsibility gap has in any case been undermined. However, it will also be argued that someone may be responsible for the actions of LAWS, or that it cannot be excluded that one can be held responsible. (shrink)

Since its emergence in the 1960s, Artifcial Intelligence (AI) has grown to conquer many technology products and their felds of application. Machine learning, as a major part of the current AI solutions, can learn from the data and through experience to reach high performance on various tasks. This growing success of AI algorithms has led to a need for interpretability to understand opaque models such as deep neural networks. Various requirements have been raised from diferent domains, together with numerous tools (...) to debug, justify outcomes, and establish the safety, fairness and reliability of the models. This variety of tasks has led to inconsistencies in the terminology with, for instance, terms such as interpretable, explainable and transparent being often used interchangeably in methodology papers. These words, however, convey diferent meanings and are “weighted" diferently across domains, for example in the technical and social sciences. In this paper, we propose an overarching terminology of interpretability of AI systems that can be referred to by the technical developers as much as by the social sciences community to pursue clarity and efciency in the defnition of regulations for ethical and reliable AI development. We show how our taxonomy and defnition of interpretable AI difer from the ones in previous research and how they apply with high versatility to several domains and use cases, proposing a—highly needed—standard for the communication among interdisciplinary areas of AI. (shrink)

In the long line of French Sade studies, Deleuze's essay Coldness and Cruelty marks out a special place. By discussing Masoch both in addition to and in contrast to Sade, Deleuze reveals the stakes of his book: he wants to unmask the concept of sadomasochism as a clinical nonentity. In their paper, the authors explain the arguments supporting this project and show their relation to Deleuze's reading of Bergson. They then argue that there is a second, similarly Bergsonian criticism of (...) Freudian psychoanalysis operating in the background of Coldness and Cruelty. This more wide-ranging criticism takes Freud to task for conceiving perversion, like neurosis, in Oedipal terms. This conception, Deleuze holds, forgets that perversion and neurosis represent two different worlds that essentially have nothing to do with each other despite crossing in clinical experience. (shrink)

Technologie is (bijna) zo oud als de mens en bepaalt al eeuwenlang mee ons bestaan. Met de komst van intelligente machines raakt die wisselwerking tussen mens en machine in een stroomversnelling. Drones, algoritmes van Spotify en zelfrijdende wagens zijn vandaag zo alomtegenwoordig dat ze vragen oproepen over de menselijke natuur, en hoezeer wij worden bepaald en bedreigd door technologie. Zijn robots waardegeladen of waardevrij? Waarin verschilt Mark Zuckerberg van Martin Heidegger? En is het effectief zo dat technologie onze samenleving aanstuurt, (...) of is het de mens die de richting bepaalt? In een glasheldere stijl ontrafelt Lode Lauwaert al deze vragen. Het resultaat is een frisse en kritische blik op de thema's van deze tijd."--Publisher information. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence and normative ethics: Who is responsible for the crime of LAWS? In his text “Killer Robots”, Robert Sparrow holds that killer robots should be forbidden. This conclusion is based on two premises. The first is that attributive responsibility is a necessary condition for admitting an action; the second premise is that the use of killer robots is accompanied by a responsibility gap. Although there are good reasons to conclude that killer robots should be banned, the article shows that (...) Sparrow's argument for the ban is not correct. (shrink)

Presenting a series of historical portraits of Bantu, Thierry Secretan recounts his investigation into the compounds that housed the black labor of the gold mines of the Rand, around Johannesburg. The use of a « pass » to control the black miners prefigured the apartheid system. From 1904 to 1939,Alfred Martin Duggan-Cronin, an Irish guard at one of the compounds, began to photograph the different kind of people doing the hard labor in the mines. The results were some 7200 (...) exposures and working prints, on 13 /18 cm negatives. Hundreds of enlargements were exhibited from 1925 onward in a gallery in his own home in Kimberley. These photographs were rediscovered in 1998 by Thierry Secretan, who is still attempting to save them front slow destruction: they constitute an extraordinary catalogue of the Bantu cultures. (shrink)

Valorising the biocultural heritage of common goods could enable peasant farmers to achieve socially and economically inclusive sustainability. Increasingly appreciated by consumers, peasant heritage products offer small farmers promising opportunities for economic, social and territorial development. Identifying the obstacles and levers of this complex, multi-scale and multi-stakeholder objective requires an integrative framework. We applied the panarchy conceptual framework to two cases of participatory research with small quinoa producers: a local fair in Chile and quinoa export production in Bolivia. In both (...) cases, the “commoning” process was crucial both to bring stakeholders together inside their communities and to gain outside recognition for their production and thus achieve social and economic inclusion. Despite the differences in scale, the local fair and the export market shared a similar marketing strategy based on short value chains promoting quality products with high identity value. In these dynamics of biocultural heritage valorisation, the panarchical approach revealed the central place as well as the vulnerability of the community territory. As a place of both anchoring and opening, the community territory is the privileged space where autonomous and consensual control over the governance of common biocultural resources can be exercised. (shrink)

While "natural history" is practically synonymous with the name of Buffon, the term itself has been otherwise overlooked by historians of science. This essay attempts to address this omission by investigating the meanings of "physique," "natural philosophy," and "history," among other terms, with the purpose of understanding Buffon's actual objectives. It also shows that Buffon never claimed to be a Newtonian and should not be considered as such; the goal is to provide a historical analysis that resituates Buffon's thought within (...) his own era. This is done, primarily, by eschewing the often-studied question of time in Buffon. Instead, this study examines the nontemporal meanings of the word "history" within the naturalist's theory and method. The title of his Natural History is examined both as an indicator of the kind of science that Buffon was hoping to achieve and as a source of great misinterpretation among his peers. Unlike Buffon, many of his contemporaries actually envisioned the study of nature from a Baconian perspective where history was restricted to the mere collection of facts and where philosophy, which was the implicit and ultimate goal of studying nature, was seen, at least for the present, as unrealizable. Buffon confronts this tendency insofar as his Histoire naturelle claims to be the real physique that, along with describing nature, also sought to identify general laws and provide clear insight into what true knowledge of nature is or should be. According to Buffon, history (both natural and civil) is not analogous to mathematics; it is a nonmathematical method whose scope encompasses both nature and society. This methodological stance gives rise to the "physicization" of certain moral concepts--a gesture that was interpreted by his contemporaries as Epicurean and atheist. In addition, Buffon reduces a number of metaphysically tainted historical concepts (e.g., antediluvian monuments) to objects of physical analysis, thereby confronting the very foundation of natural theology. In Buffon, as this essay makes clear, natural history is paving the way for a new physique (science of natural beings), independent from mathematics and from God, that treats naturalia in a philosophical and "historical" manner that is not necessarily "temporal. ". (shrink)

Formal topology aims at developing general topology in intuitionistic and predicative mathematics. Many classical results of general topology have been already brought into the realm of constructive mathematics by using formal topology and also new light on basic topological notions was gained with this approach which allows distinction which are not expressible in classical topology. Here we give a systematic exposition of one of the main tools in formal topology: inductive generation. In fact, many formal topologies can be presented in (...) a predicative way by an inductive generation and thus their properties can be proved inductively. We show however that some natural complete Heyting algebra cannot be inductively defined. (shrink)

Cet article s’interroge sur les ressources caractéristiques d’une mobilisation de sans-papiers. C’est au travail symbolique de présentation de soi et de sa cause qu’il faudra s’intéresser. Le tableau de ce type de lutte implique ainsi de souligner l’importance de l’obtention d’une « légitimité émotionnelle ». Autrement dit, le désespoir social et la faiblesse deviennent des armes dans une dramaturgie où s’affrontent la Morale et le Droit. Néanmoins, bien d’autres facteurs seront nécessaires à l’obtention d’un « succès public ». La spectacularisation (...) du conflit, son florilège de personnalités de tous ordres, et son long cortège médiatique participeront activement à cette réussite. À tous les niveaux de la mobilisation, ce sera l’humanisme qui s’imposera comme code idéologique indépassable du soutien aux sans-papiers.This article addresses the resources which characterize an irregular migrant mobilization. We’ll focus on the symbolic work carried out in the setting-up of a picture of oneself and of one’s cause. As a result, this kind of struggle also implies a quest for an « emotional legitimacy ». In other words, social despair and weakness become weapons in a dramaturgy confronting Moral philosophy and Right. However, many other factors will have to be brought together to trigger a « public success ». The spectacularization of the conflict – which boasts a large number of prominent figures from all social spheres and extensive media coverage – will be actively instrumental in this success. At each level of the mobilization, humanism appears as the inescapable ideological code of the support lent to irregular migrants. (shrink)

L’Introduction à l’analyse des lignes courbes algébriques de Gabriel Cramer, paru en 1750, a tout de suite bénéficié du soutien de D’Alembert qui l’a inclus dans les références bibliographiques de ses articles de mathématiques de l’Encyclopédie portant sur les courbes. Ainsi choisi et légitimé par l’entreprise encyclopédique et ses reprises, l’ouvrage de Cramer devient objet patrimonial au tournant du xixe siècle pour les mathématiciens, amateurs, professionnels ou enseignants qui travaillent sur les courbes algébriques. Le suivi sur le temps long des (...) mentions de l’Introduction dans les encyclopédies, dictionnaires ou histoires des mathématiques en langue française, ainsi que dans quelques textes d’enseignement, nous permettra de comprendre que ce processus de patrimonialisation n’induit pas sa conservation, sa protection, sa valorisation à de seules fins mémorielles, en figeant l’ouvrage dans un passé immuable. Au contraire, il permet une historicisation critique de la part des acteurs qui les met en position d’interroger et de réactualiser les connaissances et les pratiques que l’œuvre contient, au gré des mouvements d’émergence, de réorganisation et des spécialisations des savoirs mathématiques, quitte à en oublier certains aspects pour en mettre de nouveaux en valeur. (shrink)

In secondary literature one can often read that Arendt, when she writes about violence, differs from Benjamin and Sorel. Indeed, while she considers violence as something instrumental, the two others write about a kind of violence that does not serve a goal. In the present essay it is argued that this presentation of the debate is not correct, and that the relationship between the three philosophers regarding the issue of violence is more complex.

In this article the author discusses Pierre Klossowski’s first and second interpretation of the novels of Marquis de Sade. It is often stressed that there is a big difference between these interpretations: the first interprets Sade from a theological perspective; the second puts that Sade is an exponent of modernity. One can however argue that also Klossowski’s first theological reading interprets Sade as a product of modern thinking.

The literary oeuvre of Marquis de Sade (1740–1814) has attracted a great deal of interest over the past 200 years, not only from writers, but also from numerous leading philosophers. Among them is Georges Bataille, who particularly emphasizes the apathetic character of the Sadean libertines, meaning that they feel nothing at all. More specifically, the French philosopher focuses on their apathetic enjoyment that goes hand in hand with the abuse of victims. The goal of this article is to clarify that (...) peculiar pleasure by comparing it, among other things, with stoicism and mysticism. It will be shown that in the Sadean universe not moral transgression is central, but rather the transgression of a metaphysical boundary, i.e. the boundary between the human and non-human. (shrink)

Résumé Flaubert a su imposer à la littérature française une esthétique dont on dit volontiers qu’elle a révolutionné la littérature française. En son temps, pourtant, ses œuvres connaissent un succès mitigé et les romans de son ami, Maxime Du Camp, sont mieux côtés. Or, l’esthétique de l’un entre en concurrence avec la production de l’autre jusqu’à la réduire à l’oubli. C’est donc cette rivalité qu’il nous plaît d’interroger pour mieux comprendre ce qu’est une œuvre et les conditions requises d’une disparition (...) subie et peut-être injuste. (shrink)

Le but de cet article est de jeter un regard sur plusieurs aspects du roman La Panne de Friedrich Dürrenmatt. L’histoire est simple. À la suite d’une panne de voiture, un certain Traps est hébergé chez quatre amis. Invité à participer à un jeu, un procès où il aura le rôle de l’accusé, il accepte. Il est convaincu de meurtre, accepte sa culpabilité et se suicide. Après un bref condensé de l’histoire, l’article traite des thèmes suivants : le caractère de (...) Traps et sa transformation au cours du jeu ; le rôle ambigu des quatre amis ; le genre tragi-comique grec de l’œuvre ; les aspects comiques ; les aspects tragiques : l’atmosphère d’anxiété et de mort ; les symétries et inversions ; l’art littéraire. En épilogue, une lecture diamétralement opposée à l’interprétation traditionnelle de l’œuvre est discutée. (shrink)

This paper revisits Fleeming Jenkin’s anonymous review of Charles Darwin’s _Origin of Species_, published in the _North British Review_ in June 1867. This review is usually revered for its impact on Darwin’s theory of descent with modification. Its classical interpretation states that Jenkin, a Professor of Engineering at the University of Edinburgh, made a compelling case against natural selection based on the fact of “blending inheritance” and the “swamping” of advantageous variations. Those themes, however, are strikingly absent from Jenkin’s text. (...) They were later read into Jenkin’s text by scholars trying to explain how Darwinian selection was reconciled with Mendelian genes and the birth of the Modern Synthesis. While many scholars have tried to measure Jenkin’s effect on Darwin, the value of the 1867 review remains unclear. This paper re-examines its content and concludes that Jenkin’s “able review” was in fact written by an engineer whose competencies in biology were very low. Focusing on the figure of the shipwrecked white sailor isolated on an island inhabited by Black people, this paper also underlines the racial assumptions behind Jenkin’s review. “Blending inheritance” is thus a theme linked to theoretical reworkings on the question of race and skin colors, taking its root in Galton’s typology of heredity. Darwin was probably mostly unimpressed by Jenkin’s review. The problems raised by the review were not so much “blending inheritance” and “swamping” but a conundrum of problems related to the effects of intercrossing on variation and reversion. (shrink)

Le Quichotte de Cervantès occupe une place singulière dans l’histoire de la traduction littéraire en langue française, au moins parce qu’il a fait l’objet d’incessantes retraductions. Mais l’ouvrage retient l’attention parce que la traduction y est thématisée pour elle-même en deux endroits. Cervantès, en jouant avec les codes du roman de chevalerie, pose le cadre général d’une réflexion théorique sur la traduction dont on cherchera ici à souligner les principales tensions constitutives. En intériorisant ses propres origines fictives et traductives, dans (...) un intermède à cheval entre les chapitres viii et ix, le Quichotte évoque à la fois l’idée d’une traduction impossible, mais aussi celle de la traduction comme une modalité particulière de lecture où s’origine la littérature moderne comme quasi-monde (Ricœur) propice aux échanges textuels. Il s’agira finalement de montrer que, ce faisant, Cervantès fait signe à la fois vers le structuralisme et la tradition herméneutique, et leur articulation problématique. (shrink)

This paper is dedicated to a discussion of Gilles Deleuze’s Coldness and Cruelty and its special place in French Sade studies. In this text, Deleuze famously argues against the notion of ‘sadomasochism’ as a unity. Sadism and masochism are, on his view, two entirely separate and incompatible ways of making use of pain and suffering in perversion. What is less known about Deleuze’s text is that he argues, against the current in French philosophy, psychiatry, and even intuition, that the essence (...) of sadism is a kind of thinking rather than a pleasure in causing pain to others. In this essay, we try to make sense of the idea that the sadist, at heart, is a metaphysician who thinks by means of suffering and indifference. Our paper also addresses the related concern about how to account for the properly sexual nature of this metaphysical perversion. We argue that the sexuality of thinking is rooted in pre-genital sexual life as described by Freud in his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. (shrink)

Liang Shuming, considered to be the Last Confucian, was a Buddhist.

Many philosophers and lay people believe that philosophy has an important role to play in times of societal crisis. In this contribution reasons are given to doubt the supposed societal relevance of philosophy.

In recent years, neurophysiological evidence has accumulated in favor of a common coding between perception and execution of action. We review findings from recent neuroimaging experiments in the action domain with three complementary perspectives: perception of action, covert action triggered by perception, and reproduction of perceived action (imitation). All studies point to the parietal cortex as a key region for body movement representation, both observed and performed.

Among the French philosophers who discuss the literature of writer Marquis de Sade, Maurice Blanchot presents a unique interpretation. For Blanchot, literature is the theme par excellence on which his entire oeuvre has been built. It is not, however, the case that Blanchot reads several literary forms and invents new concepts to map out a certain form of literature. His thinking about literature is indeed accompanied by an ideal and his interest goes out to a particular kind of writer, namely (...) the writer who feels closely related to revolution. This implies that Blanchot is interested in Sade because his literature is both an illustration of a certain ideal, and is stuck in the revolutionary moment of radical negation. (shrink)

Shuming has been proclaimed the forerunner of Contemporary Neo-Confucianism. However, assessing Liang’s identity appears a much more complicated task. Taking a closer look at his copious writings on religion, this paper shows how Liang conceived the role of religion at the different steps of humanity’s quest. Applying this frame of understanding to twentieth century China, Liang saw a discrepancy between the task required in our present time and what the future was holding. Therefore, while he engaged the world in a (...) certain way, he was still holding privately another belief. This secret of Liang reshuffles traditional boundaries between the secular and transcendence. (shrink)

La connaissance n'est pas extérieure à l'individu. Pour comprendre le monde dans lequel on vit, il est indispensable de partir de soi. C'est le désir de connaître qui déclenche le processus sans fin de l'auto-éducation. Mais ce travail est facilité par l'écoute d'un partenaire qui donne sens à votre parole et par la rédaction d'une autobiographie raisonnée, qui distingue l'objet de votre recherche et le projet qui vous anime, tout en vous constituant en sujet d'un trajet éducatif qui se révèle (...) être aussi existentiel. Paul-Henry Chombart de Lauwe et Henri Desroche, deux anthropologues non académiques, ont chacun élaboré, et expérimenté avec succès, cette pédagogie ouverte et exigeante.Knowledge is not external to the individual. To understand the world in which we live, it is necessary to leave home. It is the desire to know that triggers the endless process of self-education. But this work is facilitated by listening to a partner that gives meaning to your words and writing a reasoned autobiography, which distinguishes the object of your research project and that motivates you, while you in constituting about an educational journey that proves to be too existential. Henry Paul-Henri Chombart Lauwe Desroche and two non-academic anthropologists, have each developed and successfully tested, this open learning and demanding. (shrink)