Le titre même donne à la transcription de cet exposé son résumé le plus exact et le plus laconique. Huit phrases extraites du corpus aristotélicien tracent un ensemble de dépendances où sont pris les mots que nous traduisons habituellement par nature et mouvement. L'exposé met en évidence le travail des concepts et son examen contrôlé par une lecture stricte du texte ancien et sa critique étymologique. La nature apparaît dès lors comme fondamentalement en écart par rapport à ellemême, et c'est (...) cela que nous avons encore à penser aujourd'hui. (shrink)

Les communications du colloque sur "La fonction critique de l'Art" qui s'Est déroulé à l'Université de Pau et des Pays de l'Adour, les 28, 29 et 30 novembre 2007 sous l'Impulsion d'Evelyne Toussaint, témoignent d'Une volonté d'eclairer la production d'Artistes qui ont pris position sur des questions politiques, sociales, économiques ou esthétiques. Sans céder à certains jugements qui se révèlent souvent comme autant de témoignages de méconnaissance, de distraction, d'emballements rhétoriques ou de volonté d'emprise, résistant aux arbitrages qui les (...) inciteraient à opter exclusivement pour l'esthétique relationnelle, la micropolitique, le détournement, le documentaire, l'art contextuel ou l'art autonome, de nombreux artistes se moquent, en effet, de l'injonction qui lescontraindrait à dissocier œuvre sensible et œuvre critique. (shrink)

This article aims to explore the links between Corsica and the French eighteenth century. During the Corsican revolutions, marked by the island's period of independence until the French conquest (1755-1769), the island and its leader Pascal Paoli were admired by the philosophers of the Enlightenment, particularly Voltaire and Rousseau. During the Third Republic, this reference was approached from the perspective of rooting the republican ideal on the island. In September 1889, Corsica experienced an important statuary event with the return to (...) Corsica of the ashes of Paoli. One of the ideological issues at stake was the historiographic reconstruction of the figure. Paoli became, in a teleological and shortened way, the precursor of the French Revolution. After 1945, the French 18th century was still present, albeit in a completely different political configuration. Indeed, the period of the Enlightenment was now mobilised by the nationalist movement of the 1970s in its entirety (autonomists, independentists, and clandestines, etc.). The key quotations of the famous philosophers concerning Corsica were thus reproduced on numerous media, tracts, and manifestos, including within the cultural sphere that was then in full expansion. The slightest publication or claim did not fail to allude to it, the subject asserting itself for the nationalists as a true legitimation of their political project. (shrink)

Résumé Venant, comme Eduardo Chillida, d’une tradition basque privilégiant les volumes ramassés et puissants, Jorge Oteiza Oteiza (1908-2003) passe, à la fin des années 1950, de l’organique au géométrique, du geste à la conception quasi mathématique de la forme, vers une abstraction de plus en plus affirmée. Admirateur de Mallarmé et de Malevitch, il multiplie les variations de polyèdres de fer, pliant et dépliant l’espace même, la matière et son absence. On trouve aussi, dans son Laboratoire Expérimental, de très nombreuses (...) sculptures minuscules dont certaines ont donné lieu à des réalisations monumentales. (shrink)

Tant par son œuvre politique importante que par le potentiel créateur de son travail sur la perception, l'expression et l'ontologie, Maurice Merleau-Ponty a exercé une influence peu remarquée sur la pensée politique française. Aux lectures des Aron, Sartre et Lefort qui ont déterminé la compréhension et le sens politiques de l'œuvre de Merleau-Ponty s'ajoute une postérité immédiate chez ses contemporains. Colette Audry, Tran Duc Thao, Jean-Toussaint Desanti, et Frantz Fanon furent marqués par leur proximité à Merleau-Ponty tout autant que (...) par ses écrits, reprenant chacun à son propre compte son attitude. Une postérité silencieuse, quelque peu différée, se remarque chez Cornelius Castoriadis, Françoise Collin et Jean-François Lyotard, qui construisirent leurs pensées dans une rupture créative avec celle de Merleau-Ponty. Enfin, une postérité politique se fait sentir dans le moment qui nous est contemporain): Vincent Peillon, Marc Crépon et Luce Irigaray reviennent ici sur leur relation à sa philosophie et sur ce qu'elle permet de penser. À travers ces postérités, les contributrices et contributeurs de cet ouvrage se penchent sur les questions de l'engagement militant et philosophique, de la relationalité et de l'altérité, de la racisation et des émotions, du corps et de la parole, de la vie esthétique, de l'ontologie et la révolution, du républicanisme, du conflit et des épreuves historiques, ou encore du toucher et de la culture politique. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:William James, W. E. B. Du Bois, and the Art of New Religious IdealsKolby Knight (bio)And I don’t know a soul who’s not been batteredI don’t have a friend who feels at easeI don’t know a dream that’s not been shatteredOr driven to its knees...Oh, and it’s alright, it’s alright, it’s alrightYou can’t be forever blessedStill, tomorrow’s going to be another working dayAnd I’m trying to get some restThat’s (...) all, I’m trying to get some rest—Paul Simon, “American Tune” (1973) / Recreated by Allen Toussaint (2016)William James and W. E. B. Du Bois believed that an artful life could produce new and world-changing religious ideals. As cosmopolitan scholars who studied in the United States and Europe, both men confidently interlaced original interpretations of Shakespeare, Wagner, and Goethe into their academic accounts of individual and social behavior. Beyond their patronage of the arts, James and Du Bois also saw themselves as scientists and artists who had the responsibility to create new pathways and religious ideals at a time when many European and American intellectuals depicted Western civilization as the endpoint of history.This article explores the pragmatic visions of science, art, and religion respectively offered by James and Du Bois. Pragmatism, here, refers to an active mode of study that looks closely at the interaction between specific thoughts and behaviors in particular situations without assuming a standard of truth which influences or evaluates human life from the outside of experience. As pragmatists, James and Du Bois did not believe their work consisted of merely the explication and description of preexisting truths, but more importantly the religious creation of what James called “new facts,” including healthier habits of thought and practice.1 [End Page 71]In this article, I will trace how the two men, as religious naturalists and leaders in the development of a pragmatic social science at the turn of the twentieth century, challenged evolutionary theories which envisioned Western civilization as the highest standard of aesthetic and intellectual development. Part one demonstrates how James, as a psychologist who prioritized the study and development of “first-hand” experiences, worked against visions of science that saw “lower” emotions as a hindrance to impartial intellectual discovery. It also explores how James centered personal religious experiences in his effort to de-center “impersonal” scientific frameworks which depicted human behavior and thinking as beholden to evolutionary laws which transcended individual experience. Part two considers James’s dissatisfaction with the “bad habits” of his privileged intellectual class, and how his own experience of “soul-sickness” and “stage fright” led him to contest both celebratory histories of Western progress and institutional arrangements which juxtaposed his “mystifying” intellectual performances to the lives of everyday people.Part three moves to how Du Bois, as a sociologist and former student of James, refocused James’s religious pragmatism within the context of his experience of anti-Black racism in the United States. This section traces how Du Bois saw his intellectual career as a work of art which could empower Black individuals to see themselves beyond what David Lloyd describes as “the racial regime of aesthetics” which imagines the progress of “lower humans” as dependent on higher civilizational and educational agents. This section also offers a tripartite interpretation of Du Bois’s experience of “double-consciousness” that considers its aesthetic, social, and political dimensions.2 While James expressed a desire to discard his own sense of double-consciousness, Du Bois’s experience of anti-Black racism made his two-ness more enforced and insidious. The fourth section looks at Du Bois’s disillusionment with white standards of beauty and intelligence as an experience akin to what James described as “soul-sickness.” It shows that whereas James believed that his negative emotional experiences could lead him to “new religious ideals” taking shape within the spiritual energy [End Page 72] and discomforts of his own individual body, Du Bois’s negative experience of racism led him to immerse himself in the religious and artistic vitality of Black social worlds which resisted the oppressive mechanisms and caricatures of... (shrink)

Si l'analyse augustinienne du temps, dans le livre 11 des Confessions, ne cesse d'être revisitée par nos contemporains, il devient légitime de s'in­terroger sur la pertinence de ces relectures, ne serait-ce qu'en raison de ce que le philosophe ou le théologien peut y déceler comme indice de la pertinence et de la fécondité de la réflexion d'Augustin sur le temps. Trois « relectures » philosophiques, de Paul Ricoeur, de Jean-Toussaint Desanti et de Claude Romano, et une « variation théologique (...) », de Hans Urs von Balthasar, servent de base de réflexion à l'auteur, au terme de laquelle se dessinent des variations assez difficilement conciliables dans la mesure d'abord où elles témoignent de différences de degrés dans la fidélité à l'inspiration d'Augustin. Du moins y a-t-il là témoignage de la force du propos augustinien, passage obligé quand on s'interroge sur le temps.If the Augustinian analysis of time, in the eleventh book of the Confessions, does not cease to be revisited by our contemporaries, it becomes legitimate to ask about the pertinence of these rereadings, if only for the reason that the philosopher or theologian could discern an indication of the importance and fecundity of Augus­tin's reflection on time. Three philosophical « rereadings », of Paul Ricoeur, Jean-Toussaint Desanti, and Claude Romano, and a « theological variation », of Hans Urs von Balthasar, serve the author as a basis for reflection. At the end there appear some variations somewhat difficult to reconcile, in so far as they point out the differences of degree in the fidelity to Augustin's inspiration. At the least, this is a testimony to the power of the Augustinian position, a necessary passage when one questions time. (shrink)

Georg Wilhelm Hegel’s dialectic plays a crucial role in some of the thought of the most prominent Black thinkers. The role it plays has received little attention. In this dissertation, I begin to fill this lacuna in Africana Philosophy by examining the arguments of William Edward Burghardt Du Bois in “The Conservation of Races,” Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth, and Cyril Lionel Robert James in The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the (...) San Domingo Revolution and Notes on Dialectics: Hegel, Marx, Lenin. I argue that forms of praxis are the result of their engagement with Hegel’s dialectic: reflexive practice, absolute praxis, and organic praxis respectively. I show that in each of these cases Hegel’s dialectical approach to history (dialectical thinking) was essential to their own attempts to understand the possibility of a positive transformation of the pervasively racist world they inhabited. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 177 Amsterdam, appears in the series of the International Archives of the History of Ideas, published under the direction of P. Dibon of Nijmegen and R. Popkin of the University of California at San Diego and a distinguished international editorial committee. Other volumes demonstrate the philosophical respectability of the collection: three on Descartes and Cartesianism, one on Berkeley's immaterialism, three on Pierre Bayle, the rest on philosophical (...) topics from the Renaissance to the 19th century. In this gallery, these letters by a not very good French poet---who was yet an acute and rather individualistic judge of men and books, already one of the arbiters of intellectual and artistic life in France--may seem a little out of place. Yet, to many historians of intellectual affairs, the firm establishment of dates and personal relationships is a matter of much importance, and documents such as these, largely devoted as they are to the communication of news about books and writers, the activities of rulers and ambassadors, printers and curious travelers, can be a substantial aid in determining the structure of an historical moment, the succession and interrelationship of events. One is willing to grant that much of what Chapelain wrote to Heinsius is trivial and concerns books and literary news of slight importance, that a delicate irony makes less of some of his comments than they were worth at the time. The triviality itself is a clue to the temper of Paris during the Fronde and in the late years of the regency of Mazarin. Great ideas were not being discussed in public when Pascal was writing his Pensdes; the irony is a mode of defense against involvement, and fashionable at the time. Bray's elaborate introduction is more concerned with the artistic and subjective aspect of the letters than with their contribution to intellectual history. In about a hundred pages, he discusses his author's method of writing, the genre which this kind of letter represents, the artistry it exhibits, from basic structure to stylistic ornamentation, and finally the human and even ethical implications of this collection. His notes are full and informative; identifications are well documented and cross-referencing in the notes and in the index of names make the volume a usable source of information, even though it cannot be recommended as stimulating debate or lively narrative. The topics discussed by Chapelain range over a considerable area, without becoming controversial. There is one exceptional letter in which he instructs Heinsius in adapting his integrity to the role of a diplomat; he must acquire "un peu de dissimulation" to oppose to "l'ing~nuit~ du Parnasse." There are references to civil strife, to foreign affairs, to the rivalry of Dutch and English navies, to the sympathy of the French for the Swedish Lutheran dynasty as opposed to the Catholic ttapsburgs and the ecclesiastical electors of Mainz, Cologne, and Trier. Queen Christina of Sweden plays a continually less attractive part as the letters proceed to their end; and Christiaan Huygens, the Duc de Montausier, Ismael Boulliau, Guez de Balzac, and Gilles M4nage figure more or less regularly in these pages. Of philosophers there is little mention, and of discussion of ideas for their own sake still less. The letters are, like many another collection deriving from the age before the learned and scientific journals, a source of valuable information about certain persons and certain books; they are hardly a serious contribution to the history of ideas. H~covaT BROWN Brown University Pascal. By J. H. Broome. (New York: Barnes & Noble, Inc., 1966. pp. x + 250. $6.00.) The most remarkable feature of this work is that it locates and forcefully interprets philosophical themes common to all of Pascal's widely=diversified writing. In his works on the vacuum, the computer, geometry, hydrostatics, Grace, freedom and the art of persuasion as well as the Pens~es, Broome locates five regular features of Pascal's thought: 1) the three orders (pp. 103-4, inter alia); 2) the deux infinis (p. 146); 3) a theory of knowl- 178 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY edge; 4) a dialecticalmethod; and 5) a theory of communication. The former two themes are commonly discussed by students of... (shrink)

Aucune discussion d'ensemble des ecrits de Lyotard sur l'art n'avait ete entreprise. Or sa reflexion sur les arts - musique, cinema, peinture surtout - est une part essentielle de son oeuvre, comme en temoignent les analyses proposees dans Discours, figure, Que peindre?, Moralites postmodernes, L'Inhumain et Les Ecrits sur l'art contemporain et les artistes. Moins remarque pourtant est le fait que Lyotard a collabore avec des peintres (Monory, Guiffrey, Adami, Sam Francis, Appel, Buren, etc). Il a ete commissaire d'une exposition (...) en 1985 qui a fait date, " Les Immateriaux ", au Centre Georges-Pompidou. Plusieurs textes du volume ainsi qu'un entretien inedit avec Bernard Blistene sont consacres a cette manifestation. Pour ce livre Francoise Coblence et Michel Enaudeau ont sollicite non seulement des lecteurs avertis de Lyotard (Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Elisabeth de Fontenay, Jean-Michel Rey, Jean-Loup Thebaud, Herman Parret, Anne Cauquelin, Gerald Sfez, Jean-Claude Rolland, Claudine Eizykman et Guy Fihman, Jean-Francois Nordmann, Jean-Patrice Courtois), mais aussi de plus jeunes chercheurs (Gaelle Bernard, Frederic Fruteau de Laclos, Claire Pages, Jerome Glicenstein, Maud Pouradier, Evelyne Toussaint) qui decouvrent pour leur propre compte le travail de Lyotard sur les arts. Les contributions rassemblees analysent les concepts forges par Lyotard, tels que " figural ", "libidinal ", " sublime ", " immateriau ", " matiere ", " impresentable " " affect ", " ecriture ". A travers eux, cette pensee de l'art veut rompre avec l'esthetique au sens academique du terme pour voir ou entendre dans les oeuvres l'evenement de la couleur ou du son. C'est donc bien d'un enjeu " ontologique " qu'il y va : l'art est seul a nous presenter la frappe sensible de l'etre. (shrink)

Marie-José Mondzain, philosophe, est directrice de recherche au CNRS. Elle a publié des livres sur l’image, entre autres, Image, icône, économie (Seuil, 1996), L’image peut-elle tuer? (Bayard, 2002), Le Commerce des regards (Seuil, 2003) ; des livres sur la peinture : Van Gogh ou la Peinture comme tauromachie (Éd. de l’Épure, 1996), Henri Cueco, vol. 2 (Cercle d’Art, 1997), L’Arche et l’Arc-en-ciel, Michel-Ange – la voûte de la chapelle Sixtine (Le Passage, 2006). Sa réflexion sur l’image l’a conduite à collaborer (...) avec des gens de théâtre et de cinéma, et à participer à des ouvrages collectifs : L’Assemblée théâtrale, 1 (Éd. de l’Amandier, 2002) et 2 ( La Représentation, Éd. de l’Amandier, 2004), Voir ensemble. Autour de Jean-Toussaint Desanti (Gallimard, 2003, coll. « Réfléchir le cinéma »), Le Cinéma et la Shoah. Un art à l’épreuve de la tragédie du xx e siècle (sous la dir. de J.-M. Frodon, Cahiers du Cinéma, 2007). Elle vient de publier Homo spectator (Bayard, 2007). (shrink)

This work contributes to recent transdisciplinary efforts to view the Haitian slave revolt (1791–1804) as the historical inspiration for Hegel’s master-slave dialectic. Reconstructions offered by contemporary postcolonial scholars argue that the Haitian revolt was chronicled in Minerva as Hegel raced to finish his Phenomenology. Benhabib recently recognized the Hegel-Haiti thesis as entailing the sort of inclusive dialogical learning process necessary to validate subaltern experiences. The thesis has also drawn its share of sceptical scrutiny as Badiou claims that it risks forcing (...) an unnecessary moral dissymmetry, neglects objectionable features of enslavement and imposes a mismatch between apolitical subject and revolutionary. In reply, we appeal to the pioneering work of Tavares to show that the asymmetrical construction of classification schemes for persons of mixed-racial statuses accords with decades of documented literary exchanges between Hegel and Gregoire. We then turn to the work of James on the role of mixed-race merchants in the testimonial accounts of late 18th century French historians to show that European literate publics were well aware of the extremely coercive forms of commodified labour found in Saint-Domingue. We then invoke the archival work of Du Bois on French, British and American parliamentary proceedings that show the provisional colonial identities ascribed to Caribbean subjects did not hinder their self-conscious exercise of political agency. Viewing Hegel in terms of the historiographic records of the racial ontologies of early modern transatlantic literary exchanges helps explain how he adapted these tropes concerning mixed-race subjects in a manner that better explains many of the anomalous features of the dialectic. However, conferring the Haitian revolution its proper world-historical warrant as inspiration for his infamous master-slave dialectic need not lead us to overlook Hegel’s complicity with many of the epistemic and ontological flaws of colonial tropes held in early modern transatlantic print. (shrink)

Although consumers are increasingly engaged with ethical factors when forming opinions about products and making purchase decisions, recent studies have highlighted significant differences between consumers' intentions to consume ethically, and their actual purchase behaviour. This article contributes to an understanding of this 'Ethical Purchasing Gap' through a review of existing literature, and the inductive analysis of focus group discussions. A model is suggested which includes exogenous variables such as moral maturity and age which have been well covered in the literature, (...) together with further impeding factors identified from the focus group discussions. For some consumers, inertia in purchasing behaviour was such that the decision-making process was devoid of ethical considerations. Several consumers manifested their ethical views through post-purchase dissonance and retrospective feelings of guilt. Others displayed a reluctance to consume ethically due to personal constraints, a perceived negative impact on image or quality, or an outright negation of responsibility. Those who expressed a desire to consume ethically often seemed deterred by cynicism, which caused them to question the impact they, as an individual, could achieve. These findings enhance the understanding of ethical consumption decisions and provide a platform for future research in this area. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Health practitioners run the risk of ethical board complaints or legal action against them in their professional careers. This experience can have a detrimental impact on personal wellness and professional practice. This study reports on the subjective experience of ten South African psychologists who received complaints. Semi structured interviews were conducted, and the transcripts analyzed using interpretative phenomenological analysis. The data indicates that the participants experienced the effects of a complaint on an intensely personal level and the experience of (...) a complaint highlighted the challenging nature of working in the modern health care arena. The researchers hope to inform the psychological community of the emotional challenges experienced during a complaint process, to encourage a transparent discourse about the subject and muster support for practitioners during an often-isolating professional incident. (shrink)

Background:When the contagious COVID-19 spread worldwide, the frontline staff faced unprecedented excessive work pressure and expectations of all of the society.Objective:The aim was to explore healthcare workers’ stress and influencing factors when caring for COVID-19 patients from an altruistic perspective.Methods:A cross-sectional, descriptive study was conducted in a tertiary hospital during the outbreak of COVID-19 between February and March 2020 in Wuhan, the capital city of Hubei province in China. Data were collected from 1208 healthcare workers. Descriptive statistics and multiple linear (...) regression were used to analyze the data.Ethical considerations:Research ethics approval (with the code of TJ-IRB20200379) was obtained from Tongji Hospital, Tongji Medical College of Huazhong University of Science and Technology. Written informed consent was also received from participants.Results:Less than 60% of participants chose moderate or severe stress on all stressors, indicating a low stress level among healthcare workers. The main source of stress among frontline healthcare workers caring for COVID-19 patients came from the fear of being infected, the fear of family members being infected, and the discomfort caused by protective equipment. Frontline staff who were nurses, were married, and had worked more than 20 days suffered higher stress, whereas rescue staff showed lower stress.Conclusion:The healthcare workers caring for patients with COVID-19 had low stress level, although they still had the fear of being infected or uncomfortable feeling caused by personal protective equipment. A low stress level among healthcare workers indicated their professional devotion and altruism during COVID-19 epidemic. Medical institutions and the government should continue to strengthen infection prevention measures and provide more comprehensive care involving families of frontline healthcare workers, especially nurses and married staff. It will be a lesson to other countries that awaking healthcare workers’ inside motivation and providing necessary support from government and society were significant. (shrink)

This article first analyzes the research background of the design elements of cognitive psychology and neural networks at home and abroad, roughly understands the research status and research background of these two courses at home and abroad, and discusses the application of cognitive psychology to neural networks. The design method has not yet formed a systematic theoretical system. Then, a systematic theoretical analysis of the research in this article is carried out to analyze the relationship between the various characteristics of (...) cognitive psychology and the design elements of the neural network, and it uses these relationships to guide the design practice. Second, it analyzes the relationship between the influence and interaction of cognitive psychology on neural network design and connects cognitive psychology with neural network design. Finally, according to the theoretical analysis and research of the system, the application of cognitive psychology in neural network design, design practice, and the relationship between the two are systematically reviewed. Through the exploratory research on cognitive psychology in neural network design, we can see that the combination of neural network design and psychology, art aesthetics, and other cross-disciplinary and multidisciplinary research is necessary, which can promote the scientific and technological progress of neural network design in the context of the information age and the improvement of public mental health. Under the background of the era in which the neural network design becomes the link between people's emotions and culture, we must fully understand the essential role of each element in neural network design and build a design concept based on cognitive psychology and emotional experience. It is hoped that the content of this topic can provide a certain reference value for the future development of neural network design and cognitive psychology and clarify the new development direction. (shrink)

Study on application of French sociologist, anthropologist and philosopher, Pierre Bourdieu's theories on the dynamics of power relations in Haitian social life.

In 1942 Robert K. Merton tried to demonstrate the structure of the normative system of science by specifying the norms that characterized it. The norms were assigned the abbreviation CUDOs: Communism, Universalism, Disinterestedness, and Organized skepticism. Using the results of an on-line survey of climate scientists concerning the norms of science, this paper explores the climate scientists’ subscription to these norms. The data suggests that while Merton’s CUDOs remain the overall guiding moral principles, they are not fully endorsed or present (...) in the conduct of climate scientists: there is a tendency to withhold results until publication, there is the intention of maintaining property rights, there is external influence defining research and the tendency to assign the significance of authored work according to the status of the author rather than content of the paper. These are contrary to the norms of science as proposed by Robert K. Merton. (shrink)

Naturalist philosopher Robert Corrington begins his chapter in Frontiers in American Philosophy, volume 1, by asserting that "the current obsession with language and with written texts has blunted the generic drive of hermeneutics and its more legitimate quest for a categorical structure that is truly responsive to the various dimensions of meaning manifest in the ongoing human process. . . . The deeper emancipatory forces of nature and history remain bereft of a proper location for their appearance in nondestructive social (...) orders."1 This critique is presumably directed at poststructuralist theories in which language and text are all there is, the world is made up of a play of signs, and reliance on ontology or .. (shrink)

This article explores the propensity of Iliadic landscape similes to encourage reflections on human fragility. Landscape in the similes is usually interpreted as a medium which conveys a consistent symbolic value (for example storms as the hostility of nature); however, landscape is often a more flexible medium. By offering close readings of three Iliadic similes (winter torrents at 4.452–6, snowfall at 12.279–89 and clear night at 8.555–9), this article argues that landscape allowed the poet to frame the main narrative in (...) various ways, both helping the listener to imagine described events and interrupting the listener's immersion in the main narrative. While many have analysed how similes offer analogies to the main narrative, the ways in which the same simile can also disrupt and reframe the narrative are less understood. This article observes that shifts in narrative space and time played a key role in changing the perspective of the listener. Taking a broadly phenomenological approach, it proposes that embodied descriptions of space, which recreate the experience of the moving body in landscape, invite the listener to consider the temporal scale of the natural world. By looking at how landscape in select similes shifts the listener's spatial and temporal experience, this article argues that landscape contributes to the wider Iliadic theme of human fragility. In particular, it identifies the potential for landscape similes to minimize the scale of human experience, question the possibility of human agency, and reveal the limitations of human perspectives and knowledge. (shrink)

Entre les abstractions de l'anthropologie et les approximations de l'humanitarisme, il n'est qu'un seul chemin pour retrouver l'humanité qui s'éloigne: l'exactitude philosophique. La Renaissance italienne guide ces recherches, qui tentent d'imposer une clarté historique à des principes vagues et d'opposer des principes clairs à la fuite des idées.

Building on the work of philosopher John Dewey, Bray develops an approach to transnational democracy called "pragmatic cosmopolitanism." He argues for an ideal of representative democracy that emphasizes the role of democratic leadership and the development of critical intelligence.

Based on the existing financial system risk models, a set of time-lag financial system risk models is established considering the influence brought by time-lag factors on the financial risk system, and the dynamical behavior of this system is analyzed by using chaos theory. Through Matlab simulation, the bifurcation diagram and phase diagram of time-lag risk intensity and control intensity are plotted. The analysis shows that this kind of time-lag financial system risk model has complex dynamic behavior, different motion states will (...) appear when different parameter values are selected, and the time-lag risk intensity parameter also has a very strong influence on the system motion. To ensure the operation of the financial system in a stable state, measures with certain delay effects must be taken to control the risk and to choose the appropriate time-lag control intensity, and too much or too little time-lag control intensity is not conducive to the benign operation of the system. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: References and Further Reading.

This article analyzes the complex and controversial role of material culture in the missionary endeavour of the South Pacific, using as a case study George Brown. Brown’s contributions to the European academic community as well as to his Methodist mission offer scholars an exceptional example of how extensive object collection blurs the line between missionary and ethnographer. With reference to detailed sources written by Brown himself, it is argued that his role as a missionary did not limit Brown’s credibility in (...) an academic environment hungry for first-hand accounts of indigenous culture. Furthermore, this role should enhance studies of Brown’s legacy; a collection of objects and texts such as his denies a clear categorization as a missionary or as an ethnographer. The context of George Brown’s collecting therefore merits a “recontextualization” of sorts, as the stigma surrounding the missionary enterprise often obscures the historical value of such prized research. (shrink)

La lutte pour la liberté spirituelle donne sa signification à l'humanité, affirmait en 1944 le grand sociologue de la culture Alfred Weber. Approfondissant un tel postulat, cette recherche consacrée à la liberté d'esprit emprunte ses exemples à certains intellectuels humanistes anciens et modernes, de Marsile Ficin à Erwin Panofsky et au-delà, tout en s'interrogeant sur les conditions d'une pensée libre aujourd'hui.