SUMMARYHistorians of historiography have recently adopted the language of ‘epistemic virtues’ to refer to character traits believed to be conducive to good historical scholarship. While ‘epistemic virtues’ is a modern philosophical concept, virtues such as ‘objectivity’, ‘meticulousness’ and ‘carefulness’ historically also served as actors' categories. Especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, historians frequently used virtue language to describe what it took to be a ‘good’, ‘reliable’ or ‘professional’ scholar. Based on three European case studies—the German historian Georg (...) Waitz, his French pupil Gabriel Monod and the Belgian historian Henri Pirenne —this article argues that such virtues cannot neatly be classified as ‘epistemic’ ones. For what is characteristic about virtue language in historical scholarship around 1900 is an overlap or entanglement of epistemic, moral and political connotations. The virtues embodied by, or attributed to, Waitz, Monod and Pirenne were almost invariably aimed at epistemic, moral and political goods at once, though not always to the same degrees. Consequently, if ‘epistemic virtues’ is going to be a helpful category, it must not be interpreted in a strong sense, but in a weak one. (shrink)

We suggest that performing arts help us to understand how to use embodied experience and agency to resist and transform oppressive social practices and environments. We draw from dance studies, 4E (embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive) cognition, and feminist epistemology to reveal connections between performing arts, embodied knowing, and epistemic and social justice. Epistemic injustice consists in being unduly undermined in one’s capacity as an epistemic agent, including because of inadequate understandings of the social experiences and capacities of marginalized groups. (...) Following a pluralist account of epistemic agency, we argue that oppressive social environments yield differential distributions of affordances to members of oppressed groups, resulting in a differential understanding of what they can do (permission and capacity). Performing arts provide an opportunity to produce new understandings of one’s capacity which empower epistemic agents not to conform to oppressive social norms, thereby producing new understandings of what is allowed and fostering greater epistemic and social justice. (shrink)

Dancers and dance philosophers report on experiences of a certain form of sense making and bodily thinking through the dancing body. Yet, discussions on expertise and consciousness are often framed within canonical philosophical world-views that make it difficult to fully recognize, verbalize, and value the full variety of embodied and affective facets of subjectivity. Using qualitative interviews with five professional dancers and choreographers, I make an attempt to disclose the characteristics of what I consider to be a largely overseen state (...) of consciousness: embodied reflection. Dancers are familiar with this attentive bodily presence, which constitutes their work mode and heightens their abilities as experts. Detailed descriptions of their daily work at the theatre help us grasp the qualities and understand the enigmas of the absorbed state of bodily thinking. Husserl’s theories on reflection and Merleau-Ponty’s work on motoricity support our understanding of the structures behind embodied reflection. I believe it is a common human resource, and that whether we are experts or not, we all have the ability to reflect non-conceptually through bodily and/or affective activity. (shrink)

Cet article analyse la manière dont les discours institutionnels et juridictionnels français sur la prostitution reflètent, reproduisent ou contestent la politique néo‑abolitionniste de la France. À partir d’un corpus de 84 documents produits entre 2016 et 2024 – comprenant des rapports institutionnels, des évaluations législatives et des décisions du Conseil constitutionnel, du Conseil d’Etat et de la Cour de cassation – l’étude mobilise l’analyse critique des discours dans une perspective féministe intersectionnelle, complétée par des entretiens avec des praticien·nes et de (...) représentant·es institutionnel·les. Les résultats mettent en évidence un narratif dominant qui confond prostitution et infractions pénales (proxénétisme et traite des êtres humains), qualifiant toute prostitution de violence et toute personne prostituée de victime. Cette essentialisation repose sur des stéréotypes liés au genre, à l’âge, au statut migratoire et à la précarité, tout en marginalisant la parole et l’agentivité des personnes concernées. Toutefois, des tensions apparaissent : certaines décisions, notamment de la Cour de cassation, adoptent un vocabulaire neutre et maintiennent une définition restrictive de la prostitution et du proxénétisme, limitant l’expansion idéologique néo‑abolitionniste. Ces nuances révèlent des contradictions entre rhétorique politique et pratiques juridiques, notamment en matière d’accès aux droits, de reconnaissance du statut de victime et de criminalisation indirecte. En situant ces discours dans leur contexte socio‑politique, l’article montre comment le langage agit comme un instrument de gouvernance, façonnant normes morales et frontières juridiques, et souligne la nécessité d’approches plus inclusives et empiriques des politiques relatives à la prostitution. (shrink)

In this paper, I support a hybrid view regarding the metaphysics of worlds. I endorse Lewisian Modal Realism for possible worlds (LMR). My aim is to come up with a hybrid account of impossible worlds that provides all the plenitude of impossibilities for all fine-grained intentional contents. I raise several challenges for such a plenitudinous hybrid theory. My version of hybrid modal realism builds impossible worlds as set-theoretic constructions out of genuine individuals and sets of them, that is, as set-theoretic (...) constructions from parts and sets of parts of genuine Lewisian worlds. _Structured worlds_ are defined as sets of tuples: structured entities built out of Lewisian ‘raw material’. These structured worlds are ersatz worlds, some of which are impossible. I claim that propositions must be sets of worlds rather than members of sets. Once the construction is in place, I evaluate the proposal and show that my hybrid account is able to supply a plenitude of impossibilities and thus giving the resources to make all the hyperintensional distinctions we are looking for, whilst remaining Lewisian-conservative. (shrink)

Conversational alignment, also known as accommodation, entrainment, interpersonal synchrony, and convergence, is defined as the tendency for interlocutors to exhibit similarity in their communicative behaviors. There have been many theories and explanations set forth as to why alignment occurs and, accordingly, the mechanisms that underlie it. To date, however, alignment research has been largely siloed, with different research teams often examining alignment through the lens of a single theoretical account. Considering causal mechanisms in tandem offers a more holistic and nuanced (...) understanding of the dynamic nature of alignment, its purposes, and its consequences. Accordingly, we propose the Mechanistic Framework of Alignment (MFA), a qualitative conceptual model that integrates existing theories of conversational alignment into one unified framework. To explain this framework, we first review five alignment mechanisms, discussing the underlying assumptions, contributions, and supporting evidence for each. We then introduce two overarching factors—conversational goal and alignment type—that are critical for understanding when and how these mechanisms give rise to aligned behavior. Illustrative examples demonstrate how the relative weightings of each mechanism interact with these contextual variables. Finally, we conclude with directions for how future research can extend and refine this framework and how the MFA can support future work in this area. (shrink)

Traditional versions of workplace democracy imply that the decisions in which workers should have a say primarily concern governance issues. Worker cooperatives are, therefore, often cited as some of the most promising examples of workplace democracy. In this paper, I argue that a comprehensive and fully developed theory of workplace democracy should aim to democratize both spheres of power: governance and management. Indeed, there exists a broad spectrum of intermediate decision-making – carried out by middle and line management, such as (...) team leaders, supervisors, superintendents, and foremen – that constitutes an often-overlooked site of power in worker cooperatives. The primary responsibilities of managers – which should remain subject to oversight by the workers – should therefore include facilitating and fostering democratic deliberation on work-related issues, supporting coordination efforts, and providing assistance to workers. This perspective also supports the view that managers themselves should be elected rather than appointed by the cooperative’s general manager or board of directors, as is usually the case. (shrink)

As part of their professional practice, dancers allow their affectivity to enhance their kinesthetic work. Their intentional and disciplined use of personal, emotional resources ensures both creativity, interpretation, absorption, and connections in ways that extend beyond the traditional phenomenological understanding of affectivity as pre-reflectively based. The affective regulations dancers employ can be seen as an “artistic epoché,” and their layered performance awareness corresponds with Edmund Husserl’s descriptions of “image-consciousness.” Through qualitative interviews with three professional dancers, phenomenological theory, and additional supportive (...) literature, this article shows how affectivity can be experienced through high-order levels of Leib, constituting states of “bodily reflective” consciousness. The dancers’ primary goal in these efforts is to foster meaningful and artistic communication with their audience. (shrink)

Gothic literature—a genre brimming with madness, supernaturalism, and psychological terror—offers innumerable case studies potentially representing how psychiatric patients perceive their treatment from healthcare professionals. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s famous 1892 short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” offers a poignant example of this through its fictional narrator, a diarist many interpret to be suffering from postpartum depression. The fiction here does not stray far from reality: Gilman orchestrated her diarist’s experience to mirror her own, as both real author and fictional character suffocated from (...) a melancholy only made worse by their physicians’ insistence on following the “Rest Cure.” While this instruction to cease all work and activity was a prevalent depression treatment at the time, Gilman, through “The Yellow Wallpaper,” reveals how the intervention ultimately harmed more than helped because it overlooked her—and, by extension, her fictional diarist’s— unique needs and identities. Today, while the ineffective Rest Cure no longer exists, applying observations from “The Yellow Wallpaper” to clinical research calls attention to underrepresentation in treatment development, a costly problem that could be mitigated by mindful incorporation of intersectionality theory into study designs. (shrink)

This paper explores the opportunities, challenges, and ethics of engaging artificially intelligent models in collaborative creations of knowledge through the creation of the “Trans-Feminist-Queer Transformer” (T.F.Q.T.), a Generative Pre-Trained Transformer 2 (GPT-2) model fine-tuned with databases of love songs from trans-feminist-queer artists, programmed to generate output for live musical performance. Guided by trans-feminist-queer phenomenologies, this paper retroactively analyzes the creation of the T.F.Q.T. from creating a dataset for fine-tuning and experimenting with intervals of training to exploring methods of remixing, adapting, (...) and performing the generated output live. Through a critical analysis of my own practice as informed by sensory analyses of other contemporary AI works—including Annie Dorsen’s algorithmic theatre, J.R. Carpenter’s electronic literature projects, and Allison Parrish’s algorithmic poetry projects—this article posits research creation as an ideal methodology for working through philosophical crises of AI and creative labour, which often understate or neglect sensory analyses of the body. This article uses the T.F.Q.T. to navigate the debate between embracing AI as “literary communism,” or “the freeing of language from the constraints of property” (Wark M. “From Automatic Writing to Automated Writing.” 2024 Ursula Franklin Lecture (keynote presentation, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, 25 March 2024).), and shifts in public policy and discourse around the fears of generative AI and plagiarism, data theft, surveillance, and the augmentation or replacement of creative workers. Its findings reflect on the project’s technical successes and conceptual failures, concluding that while emotional resonance with the T.F.Q.T.’s output was to some degree inevitable, the generated material ultimately produced limited and stereotypical conceptions of queer identities, which are inherently fluid and resistant to normalization. (shrink)

This paper by Camille Chamois examines the role played by the notion of “impersonal” in Michel Tournier’s work. The notion is present in the title of the article “L’Impersonnalisme”; however, it is absent from the text itself. We show that Tournier’s article can be compared with three corpuses: the analysis of the “impersonal consciousness” in psychology at the beginning of the 20th century; the Sartrean theory of an “impersonal field of consciousness”; and the Deleuzian theory of a “field of (...) experience”. (shrink)

John Rawls is frequently perceived as being an advocate for purely redistributive policies designed to mitigate the consequences of a capitalist economy — an assumption I challenge in this article. My objective is to elucidate the biased nature of this view and provide a comprehensive analysis of the transformation of the corporate landscape that a just society would entail within Rawls's framework. Through a meticulous examination of Rawls's delineation of economic regimes, I underscore the profound — and often unsuspected — (...) implications of liberal egalitarianism on corporate ownership and management. Rawls's proposition of a “property-owning democracy” posits that citizens should retain ownership of shares in companies throughout their lifetimes. Liberal socialism implies the nationalization of the means of production and the socialization of their management. (shrink)

What does it mean to care for the dead? This article argues that the handling of dead bodies – washing, dressing, transporting, burying – is a form of reproductive labor that deserves recognition within both care ethics and social reproduction theory. Despite its social necessity, death care remains largely invisible in frameworks that link care to life, productivity, and reciprocity. Yet, like other forms of care work, death care is unequally distributed. This article identifies a ‘biocentric’ bias that renders posthumous (...) care morally suspect and politically illegitimate. Exploring how death labor is caught between commodification and moralization, it argues that recognizing this labor as care challenges existing boundaries around who counts as a care providers, and whose needs are worth organizing around. Such recognition is necessary to question how death care is currently being distributed and organized. (shrink)

While often presented as promising assistive technologies for motor-impaired users, electroencephalography (EEG)-based Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) remain barely used outside laboratories due to low reliability in real-life conditions. There is thus a need to design long-term reliable BCIs that can be used outside-of-the-lab by end-users, e.g., severely motor-impaired ones. Therefore, we propose and evaluate the design of a multi-class Mental Task (MT)-based BCI for longitudinal training (20 sessions over 3 months) of a tetraplegic user for the CYBATHLON BCI series 2019. In (...) this BCI championship, tetraplegic pilots are mentally driving a virtual car in a racing video game. We aimed at combining a progressive user MT-BCI training with a newly designed machine learning pipeline based on adaptive Riemannian classifiers shown to be promising for real-life applications. We followed a two step training process: the first 11 sessions served to train the user to control a 2-class MT-BCI by performing either two cognitive tasks (REST and MENTAL SUBTRACTION) or two motor-imagery tasks (LEFT-HAND and RIGHT-HAND). The second training step (9 remaining sessions) applied an adaptive, session-independent Riemannian classifier that combined all 4 MT classes used before. Moreover, as our Riemannian classifier was incrementally updated in an unsupervised way it would capture both within and between-session non-stationarity. Experimental evidences confirm the effectiveness of this approach. Namely, the classification accuracy improved by about 30% at the end of the training compared to initial sessions. We also studied the neural correlates of this performance improvement. Using a newly proposed BCI user learning metric, we could show our user learned to improve his BCI control by producing EEG signals matching increasingly more the BCI classifier training data distribution, rather than by improving his EEG class discrimination. However, the resulting improvement was effective only on synchronous (cue-based) BCI and it did not translate into improved CYBATHLON BCI game performances. For the sake of overcoming this in the future, we unveil possible reasons for these limited gaming performances and identify a number of promising future research directions. Importantly, we also report on the evolution of the user's neurophysiological patterns and user experience throughout the BCI training and competition. (shrink)

BackgroundOver the past decade, the exponential growth of the literature devoted to personalized medicine has been paralleled by an ever louder chorus of epistemic and ethical criticisms. Their differences notwithstanding, both advocates and critics share an outdated philosophical understanding of the concept of personhood and hence tend to assume too simplistic an understanding of personalization in health care.MethodsIn this article, we question this philosophical understanding of personhood and personalization, as these concepts shape the field of personalized medicine. We establish a (...) dialogue with phenomenology and hermeneutics (especially with E. Husserl, M. Merleau-Ponty and P. Ricoeur) in order to achieve a more sophisticated understanding of the meaning of these concepts We particularly focus on the relationship between personal subjectivity and objective data.ResultsWe first explore the gap between the ideal of personalized healthcare and the reality of today’s personalized medicine. We show that the nearly exclusive focus of personalized medicine on the objective part of personhood leads to a flawed ethical debate that needs to be reframed. Second, we seek to contribute to this reframing by drawing on the phenomenological-hermeneutical movement in philosophy. Third, we show that these admittedly theoretical analyses open up new conceptual possibilities to tackle the very practical ethical challenges that personalized medicine faces.ConclusionFinally, we propose a reversal: if personalization is a continuous process by which the person reappropriates all manner of objective data, giving them meaning and thereby shaping his or her own way of being human, then personalized medicine, rather than being personalized itself, can facilitate personalization of those it serves through the data it provides. (shrink)

Female crested gibbons (genus Nomascus) perform conspicuous sequences of twitching movements involving the rump and extremities. However, these dances have attracted little scientific attention and their structure and meaning remain largely obscure. Here we analyse close-range video recordings of captive crested gibbons, extracting descriptions of dance in four species (N. annamensis, N. gabriellae, N. leucogenys and N. siki). In addition, we report results from a survey amongst relevant professionals clarifying behavioural contexts of dance in captive and wild crested gibbons. Our (...) results demonstrate that dances in Nomascus represent a common and intentional form of visual communication restricted to sexually mature females. Whilst primarily used as a proceptive signal to solicit copulation, dances occur in a wide range of contexts related to arousal and/or frustration in captivity. A linguistically informed view of this sequential behaviour demonstrates that movement within dances is organized in groups and follows an isochronous rhythm — patterns not described for visual displays in other non-human primates. We argue that applying the concept of dance to gibbons allows us to expand our understanding of communication in non-human primates and to develop hypotheses on the rules and regularities characterising it. We propose that crested gibbon dances likely evolved from less elaborate rhythmic proceptive signals, similar to those found in siamangs. Although dance displays in humans and crested gibbons share a number of key characteristics, they cannot be assumed to be homologous. Nevertheless, gibbon dances represent a striking model behaviour to investigate the use of complex gestural signals in hominoid primates. (shrink)

Against a backdrop of declining Catholicism, a French ecumenical community continues to attract thousands of young, mostly liberal, Christians. These young adults live in the monastery for varying lengths of time, and work there as volunteers. Many of them are openly queer, which does not lead to any particular stigmatization: the community is thus labeled "queerfriendly" by a fraction of its public. A month-and-a-half-long ethnography, based on participant observation, provides an insight into the negotiated place of young queer and feminist (...) Christians in the church. (shrink)

In the 2023 intergenerational dance project Superpower Ensemble, the participants were chosen for their individual qualities to form a greater ‘we’ as a group. The children added spontaneity and playfulness, whereas the adult artists inspired the children with their artistic practice, professionalism, and direction. In this article, we aim to describe the subtle processes a choreographer initiates to achieve the intended aesthetic and ethical results. Our case story is Superpower Ensemble, and the theme investigated through the case story is ‘we-ness’. (...) By describing these processes and this theme, we seek to demonstrate some of the manifold forms of knowledge possessed by dancers, choreographers, and artists. Their practically gained expertise in being, being together, and being in the world has the potential to reach far beyond the artistic realm. Their findings align with academic insights into metaphysical, philosophical realms. To show the latter, we outline certain theoretical and philosophical discoveries that reinforce the findings unearthed and explored through the bodily–affective dance work in Superpower Ensemble. (shrink)

"Descartes ou la philosophie française : le caractère fondateur qui a été reconnu de droit à Descartes au regard de toute la philosophie moderne a masqué l'importance toute particulière que les penseurs français lui ont toujours accordée, de fait, dans leur propre édification intellectuelle. Descartes fournit en France moins les idées que la trame qui a servi à les ordonner -- ce qui n'est le cas d'aucun philosophe ailleurs. Sartre, toute sa vie durant, fut tenu par le projet de construire (...) une morale. Par la suite, il ne s'est jamais lassé de conclure : « Et j'ai toujours échoué. » Conscient de cet échec où son projet de métaphysique l'a mené, il reconduit les motifs qu'il avait de l'écrire à son enfance : « Ma seule affaire était de me sauver. » Il avait cru être au monde ; il a vécu dans l'imaginaire. Il avait bâti tout une œuvre afin de s'y mettre tout entier. Or ce Moi immortalisé, celui auquel il aspirait, c'était secrètement Descartes, médiateur caché dans la pénombre mais qui lui avait tracé un chemin pour le rejoindre. Sartre ne l'a pas dit. Néanmoins il savait qu'il était en train de récrire les Méditations métaphysiques de Descartes. C'était son secret et le propre du secret est d'appartenir à ce qui relève en chacun non pas de l'inconscient mais de ce « fonds sombre qui refuse d'être dit » -- le vécu. Un tel secret, encore enveloppé et obscur à lui-même, explique également que Sartre ait pu se dire à la fois existentialiste et cartésien. D'un côté, l'existentialisme est le nom que l'adversaire avait donné à la doctrine. Il est la manière objective dont sa pensée s'est extériorisée dans l'histoire, il est la doctrine vue du dehors. De l'autre côté, le cartésianisme est la même doctrine mais telle qu'elle est comprise du dedans par Sartre. Il est la manière subjective dont Sartre a intériorisé sa doctrine dans l'histoire de la philosophie. Deux courants de pensée dont l'un, tout en surface, a recouvert malencontreusement l'autre qui était pourtant le seul qui fût profond."--Page 4 de la couverture. (shrink)

La sensibilité cinétique est un concept issu de la phénoménologie qui comprend les sensations des mouvements à l’intérieur et autour du corps. Nous souhaitons réhabiliter ce concept en tant que connaissance, afin de défendre le rôle du corps dans le savoir et de dénoncer certaines injustices épistémiques. Pour appuyer cela, les éthiques du care nous aideront à reconnaître une légitimité politique envers la vulnérabilité de nos mobilités corporelles. L’intérêt pour la sensibilité cinétique est de permettre à l’agent.e de se soucier (...) de sa relation à l’environnement, en développant un accès pédagogique envers son corps et par l’attention portée envers ses possibilités de mouvement. L’agent.e apprend alors à choisir une manière de s’orienter au sein de l’organisation socio-politique présente. Ainsi, nous travaillerons les liens entre la phénoménologie, les éthiques du care2 et l’injustice épistémique dans le but de comprendre l’agentivité de manière incarnée, sensible et vulnérable. (shrink)

Polymathe et polygraphe, John Stuart Mill entra en relation avec les plus éminents esprits de son temps. Mais cette ouverture d’esprit et ce souci dialogique plongent leurs racines dans la fréquentation d’auteurs plus anciens, à commencer par Platon, dont Mill lut et traduisit plusieurs dialogues socratiques dès son adolescence. L’un d’eux semble avoir durablement influencé sa vision du bonheur : le _Gorgias_. Cet article se propose de reconstituer le dialogue que le penseur britannique entretint, à travers sa lecture de cette (...) œuvre elle-même dialoguée et les différentes reprises qu’il en fit, avec la vision socratique du bonheur et de la vertu, ainsi que celui auquel il nous engage de manière posthume à travers une philosophie de l’exemplarité où l’individualité est toujours tissée de pluralité, et enchâssée dans une pluralité, dans laquelle elle peut devenir actrice du bien commun. Mill apparaît en ce sens comme le médiateur, dans un siècle individualiste, démocratisé et sécularisé,... (shrink)

In Naissance de la clinique, Michel Foucault develops a theory of the socialization of perception called “archaeology of the medical gaze.” According to this model, the everyday gaze is conditioned by a perceptual code that determines both the features worthy of attention and the meaning to be attributed to them, called “regimes of visibility.” The aim of this article is to describe the interests and difficulties of such a project. I will show that Foucault does not develop any real theory (...) of perception, which weakens his model in two ways: first, at the theoretical level, it leaves aside the question of the transformation of the perceptual code that has been brought to light; second, at the empirical level, it is unable to account for contemporary ethnographies of medical practice. (shrink)

How does one talk about painting? This article analyzes how Francis Bacon’s painting announces the overcoming of the oppositions it contains, between painting and literature, abstract and figurative, sensation and language. By comparing this work with Gilles Deleuze’s analysis of it and Bacon’s own words, the aim is to show how this artistic practice has gone beyond the vocabulary available at the time to talk about it, which continues to play sensation off against language, the nervous system against the brain. (...) It’s not a question of an essential divorce between theory and practice, but rather of a historically situated gap between an artistic practice and its contemporary discourses. (shrink)

This article introduces the notion of the “image of thought” that gives its title to the third chapter of Difference and Repetition. The discussion is divided into four parts. In the first part, we present the motif of the “image of thought” as developed in Nietzsche and Philosophy and Proust and Signs. In the second part, we summarize the eight postulates of the “dogmatic image of thought” presented in Difference and Repetition. In the third part, we recall that the motif (...) of a “thought without image” is in fact part of the contemporary history of psychology, from the Würzburg school to Alfred Binet, to which Deleuze certainly has access via Sartre, Bréhier and Burloud. Finally, in the fourth part, we show how, from the 1970s and with Félix Guattari, the motif of the image of thought is transferred into a framework that is both socio-historical and critical, where it describes on the one hand the influence of the state on the thinking of professional philosophers, and on the other hand the alternative represented by non-philosophical discursive traditions. (shrink)

Simone Weil's ideas proved fundamental for Iris Murdoch, opening up a difficult path of thought for one rooted in the British philosophical tradition in the 1950s (Sim 1985, Bok 2005, Lovibond 2011a, Panizza 2022a, Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman 2022). Grasping the Weilian-inspired moral theory of attention sketched by Iris Murdoch is a prerequisite for comprehending the development of her moral ideas (Panizza 2015, Broackes 2012) and the form they may take in her literary writings (Griffin 1993, Morgan 2006). This paper (...) argues that we can read an expression of Simone Weil in Iris Murdoch's novels which articulate her notions of grace and gravity, but also convey the Weilian insights that shape Murdoch's moral perfectionism. It investigates three of Murdoch's well-known male protagonists, i.e., Bradley Pearson, Charles Arrowby and Hilary Burde, so as to comprehend how their moral failures relate to a defective implementation of the concepts of love and attention as theorised by Simone Weil as leading to goodness. Hence, it offers a new examination of the way in which the Murdochian literary staging of inattention as a cause of moral deficiency reveals its Weilian-based ethics of attention. (shrink)

Selon Félix Guattari les systèmes de coercition matériels sont progressivement remplacés au XX e siècle par des techniques de « modelage des systèmes perceptifs », à la fois plus douces et plus prenantes. Pour rendre compte de cette théorie de la socialisation de la perception et des ses enjeux socio-politiques nous nous focalisons sur la perception du visage d’autrui en soulignant l’ensemble des biais perceptifs (notamment racistes) identifiés par Guattari. Une étude approfondie des modalités d’apprentissage perceptif permet d’actualiser une dimension (...) souvent inaperçue de la pensée de Guattari. (shrink)

The agroecological transition of agriculture not only requires changes in practices but also in ways of thinking and in their underlying values. Agroecology proposes broad scientific principles that need to be adapted to the singularities of each farm. This contextualization leads to the identification of agroecological practices that work locally and could serve as evidence-based practices to be transferred to local practitioners. This strategy was tested in a 4-year experiment conducted with dairy-sheep farmers in the South of France. The aim (...) was to collectively engage in the agroecological transition. Our work focused on the creation of a diagnostic tool that was used to analyze local farms and identify virtuous practices to be promoted locally as evidence-based practices. But this strategy came up against the complexity and singularity of the situations to be transformed: not only was no evidence found but the construction of the diagnostic tool itself led to controversy concerning the models of agriculture to be promoted. The experiment then took a pragmatic turn: on-farm workshops were organized to enable farmers to benefit from the professional judgment of peer farmers who were willing to help their colleagues accomplish their agroecological transition. The diagnostic tool, which was designed to be prescriptive, was then used to judge the social acceptability of solutions that made sense in each farmer’s own situation. Our experiment led us to conclude that managing the agro-ecological transition of farmers and their farming system is better conceived as a value-based process than as an evidence-based one. (shrink)

The autobiography of the West African slave Omar ibn Said is the earliest piece of extant Arabic writing on American soil. Omar Ibn Said was captured as a slave and arrived in the USA in 1807. About twenty-five years after his arrival, he was commissioned to write an autobiography in the Arabic language, which he had studied for religious purposes in his native land. Unlike most slave narratives that have come to light, Ibn Said's is remarkable in that it was (...) written in Arabic, by a Muslim slave who was already literate before his arrival in America. The narrative maintains certain conventions found in the slave narrative genre, such as the humility of the slave author and the practice of extolling the master. Yet the text also evidences Said's manipulation of the language, rendering various readings possible. This is particularly remarkable in a slave narrative, a genre often acknowledged more as propagandistic than as revealing slave identity. Rather than being on the ‘double quest for literacy and freedom’ typical of American slavery, Said is a new representation as the already literate learned slave. This article is an investigation of the form and content of his narrative, and an analysis of some of the key ways in which Said uses form to elucidate or obscure content. (shrink)

What is conceptual injustice, and how can it supplement hermeneutical injustice? By bringing feminist epistemology, in particular Miranda Fricker’s notion of hermeneutical injustice, into dialogue with conceptual ethics and conceptual engineering, this article sheds light on what conceptual injustice is and how it can supplement hermeneutical injustice. What needs to be understood is how concepts can be advantageous to some and disadvantageous to others. For this, I propose approaching language in its relationship with ethics: something I call the ethics of (...) attention to language. By combining a Wittgenstein-Murdochian approach to concepts with the ethics of attention, I try to demonstrate how an ethics of attention to language can counter cognitive disabilities or forms of cognitive blockages constituting experiences of oppression and how it can be an antidote to conceptual injustice. I argue that this ethics of attention to language can be especially beneficial to feminism. (shrink)

This mixed-methods study explored how participation in an intensive course on human-animal relationships impacted preservice teachers’ views about human-animal welfare and advocacy and animal-focused curriculum. Participants were 25 undergraduate students (24 female; 1 male) following a teacher education pathway. Participants completed the Animal Rights Scale, and their insights on assigned readings were captured through weekly journal entries and responses to summative prompts. Participants reported feeling increased responsibility to advocate on behalf of nonhuman animals and greater support of animal welfare during (...) the post-course (versus pre-course) assessment, and participants’ weekly and summative responses revealed some of the nuances and internal tensions in their thinking about integrating animal-focused curriculum as part of their future professional practice. As teachers play key roles fostering humane literacy and engaging young people with actual nature and animals, these findings have implications for both education and higher education curriculum and initiatives. (shrink)

This article explores the décloisonnement of philosophy by questioning the contributions of a pedagogy based on the expression of the body, as developed by the performing arts. While the body is a pedagogical resource (Duval et al. 2022, p. 3-4-5), and has been recognized since Antiquity with the teaching of choral art (Plato, Laws, II 673d ; VII 795e), its use remains generally limited in university teaching. We believe that this restriction feeds relationships of domination through the negation of bodily (...) experiences. As bell hooks explains, denying the body feeds the myth of a neutral class, allowing behaviors associated with dominant social classes to be normalized (hooks, 1994). Such normalization restricts the learning of students from non-dominant social groups. We will therefore attempt to answer the question of how to place corporeality at the heart of learning, as a pedagogical resource and a place of knowledge. In particular, we believe that an embodied pedagogy, inspired not only by feminist pedagogies but also by somatic education and dance studies, would offer a philosophical practice highly beneficial to the development of learners’ epistemic agentivity and autonomy. Questioning the learning’s place of the body thus involves several issues, which will guide our discussion : a pedagogical issue, an epistemic issue and a political issue. It is crucial to clarify each of these issues, in order to better understand the potential benefits and risks of the specific engagement of corporeality in learning. We argue for the importance of interdisciplinary research to grasp these three issues, especially as research in dance and somatic education has developed a rich understanding of what learning based on the multisensoriality of our corporeity entails. This multisensoriality is highlighted by phenomenological and enactive approaches to knowledge. These philosophical approaches, in which the place of the body is central, highlight postures, learning dispositions and attitudes that are still often absent from education and society in general. We’ll pay particular attention to the relational dimension of physicality, and look at the pedagogical tools to turn it into a pedagogical and epistemic resource. (shrink)

Cette contribution propose l’analyse des temporalités de la patrimonialisation de l’héritage minier dans le bassin minier du Nord et du Pas-de-Calais à partir d’un travail de thèse réalisé entre 2013 et 2019, de retours réguliers sur le terrain depuis associés au maintien d’une veille sur les politiques patrimoniales menées. Je tenterai dans un premier temps d’identifier comment la mise en patrimoine de l’héritage minier, observée sur un temps long, permet de faire émerger différentes logiques et moteurs de mise en patrimoine (...) en fonction des jeux d’acteurs et des enjeux d’échelles tout en gardant une fonction stabilisatrice. La deuxième partie consiste plutôt à réfléchir sur la catégorie d’inscription Unesco « paysage culturel évolutif vivant », qui comporte un paradoxe temporel, et de la faire dialoguer avec des propositions conceptuelles comme l’omnipatrimonialisation, le temps-paysage et la patrimondialité. Ces deux axes de réflexion ont été pensés comme complémentaires pour envi... (shrink)

Nietzsche’s criticism of the masses could have looked hackneyed at the end of the XIXth century, had it not the originality of moving onto psychological and biological levels what others previously elaborated only at a social scale: a "herd instinct" explaining both the lack of social cohesion and the loss of possible individual affirmation in democratic and egalitarian ages. As he sees the utilitarian promotion of happiness and empathy as part of the problem, he fiercely condemns John Stewart Mill’s philosophy (...) – as he understands it. Our point is to throw into relief that Mill’s theory of individuality is but closer to Nietzsche’s views for regenerating life against the spreading of democratic "nihilism". Our cross-reading of Mill and Nietzsche therefore aims at offering a reassessment of their antagonism and at highlighting ways of overcoming "nihilism" via culture and cultivation of the "character" and the individual surpassing of oneself. (shrink)

In treatise 51 [I, 8], Plotinus declares that the individual soul can die, insofar it can die. This statement is completely contrary to the principle of the immortality of the soul, which has existed since Plato. In this paper, I explain what the death of the soul is. I also describe how this condition inscribes itself into a more important question: How can the soul return to the intelligible world after it has fallen in the body and forgotten its divine (...) nature? (shrink)

L’article se propose de réintégrer Spinoza dans l’histoire des preuves de l’existence de Dieu et d’interroger, dans ce but, le cartésianisme de Spinoza.

This article brings together epistemological and political philosophy approaches and investment of the dialectic of knowledge, values, and skills, by situating the whole in an uncertain world. We propose to look at the place that environmental issues have in the most recent French public education policies and in particular in the teaching programs that have been developed for the compulsory education period. We present the main themes and potential implications of Mill's philosophical work. We discuss what could be a new (...) approach to the question of the meaning of school knowledge in a democracy. We try to briefly synthesize, on the one hand, what, according to us, distances the current programs from the horizon of such a re-examination; and on the other, what, within them, seems to open up a certain number of possibilities that are worth exploring in this domain. (shrink)

This article is an analysis of a collection of articles published by Gilles Deleuze in 1953 under the direction of Georges Canguilhem. This collection, which has been little read and commented upon, sheds light on the intellectual trajectory of its author by underlining the theoretical hesitations that were his. I show that Deleuze then outlined an ambitious “psycho-sociological” project that he never fully realized. To do this, I reconstitute the psychological and ethological subtext of the book by following his sources; (...) I thus bring to light real theoretical positions often unnoticed in his work (in particular with respect to Henri Bergson, Jakob von Uexküll, and gestaltpsychology). I then argue that the difficulties linked to the theory of perception lead Deleuze to turn away from this project in order to devote himself to more specifically ontological problems. However, I suggest that these difficulties persist throughout Deleuze's works, where notions such as “sign” and “semiotics” both cover and avoid specifically perceptual problems. (shrink)

Résumé Si Spinoza est aujourd’hui souvent mobilisé comme penseur de la liberté et de la potentia multitudinis dans une perspective critique des mécanismes de domination, la lettre du texte – bien plus conservatrice de l’ordre établi qu’elle n’y paraît dans ces lectures – nous enjoint d’examiner la positivité éthique d’une certaine obéissance spinoziste. L’obsequium, objet que nous nous proposons d’analyser dans cet article, désigne chez Spinoza l’obéissance déterminée par les affects. Comment un tel processus de conditionnement affectif peut-il donner lieu (...) à une émancipation par la raison? Seule une certaine complexion affective – l’hilaritas – dans la détermination à l’obéissance peut permettre d’envisager l’horizon politique du libre usage de la raison porté par la république du Traité théologico-politique. L’analyse du mécanisme d’obsequium nous invite à penser à nouveaux frais la question de notre consentement affectif dans la soumission à l’autorité pour déterminer à quelles conditions les progrès de notre faculté de raisonner ne sont pas empêchés. Il nous donne ainsi les conditions véritables de notre libération. (shrink)

Cet article se donne pour objectif de réfléchir à ce que la crise mondiale du Covid-19 a révélé de nos manières d’habiter les lieux où nous vivons, et parmi celles-ci, la pratique de la danse. La démarche adoptée ici est celle d’un dialogue entre trois courants philosophiques spécifiques : la phénoménologie, le pragmatisme et l’écoféminisme, au sujet de leur conception de l’expérience somatique, à la fois vécue, complexe et ordinaire. Nous cherchons ici les lignes communes à ces trois mouvements philosophiques, (...) dans le but d’esquisser une compréhensions nouvelle du corps, et par extension, une nouvelle approche de la danse par temps de crise pandémique. (shrink)

Psychiatric phenomenology emerged from the willingness to spread Husserl’s program of going back to the things themselves into the psychiatric field. However, what this initial will then became is not very clear. We show that if this will to go back to the things themselves really enabled to bring phenomenology and psychiatry together (especially by the Swiss psychiatrist L. Binswanger), the thing to whom we have to go back changed over time: first conceived as the experience lived by people with (...) a psychiatric disorder, it was then conceived as the psychiatric disorder itself. We show that both of these ideas are inadequate. Our thesis is that psychiatric phenomenology has to be considered as belonging to the hermeneutical field (as defined by Ricoeur and Gadamer). We show that this hypothesis leads to a more insightful understanding of what is psychiatric phenomenology and what status we should concede to it. (shrink)