For a genealogical study of the value of human rights: an opposition to historicism and racism The purpose of this article is to focus on human rights as a value in itself that has to fight against other values. We would like to show that human rights have become an intrinsic value only by following a path in human history that distinguish them from historicism. Because human rights became a value through history, it is important to be able to show (...) the lay out of this history. We will illustrate it by means of diverse philosophical theories. We will begin with Leo Strauss' philosophy of natural rights which considers human rights in their opposition to historicism. Then, with the help of Michel Foucault's genealogy we will show how human rights develop themselves against the racist theory elaborated by a fraction of the French aristocracy in the 17th century. Consequently, a tension emerges inside those rights between their natural value and their historical one, which leads to the fundamental question: what is the essence of humankind involved in human rights? (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to present some recent main evolutions which affected Philosophy in Africa. These evolutions are marked by the decline of ideals which emerged during the Bandung era. Such ideals concerned Liberation and Emancipation, Progress. This supposed the future affirmation of Africa as a strategic pole of power. In this perspective, Philosophy and social sciences had an important role to play. There was a consensus on the fact that philosophy could be an instrument of liberation and (...) emancipation and a major factor of social, cultural and political change.But new paradigms emerged with globalization and its cultural logics known as postmodernism/postcolonialism. For instance, this conducted some thinkers to substitute hermeneutics, interpretation and language to the theories based on the intelligibility of the real and the necessity to transform it. This explains on the one hand the delegitimation of some main categories of modernity such as Reason, History, Nation, State, Emancipation, Progress, etc., and on the other hand, the affirmation of new alternatives on terms of Desire, Fluidity, Hybridism, Diversity, Ethnicity, all crowned by the theory of Empire. In this paper, I try to confront these recent trends in African Philosophy and the earlier trends which emerged from the fight against colonialism and imperialism in Asia, Latin America and Africa. (shrink)

In the ideological construction of colonialism and, more widely, of any hierarchy of human communities, a crucial role is played by discourse on language. English nationalism and imperialism, in particular, developed extensive argumentations on language as an interpretation of the encounter with the other, on the basis of internal cultural developments that assigned to language the role of social discriminator. The paper investigates a strand of such argumentations during the period from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century: the concept of (...) “primitive” languages, described in a positive or, more often, in a negative light. The former arguments employ tones related to the idea of the “good savage” and stand in connection with narratives on the “language of Adam” and of the “Welsh Indians”, the latter uses a rhetoric extolling “progress” and “civilization” against the “immaturity” and “backwardness” of primitive languages, a perspective that was later to influence Darwinism. (shrink)

Depuis plus d’une dizaine d’années, Albert Piette travaille à renouveler les méthodes et les concepts de l’anthropologie. Cette refondation s’appuie sur ses propres travaux empiriques, notamment sur le religieux, sur l’usage de méthodes plus pointillistes comme la photographie ou la description des détails, ainsi que sur des hypothèses relatives à la différence entre Sapiens et Néandertal. Les nouvelles propositions de travail qu’il avance empruntent souvent à la philosophie comme moyen d’une réflexion épistémologique, mais aussi parfois à la métaphysique. C’est pourquoi (...) je me propose de discuter en philosophe son ouvrage Contre le relationnisme. Lettre aux anthropologues. Il ne s’agit pas de réactiver la pratique philosophique de la science ultime couronnant les autres disciplines grâce à une réflexivité plus radicale, mais de suivre la démarche de Piette dans ses motivations profondes qui, comme il l’admet lui-même, l’oblige à passer par la philosophie. (shrink)

While increasing attention has been paid in recent years to the relation between Foucault’s conception of critique and Kant’s, much controversy remains over whether Foucault’s most sustained early engagement with Kant, his dissertation on Kant’s Anthropology, should be read as a wholesale rejection of Kant’s views or as the source of Foucault’s late return to ethics and critique. In this paper, I propose a new reading of the dissertation, considering it alongside 1950s-era archival materials of which I advance the first (...) scholarly appraisal. I argue that Foucault manifests a fundamental ambivalence to Kantian anthropology, rejecting it in theoretical terms while embracing its practical (‘pragmatic’) conception of the subject. Furthermore, I take these texts to collectively evidence Foucault’s attempt to situate himself within the anthropological-critical tradition rather than extricating himself from it. If we interpret Foucault to reject this tradition’s appeal to an essentialized, theoretical conception of subjectivity, what remains of anthropology is its inherent practical reflexivity in structure. Thus, I situate Foucault’s conception of ethics as one’s relation to oneself in continuity with this tradition. (shrink)

What allows theories to evolve, to progress? A contentious notion, progress still haunts a number of contemporary theories. However, little research invites us to rethink progress in a comprehensive way. In this article, I contribute to this issue by considering the paradigmatic case of David Harvey’s Marxism. A pathbreaking thinker in geography, sociology, and urban studies, Harvey claims his theory intrinsically surpasses its inherent contradictions. However, numerous authors suggest otherwise, as it fails to engage with essential urban processes such as (...) those based on state, gendered, racial, or environmental dynamics. These aspects of social life challenge his dialectical ambition. I argue that Harvey’s attachment to an orthodox Marxism ultimately limits his claim to theoretical progress. Reviewing Harvey’s overall body of work, I focus on his metatheory regarding space and his examination of the Paris Commune. I argue that his ideas on the progress of theory follow from his dialectical assumptions, which in turn inhibit his portrayal of practical realities and a continuous dialogue with concrete cases. (shrink)

Vitalism was long viewed as the most grotesque view in biological theory: appeals to a mysterious life-force, Romantic insistence on the autonomy of life, or worse, a metaphysics of an entirely living universe. In the early twentieth century, attempts were made to present a revised, lighter version that was not weighted down by revisionary metaphysics: “organicism”. And mainstream philosophers of science criticized Driesch and Bergson’s “neovitalism” as a too-strong ontological commitment to the existence of certain entities or “forces”, over and (...) above the system of causal relations studied by mechanistic science, rejecting the weaker form, organicism, as well. But there has been some significant scholarly “push-back” against this orthodox attitude, notably pointing to the 18th-century Montpellier vitalists to show that there are different historical forms of vitalism, including how they relate to mainstream scientific practice. Additionally, some trends in recent biology that run counter to genetic reductionism and the informational model of the gene present themselves as organicist. Here, we examine some cases of vitalism in the twentieth century and today, not just as a historical form but as a significant metaphysical and scientific model. We argue for vitalism’s conceptual originality without either reducing it to mainstream models of science or presenting it as an alternate model of science, by focusing on historical forms of vitalism, logical empiricist critiques thereof and the impact of synthetic biology on current theorizing of vitalism. (shrink)

There has been the recurrent suspicion that community, harmony, cohesion, and similar relational goods as understood in the African ethical tradition threaten to occlude difference. Often, it has been Western defenders of liberty who have raised the concern that these characteristically sub-Saharan values fail to account adequately for individuality, although some contemporary African thinkers have expressed the same concern. In this chapter, I provide a certain understanding of the sub-Saharan value of communal relationship and demonstrate that it entails a substantial (...) allowance for difference. I aim to show that African thinkers need not appeal to, say, characteristically Euro-American values of authenticity or autonomy to make sense of why individuals should not be pressured to conform to a group’s norms regarding sex and gender. A key illustration involves homosexuality. (shrink)

En este artículo nos proponemos exponer, a partir de los límites conceptuales encontrados a los planteamientos arqueo-genealógicos de Michel Foucault, la posibilidad de plantear, en dos momentos –arqueo-genealógico y gubernamental–, una “ética de la insubordinación reflexiva”. Es decir, una “ética de la libertad inmanente” al débil que al decir su palabra, denuncia y al denunciar cuestiona al tirano y su mundo al habar y actuar con –y por– los otros. Esta ética de la intersubjetividad planteada como una ética de la (...) insumisión concertada, crítica y deliberada, pensamos, puede derivar de ciertas “condiciones enunciativas” encontradas en las dos últimas investigaciones concernientes al “decir veraz” o el “hablar franco” expuestos en El gobierno de sí y de los otros y El coraje de la verdad. (shrink)

Este artículo tiene camo finalidad estudiar la noción de aserción en dos obras del sigla XVII francés: La Logique ou l’art de penser (conocida como Lógica de Port-Royal), de Antoine Arnauld y Pierre Nicole, y la Grammaire générale et raisonnée, de Antoine Arnauld y Claude Lancelot. Se ha dividido el artículo en dos apartados dedicados respectivamente a la concepción de Port-Royal acerca del juicio, y a la teoría del verbo. A lo largo de la reflexión en torno a estos importantes (...) conceptos en la teoría del lenguaje de Port-Royal, pretendemos probar que sus autores efectuaron la distinción entre contenido proposicianal y actitud proposicianal antes de que Frege la estableciera de forma sólida y definitiva.The present paper sets out to examine the notion of assertion within two French 17th century works: Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole’s La Logique ou l’art de penser (known as the Port-Royal Logic), and Antoine Arnauld and Claude Lancelot’s Grammaire générale et raisonnée. This article has been divided into two sections. The first section is devoted to the Port-Royalian doctrine about judgment; the second section analyzes the theory of verb. On our account of these important notions of Porl-Royal’s theory of language, we intend to prove that its authors had made out the distinction btween propositional content and propositional attitude before Frege could set it forth in a solid and definitive way. (shrink)

The chapter discusses Quentin Meillassoux's recent interpretation and critique of Heidegger's philosophical position, which he describes as "strong correlationism." It emphasizes the fact that Meillassoux situates Heidegger in the post-Kantian tradition of transcendental idealism that he defines in terms of a focus on the correlation between being and thinking. It is argued that Meillassoux's "speculative" attempt to overcome the Kantian philosophical framework in the name of absolute contingency should be understood as a further development and dialectical overcoming of its ultimate (...) contemporary form, the Heideggerian philosophy of finitude. (shrink)

Focusing on his last courses at the Collège de France, the present paper aims at exploring the strategic role the notion of parrhesia plays in the elaboration of Foucault’s critical project, according to which parrhesia is what enables the pas- sage from the concept of problematization as an archaeo-genealogical target of inquiry to the idea of problematization as a verbal act of investigation. To this end, the article argues that parrhesia is the condition of possibility for the problematization of one’s (...) mode of subjectivation, whereby it comes to describe a transformative practice of resistance against the existing power regimes in charge of truth. After tracing the seminal formulation of such a form of resistance in the Socratic imperative of taking care of oneself, the paper then concludes by briefly pointing to the importance of Socrates’ parrhesiastic philosophy for the development of Foucault’s own critical ethos. (shrink)

Partiendo del paralelismo entre las empresas de, por una parte, Diferencia y repetición y El Anti-Edipo, y, por otra parte, Lógica del sentido y Mil mesetas, y siguiendo el enfoque que Bertrand Ogilvie adopta en su libro La seconde nature du politique. Essai d’anthropologie négative, pretendemos determinar si en el paso del primer posicionamiento al segundo –es decir, de Diferencia y repetición a Lógica del sentido y de El Anti-Edipo a Mil mesetas– se produce un abandono rotundo de la perspectiva (...) antropológica, como pudiera parecer a primera vista, o si cabría entender que más bien se sientan las bases de una antropología de lo impropio o antropología negativa que ya anuncia la necesidad de contener y limitar las reivindicaciones de lo inesencial, lo inacabado o el vacío como rasgo característico de la condición humana. (shrink)

Les neurosciences sont utilisées en économie dans l’objectif d’améliorer la compréhension et la description des choix individuels. Elles permettent aussi d’évaluer la rationalité des décideurs et de réguler les comportements. Cet article analyse les implications normatives de la neuroéconomie, en dégageant les apports des neurosciences à l’économie du bien-être et à l’économie publique. L’interventionnisme économique défendu par les neuroéconomistes (par exemple, Bernheim et Rangel 2004) y est interprété comme une politique caractéristique du néo-libéralisme, au sens qu’en donne Michel Foucault (1978b). (...) Si la neuroimagerie ne permet pas de « manipuler » directement le cerveau des décideurs, elle offre en revanche la possibilité de détecter le caractère pathologique ou irrationnel de certaines conduites. Ce diagnostic justifie une régulation comportementale du bien-être, qui doit être distinguée du paternalisme libertarien de Sunstein et Thaler (2003). Dans les deux cas, c’est l’environnement plutôt que le décideur lui-même qui est la cible de l’intervention, mais la justification théorique n’est pas la même. Pour les neuroéconomistes, l’irrationalité d’un comportement tel que l’addiction ne résulte pas d’un biais cognitif de l’individu, mais de son interaction avec un environnement pathologique. Les réflexions normatives des neuroéconomistes s’inscrivent dans le prolongement théorique des réflexions de Michel Foucault sur la biopolitique et le néolibéralisme (Foucault 2004b). Notre étude vaut ainsi comme une contribution à l’étude de la gouvernementalité. Elle nous conduit à défendre une interprétation non-réductionniste des rapports entre savoir et pouvoir chez Foucault. Classification JEL : D87, H10, B41. (shrink)

This paper builds a three-part argument in favour of a more transcendentally focused form of ‘postphenomenology’ than is currently practised in philosophy of technology. It does so by problematising two key terms, ‘constitution’ and ‘postphenomenology’, then by arguing in favour of a ‘transcendental empiricist’ approach that draws on the work of Foucault, Derrida, and, in particular, Deleuze. Part one examines ‘constitution’, as it moves from the context of Husserl’s phenomenology to Ihde and Verbeek’s ‘postphenomenology’. I argue that the term tends (...) towards different senses in these contexts, and that this renders its sense more problematic than the work of Ihde and Verbeek makes it appear. Part two examines ‘postphenomenology’. I argue that putatively ‘poststructuralist’ thinkers such as Derrida, Foucault, and Deleuze may be better characterised as ‘postphenomenologists’, and that approaching them in this way may allow better access to their work from a philosophy of technology perspective. Part three argues for a ‘transcendental empiricist’ approach to philosophy of technology. In doing so, it argues for a rewriting of contemporary philosophy of technology’s political constitution: since an ‘empirical turn’ in the 1990s, I argue, philosophy of technology has been too narrowly focused on ‘empirical’ issues of fact, and not focused enough on ‘transcendental’ issues concerning conditions for these facts. (shrink)

Résumé L’imaginaire est une catégorie plastique qui renvoie à des conceptions préscientifiques, aux fictions politiques et juridiques, aux croyances religieuses, aux stéréotypes ou préjugés, sans se confondre avec tous ces objets. Notion imprécise et fourre-tout, l’imaginaire serait inutile pour saisir avec rigueur les objets du monde : il relèverait du subjectif et de l’insaisissable. Pourtant, l’imaginaire a bien un contenu, des structures et dévoile une visée de la conscience. En se fondant sur les écrits de Castoriadis, et notamment la distinction (...) imaginaire instituant et imaginaire institué, on propose d’utiliser cette notion comme un outil méthodologique d’analyse du droit. L’imaginaire n’est d’ailleurs pas étranger à la théorie du droit, principalement américaine, et notamment au sein de l’Université de Yale. Elle recoupe les préoccupations du courant des Cultural Legal studies, où l’on retrouve des auteurs tels que Paul Kahn, David Nelken, Austin Sarat et Jonathan Simon, etc. Le droit constituant une représentation du réel, l’usage de l’imaginaire doit chercher à saisir les significations profondes des normes juridiques, leur de manière de structurer notre pensée et les luttes qu’elles engendrent pour imposer des vérités toujours renégociables. (shrink)

Once upon a time scholars assumed that the knowing subject in the disciplines is transparent, disincorporated from the known and untouched by the geo-political configuration of the world in which people are racially ranked and regions are racially configured. From a detached and neutral point of observation (that Colombian philosopher Santiago Castro-Gómez describes as the hubris of the zero point ), the knowing subject maps the world and its problems, classifies people and projects into what is good for them. Today (...) that assumption is no longer tenable, although there are still many believers. At stake is indeed the question of racism and epistemology. And once upon a time scholars assumed that if you ‘come’ from Latin America you have to ‘talk about’ Latin America; that in such a case you have to be a token of your culture. Such expectation will not arise if the author ‘comes’ from Germany, France, England or the US. As we know: the first world has knowledge, the third world has culture; Native Americans have wisdom, Anglo Americans have science. The need for political and epistemic de-linking here comes to the fore, as well as decolonializing and decolonial knowledges, necessary steps for imagining and building democratic, just, and nonimperial/colonial societies. (shrink)

Research on this topic in Europe and North America has reached a new stage. Prior to 1970, historians told a story of progress in which modern individuals gradually gained mastery of emotions. After 1970 this older approach was put into doubt. Since 1990 research into the history of emotions has increasingly relied on a new methodology, based on the assumption that emotion is a domain of effort, and that it is possible to document variance between emotional standards, on the one (...) hand, and the greater or lesser success of individuals in conforming to them, on the other. Emotional standards are now assumed to display a history that is not progressive, but reflects distinctive features of each period. (shrink)

Issues of the truth potential of religions and its alleged incompatibility with scientific objectivity are among the questions that cannot be bypassed in discourses aiming to an integral understanding of society. In this paper, we will examine and compare two specific approaches that share the intention of taking into consideration religious truths when describing and criticising both modern societies and methods permitting their scientific examination within the academic field. As perennialism focuses on common metaphysical truth shared by all religions, and (...) post-secularism deals with a possible form of cooperation between secular and religious morality, it is expected to find that their offered solutions to social crisis phenomena will be essentially different. However, the results show that basically both see the solution as a reorganizational task. (shrink)

Reading with Gilles Deleuze, this thesis explores art as a production that abandons representation as a formation of identity in favour of an ontology of becoming. I argue that the move to abstraction in painting resonates with the aim of "thought without image" because it counters representation with a radical materiality that returns painting to the movement of matter. In order to situate Deleuze's thinking on art within a trajectory of a philosophy of becoming I open the thesis with a (...) chapter on Bergson and Merleau-Ponty. Here I introduce the notion of 'thinking in painting' and argue that, while in Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of art painting is a pedagogical investigation of the pre-human, chaotic and invisible 'depth' of a lived visible world, Deleuze takes Bergson's commitment to the possibility of moving beyond the human seriously and reverses the order of perception in order to seize the non-human virtual that eludes actualization. For Deleuze, the task of painting is therefore not to reveal the ontogenesis of the actual and the lived, but to extract the virtual and to embody it as a monument to that event. In abstraction the interest moves from the mechanism of perception to the work of paint, and in the subsequent chapters on Mondrian, Pollock, Klee and Bacon I explore specific practices and their peculiar logic of sensation. In Mondrian we see the strange space of virtuality unleashed when the line is not constrained by the closure of the punctual system, and in Pollock's explosive "all-over" paintings identify that space not as a chaos but as a chaosmosis or machinic heterogeneity. I argue that by understanding these modulating and rhythmic compositions as haptic spaces, we break through the distancing of visibility and can begin to think at the level of expressive matter. I then turn to Klee, and using the famous image of "taking a walk with a line" explore the notion of the emergent figure in the context of Klee's aim to "render visible". What we find is an art where space and the form of expression works on the plane of composition and refers only to the unfolding rhythms of the abstract line. In the final chapter I discuss Bacon's portraits and look at how the multiplicity of the event that is maintained in the diagrammatic composition is drawn into the recognizable face. I conclude that the embodiment of the non-human event forces thought to confront the possibility of the emergent identity that is realized in the abstraction of "thinking in painting". (shrink)

The eminent French biologist and historian of biology, François Jacob, once notoriously declared “On n’interroge plus la vie dans les laboratoires”: laboratory research no longer inquires into the notion of ‘Life’. Nowadays, as David Hull puts it, “both scientists and philosophers take ontological reduction for granted… Organisms are ‘nothing but’ atoms, and that is that.” In the mid-twentieth century, from the immediate post-war period to the late 1960s, French philosophers of science such as Georges Canguilhem, Raymond Ruyer and Gilbert Simondon (...) returned to Jacob’s statement with an odd kind of pathos: they were determined to reverse course. Not by imposing a different kind of research program in laboratories, but by an unusual combination of historical and philosophical inquiry into the foundations of the life sciences (particularly medicine, physiology and the cluster of activities that were termed ‘biology’ in the early 1800s). Even in as straightforwardly scholarly a work as La formation du concept de réflexe aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (1955), Canguilhem speaks oddly of “defending vitalist biology,” and declares that Life cannot be grasped by logic (or at least, “la vie déconcerte la logique”). Was all this historical and philosophical work merely a reassertion of ‘mysterian’, magical vitalism? In order to answer this question we need to achieve some perspective on Canguilhem’s ‘vitalism’, notably with respect to its philosophical influences such as Kurt Goldstein. (shrink)

Well prior to the invention of the term ‘biology’ in the early 1800s by Lamarck and Treviranus, and also prior to the appearance of terms such as ‘organism’ under the pen of Leibniz in the early 1700s, the question of ‘Life’, that is, the status of living organisms within the broader physico-mechanical universe, agitated different corners of the European intellectual scene. From modern Epicureanism to medical Newtonianism, from Stahlian animism to the discourse on the ‘animal economy’ in vitalist medicine, models (...) of living being were constructed in opposition to ‘merely anatomical’, structural, mechanical models. It is therefore curious to turn to the ‘passion play’ of the Scientific Revolution – whether in its early, canonical definitions or its more recent, hybridized, reconstructed and expanded versions: from Koyré to Biagioli, from Merton to Shapin – and find there a conspicuous absence of worry over what status to grant living beings in a newly physicalized universe. Neither Harvey, nor Boyle, nor Locke (to name some likely candidates, the latter having studied with Willis and collaborated with Sydenham) ever ask what makes organisms unique, or conversely, what does not. In this paper I seek to establish how ‘Life’ became a source of contention in early modern thought, and how the Scientific Revolution missed the controversy. (shrink)

Selectionist evolutionary theory has often been faulted for not making novel predictions that are surprising, risky, and correct. I argue that it in fact exhibits the theoretical virtue of predictive capacity in addition to two other virtues: explanatory unification and model fitting. Two case studies show the predictive capacity of selectionist evolutionary theory: parallel evolutionary change in E. coli, and the origin of eukaryotic cells through endosymbiosis.

Others consider them as conditions, positions, or roles assumed in society. Such theoretical uncertainty is followed by a similarly uncertain empirical classification. This confusion probably exists because classes are not ostensible objects but concepts, that is, culturally and mutually constructed cognitive schemas. In order to see classes, scientists have to agree about the culturally framed discourse to use. This has not yet happened. This seems to be the main cause of the endless conflict in the debate on social stratification. This (...) article documents that "class," before becoming a scientific construct, was a "folk category." From ordinary language, "class" reached the social sciences, passing through the natural sciences. (shrink)

It is always risky to make sweeping statements about the development of philosophy, but if one were nevertheless asked to describe 20th century philosophy in broad strokes, one noteworthy feature might be the following: Whereas important figures at the beginning of the century, figures such as Frege and Husserl, were very explicit in their rejection of naturalism (both are known for their rejection of the attempt to naturalize the laws of logic, i.e., for their criticism of psychologism), the situation has (...) changed considerably. Today many philosophers – not the least within analytical philosophy – would subscribe to some form of naturalism. In fact, naturalism is seen by many as the default metaphysical position. If you don’t subscribe to naturalism you must be subscribing to some form of Cartesian substance dualism. Thus, whereas 20 or 30 years ago one might have been inclined to characterize the development of 20th century philosophy in terms of a linguistic turn, a turn from a philosophy of subjectivity to a philosophy of language, it might today be more apt to describe the development in terms of a turn from anti-naturalism to naturalism. (shrink)

This article outlines a new approach to the law of political economy as a form of transformative law, a new approach that combines a focus on the function of law with a concept of law encapsulating the triangular dialectics between the form-giving prestation of law, the material substance the law is oriented against, and the transcendence of legal forms—that is, the rendering of compatibility between forms. Transformative law thereby serves as an alternative to both law and economics and recently emerging (...) culturalist and neo-Marxist approaches. The timing of this publication is not coincidental. The era of neoliberalism—that is, of structural liberalism, which started in the 1970s and experienced its breakthrough in the 1980s and 1990s after the collapse of structural Marxism—is ending. This makes the question of what will succeed the neoliberal episteme pertinent. (shrink)

Evolutionary biologists, evolutionary epistemologists, and biosemioticians have demonstrated that organisms not merely adapt to an external world, but that they actively construct their environmental, sociocultural, and cognitive niches. Denis Noble demonstrates that such is no different for those organisms that engage in science, and he lays bare several crucial assumptions that define the scientific dogmas and practices of evolutionary biology.

This article applies a constructivist perspective to the analysis of a town-planning innovation. The so-called Cerdà Plan for the extension of Barcelona was launched in the 1860s and gave this city one of its most characteristic present features. For different reasons it can be considered an extraordinary case in town-planing history, though almost unknown to international scholars. The authors analyze the intense controversy that developed around the extension plan and the three technological frames involved. Finally, the relationship between power and (...) technology is discussed. The sociohistorical account is used to illustrate a specific concept of power, to be used in a politics of technology. (shrink)

While historians of the microscope currently consider that no programme of microscopy took place during the Enlightenment, the thesis challenges this view and aims at showing when and where microscopes were used as research tools. The focus of the inquiry is the research on microscopic animalcules and the relationship of European microscope making and practices of microscopy with topical trends of the industrial revolution, such as quantification. Three waves of research are characterised for the research on animalcules in the Enlightenment: (...) 1. seventeenth-century observations on animalcules crowned by Louis Joblot's 1718 works in the milieu of Paris Académie royale des sciences, 2. mid eighteenth-century observations and experiments on polyps and animalcules (Trembley, Baker and Hill) and, 3. between 1760 and 1790, OF Müller's establishment of the systematics of infusoria in Denmark and Germany. (shrink)

The paper is focused on Genesis 1 – 3 where the primordial man [adàm] is created ‎and he was given the proper name Adam [adàm]. ‎ In Hebrew man and Adam are the same word, spelled the same way – [adàm]. ‎Different translations of Genesis 1-3 use for the first time the proper name Adam in ‎different places versions Gen 2:25; The German Luther ‎Bible Gen 3:8; Some English Protestant versions Gen 3:17; Bulgarian Protestant and many ‎English Protestant versions Gen (...) 3:20-21). The paper decodes the phenomenon by ‎studying the Hebrew original and several semiotic views on common and proper names ‎‎. Through these opinions the ‎important question “Who wrote the Bible?” is discussed. The analysis interfaces the new ‎linguistic relativity theory.‎ Four layers of symbolism are decoded: 1. The man became Adam; 2. The two men in ‎Gen 1:27 and in Gen 2:7 man [adàm] ‎is made by earth, ground [adamà]; 3. The two men in the New Testament ; 4. Edom, Adam and cultural discourses in both Testaments.‎. (shrink)

Kako danes lahko beremo Descartesa? Poskusi zavrnitve Descartesa nakazujejo težnjo k temu, da bi tisti začetek, ki ga zastopa Descartesov vpis v zgodovino filozofije in znanosti, rekonstruirali v nekakšen nov začetek, ki bi se znebil kontinuitete z »Descartesovim začetkom«, pa naj gre za njegovo formulacijo subjekta, za njegovo utemeljitev metodičnega dvoma, za njegovo naklonjenost matematiki, za racionalni dokaz boga, predvsem pa za njegov rudimentarni koncept avtonomnega subjekta. Maritainova kritika Descartesa iz l. 1932 je v tem pogledu vzorec tudi kasnejših moralnih (...) in ideoloških zavračanj Descartesove filozofije. V obravnavi Descartesovega dokazovanja boga pa se pokaže, da je tisto, kar je moteče za sodobne filozofije in ideologije, ki gradijo na abstraktnem konceptu »čoveka«, ravno Descartesova elaboracija cogita, v kateri je vpisana insuficienca subjekta. Kartezijanska paradigma je izhodišèe za koncepcije subjekta, v katerih je subjekt svoj lastni objekt. Subjekt, ki iz sebe določ vso realnost, torej tudi realnost samega sebe, ki je zaèetek in konec cirkularnega dokaznega postopka preko dvoma, je nenehno izpostavljen lastni negaciji. (shrink)

This paper is a survey of Father Mersenne’s views about the classification of sciences, its reasons and its practical consequences. Some emphasis is put on the interconnection between Mersenne’s two majors ideas about the practice of science : scientific research is an activity mostly devoted to religious apology and to the edification of the people. This religious concern allows him to resist two of the most influential philosophical streams of his time, scepticism and alchemy, which provide some favorite opponents to (...) his works. We also show how an analogical kinship based on theological considerations and on the classification of sciences gives ground to the same kind of arguments shaping his views about arithmetic, language, and music. Finally, we focus on the connection between Mersenne’s theses, especially about the nature and virtue of language and sound, and a more general discussion of the scientific status of music and language in the context of the blooming of academies. (shrink)

The article shows the strategic analogies, but also the differences between Bachelard and Canguilhem on the use of the history of science for epistemology. It emphasizes the importance of the ideology for Canguilhem, and the conceptual essence he recognizes in the history of science, which is read in its internal specific differences and in its complex articulations with life and reality. No concept, in fact, comes from nothing. The link between history and epistemology is not however of subjection, but of (...) mutual influence. Canguilhem radicalizes the thought of Bachelard, and recognizes the historicity of every aspect of scientific knowledge, even of its less valued features and above all of errors. All aspects of Science are historical. The object of the history of science is not the object of the sciences, because it is always a discourse. This is why the history of science is inevitably linked to other forms of history. This opens up a pluralist conception of History and of Time, thinking of the sciences in their real body and no longer ideal or legal. Thus Canguilhem opens the way to the researches of Foucault and Serres. (shrink)

De una u otra forma, los diferentes procesos independentistas iberoamericanos de comienzos del siglo XIX suelen ser involucrados dentro de la larga cadena revolucionaria que alternativamente sacudió a ambos meridianos del mundo occidental a lo largo de no menos de cincuenta años (1774-1824), para otros ciento treinta y seis (1668-1824)3, o incluso ciento sesenta años (1645-1824). Consumado el mencionado ciclo revolucionario americano, este significó o bien la transformación —Canadá, Brasil, Cuba y Puerto Rico— o bien el derrocamiento del "Antiguo régimen (...) colonial" en la casi totalidad del continente americanos, y con ello surgimiento de un nuevo y ampliado orden político y económico mundial. (shrink)

In 1962 Umberto Eco published his Opera aperta. Forma e indeterminazione nelle poetiche contemporanee, in which he dealt with the televised space and its influence on the development of plot in contemporary narratives. The analysis of the aesthetic of television led him to highlight the exclusive capacity of television to transmit events in real time: Live TV.Eco affirms in particular that through the editing in Live TV, the role of choice completely changes in comparison to what happens in the editing (...) phase within the cinematographic narrative. In Live TV, choice becomes a proper composition, a form of narrative, a means of unifying in a discursive way a set of isolated images within the framework of a wider set of events taking place at the same time and intersecting one another. This impromptu narrative brings with it the use of some recursive forms, which represent an important narrative tool enabling a weaving of the narrative space. Eco identified those recursive forms in some jazz figures such as the riff, the recursive form of which allows for the creation of an organic composition full of improvisation. A few years later, the importance of figures of this kind was also noted by Deleuze-Guattari, who posited that ritornello has an important function of organizing the exterior space, or chaotic space. Based on these considerations, this paper deals with the phenomenon of repetition, recursivity, and patterns, to bring these concepts into the construction of narrative spaces. The central point of the paper is that the birth of Live TV started a phenomenon of exteriorization of the inner data of the narrative construction. This phenomenon of externalization makes possible the understanding of data through spatial terms, and one starts to use recursive formulas to navigate it. (shrink)

The paper focuses on the work of Lorenz Oken in an attempt to make sense of the role played by RomanticNaturphilosophiein the development of natural history in Germany at the turn of the nineteenth century. It first focuses on the role played by Schelling and his Würzburg circle in the development of Oken's early views on natural history, then reconstructs Oken's mature programme for a reform of animal classification.

Major difficulties for readers of Foucault’s The Order of Things concern the historical function and the logical construction of the episteme. Our proposal is to link it with another notion, the ‘point of heresy’, less frequently addressed. This leads to asserting that irreconcilable dilemmas are in fact determined by the type of rationality governing the emergence of common objects of knowledge. It also introduces a possibility of ‘walking on two roads’: a dialogical adventure within rationality. Foucault is not content with (...) either accepting or rejecting the ‘transcendental’ question ‘What is Man?’: with the help of quasi-transcendental categories performing a ‘transdisciplinary’ function, he wants to reach the ‘heretical’ point where anthropology becomes historicity within the horizon of finitude. (shrink)

In the course of their disciplinary consolidation during the 19th and 20th centuries, the social sciences came increasingly to be less historically orientated. Analogously, global history became increasingly a marginal concern for professional historical scholarship. At the present juncture, however, there is a coincidence of a rethinking of the formation of modernity in cultural terms and the need to locate European modernity in a global context. Social theory must be able to provide an account of global historical developments that is (...) less constrained and biased than modernization theory, even in the new garb of globalization studies, but significantly more elaborate in conceptual terms than current contributions to global history. A rethinking of the formation of modernity has already contributed to a greater appreciation of processes of cultural and ideational transformations. It has also suggested new ways of studying institutional change. It must, however, also be able to locate the specific European trajectory in a global context. The core element in such a research programme is the analysis of three major periods of global cultural crystallization, namely the Axial Age, the ecumenical renaissance, and the formation of modernity. The rationale and the contours of this research programme are outlined. (shrink)

(2014). Emergence, Story, and the Challenge of Positive Scenarios. World Futures: Vol. 70, Strategy, Story, and Emergence: Essays on Scenario Planning, pp. 52-87.

Selon la façon dont on l’envisage et l’origine du regard qui se pose sur elle, l’autorité ne paraît pas représenter la même chose. Pour certains elle est l’expression d’un principe abstrait, atemporel, relatif au jeu des places qu’organisent les rapports sociaux, en l’occurrence les places spécifiques qu’occupent les parents par rapport à l’enfant. Pourtant, pour d’autres approches, notamment les approches psychanalytiques, l’autorité n’est pas un principe neutre, elle a un sexe, de préférence masculin. Que peut-on dire d’une telle affirmation à (...) notre époque de reconfiguration des relations non seulement entre les sexes mais aussi entre les générations, et plus globalement de l’ensemble des relations privées, si ce n’est des rapports entre le public et le privé? Je m’essaie ici à une analyse sociologique, alimentée de références psychologiques et historiques, de la signification de cette question et des réponses qu’il est possible de lui apporter. (shrink)

This essay argues that important critical and political perspective can be gained on Deleuze's famous essay, ‘Bartleby; or, The Formula’ by viewing it as an attempt to move beyond the Sartrean framework of ‘bad faith’. The argument comprises four sections. In section one, I contextualise Deleuze's essay in terms of contrasting readings of Bartleby, from a prior account by Georges Perec, to contemporary accounts indebted to Deleuze, from Hardt and Negri's Empire to Gisèle Berkman's recent L'Effet Bartleby. The argument of (...) this section is that a problematically reductive image of Bartleby has emerged in the wake of Deleuze's essay, but that this can be challenged in favour of a more nuanced and politically significant reading by contextualising the essay as an attempt to overcome bad faith. In section two, I develop this by drawing out the nature and relevance of the threat posed by bad faith through a focus on Sartrean, Deleuzian and Badioucan critiques of Bartleby, before arguing, in section three, that attention to the concept of a ‘logic of presuppositions’ developed in Deleuze's essay shows how bad faith can be overcome. These sections all build towards the fourth and longest section, which draws out the wider political significance of what it means to overcome bad faith. To do so, I pay attention to how logics of presupposition function in Bartleby's story, and consider Deleuze's essay in relation to his work on ‘control societies’ and ‘collective assemblages of enunciation’. (shrink)