On the basis of Anton Marty’s 1867 Preisschrift, this article offers a reconstruction of the semiotic and linguistic investigations the Swiss philosopher develops just before becoming a student of Brentano. The paper then compares this account with the view on signs that will be given in Marty’s later work, as well as within the Austro-German tradition.

Intellectual historians have rarely attended to the genre of fighting manuals, but these provide a new window on long-debated questions such as the relationship between Scholasticism and Humanism. This article offers a close comparison of the first known fencing manual, the 14-th century Liber de Arte Dimicatoria (Leeds, Royal Armouries FECHT 1, previously and better known as MS I.33), and the corpus of fighting manuals which underwent a remarkable expansion during the 15th and 16th centuries. While the former clearly shows (...) its origins in a scholastic background, the latter is mainly viewed as reflecting its humanist context. To this historiographical division corresponds a linguistic one: MS I.33 is a Latin text, while the rest of the corpus is mainly written in German and Italian. However, exceptions arise, amongst which, Heinrich von Gunterrodt’s Sciomachia et Hoplomachia: sive de Veris Principiis Artis Dimicatoriae (1579), the first text which explicitly refers to I.33. This article will compare these two texts, in order to interrogate their common relation to Scholasticism, namely the traditional frame of the knowledge within the medieval and early modern universities. The intent is to show that (at least some) Renaissance fight books include references to Scholasticism and to provide a better qualification of the nature of such references. The general hypothesis is that a large part of the texts―and products of culture―of the Renaissance that have been read, until recently, exclusively in relation to a humanist intellectual background can valuably be interpreted in the context of a Scholasticism that is still vivid during the period in question. (shrink)

While being a crucial figure in the Brentanian School, Anton Marty did not receive the attention he deserves. This chapter briefly presents the aim of the volume: bringing the spotlight back on Marty and his most significant philosophical contributions with the help of leading figures of the contemporary debate. This chapter also offers an overview of the eight original contributions of the volume and its tripartite structure: Language and Communication, Ontology and Consciousness of Space and Time, Meta-metaphysics and Meta-philosophy.

La Divine Comédie est le récit poétique d'une vision, d'une expérience surnaturelle qui se fait toujours plus intense, et que le langage peine toujours davantage à traduire. La mission de Dante consiste à rapporter cette vision. La question que nous pose la Divine Comédie réside dans la différence entre l'intraduisible et l'indicible: y a-t-il un intraduisible dicible? Ou en d'autres termes : quelle est, au-delà du topos de l'indicible poétique, et au-delà de la figure rhétorique de la prétérition, la signification (...) conceptuelle de l'expression du "dire" dans la Divine Comédie? (shrink)

L’histoire de la pensée sémiotique se caractérise par une oscillation entre définition large et définition étroite de son objet. Au Moyen Âge, la définition augustinienne du signe est jugée trop étroite, car elle ne concerne que le signe sensible. De nouvelles définitions tentent alors de faire des concepts des signes qui renvoient aux choses. L’Âge moderne, au contraire, affirme une volonté de rétrécissement à l’égard de la notion de signe. Cet article montrera les caractéristiques d’une telle réflexion sémiotique à travers (...) deux auteurs représentatifs d’un premier empirisme moderne : Pierre Gassendi et Thomas Hobbes. Le retour à une sémiotique étroite s’effectue par la référence aux traditions stoïcienne, sceptique et épicurienne, ainsi qu’à un Aristote renouvelé, et par une prédilection affichée pour la valeur indiciaire du signe par rapport à sa valeur sémantique. Ceci veut dire que les empiristes vont insister avant tout sur la fonction remémorative du signe et sur sa valeur de probabilité. L’indice en tant que trace sera ainsi privilégié par rapport au signe communicationnel, et il s’agira d’en défendre la validité en tant qu’il s’inscrit dans une échelle de certitude, au sommet de laquelle se situe la preuve. (shrink)

This entry describes the semiotic thought in the Early Modern Period through three groups of authors: Late Scholastics who developed original theories within a traditional Aristotelian and Augustinian framework; John Locke and the authors of Port-Royal who follow the lines of a linguistic paradigm; Thomas Hobbes, Pierre Gassendi, and Pierre Bayle who built a renewed semiotic theory headed towards epistemology.

Ce mini-dossier compte parmi les résultats d’un travail de séminaire de longue haleine, développé au cours d’un cycle de trois ans, portant sur les théories philosophiques du signe de l’Antiquité à nos jours, organisé à l’UMR STL 8163 par Claudio Majolino et Laurent Cesalli. Au sein de l’arc temporel visé par ce séminaire, le XVIIe siècle avait d’emblée une place privilégiée : conçu comme un siècle de rupture qui inaugure la période moderne, il illustre surtout, en particulier dep...

The debate between Husserl and Marty focuses on the notion of general grammar. Nevertheless, there doesn’t seem to have been a clear outcome, and the terms of the debate remain quite unclear. Moreover, while both authors make striking use of historical references, their entanglement seems to call for some clarification. This paper aims to shed light on this debate, by considering it from an historical perspective. In doing so, two putative candidates will be introduced as (conceptual) precursors of the ‘allgemeine (...) Grammatik’: the Grammaire générale et raisonnée of Port-Royal (1660), and the medieval grammatica speculativa, which included a group of late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century philosophers of language known as the Modistae. I will first identify Husserl’s and Marty’s respective critiques, distinguishing, between Husserl’s critique of the conflation of the a priori and empirical, and Marty’s of the conflation of meaning and forms of expression. Second, I will place these critiques in an arrangement involving two types of cross-reference: on the one hand, Marty and Husserl can be seen as standing in opposition to their historical predecessors; on the other hand (and more significantly), Marty and Port-Royal can be seen as standing in opposition to Husserl and the speculative grammarians. (shrink)

This entry provides a presentation of grammar according to its early modern sense, as the art of speaking a particular language, as well as of the universal grammar of this period, whose scope is theoretical and which transcends any particular language.

Parmi les différentes approches possibles de la matière historique, on observe souvent, dans la littérature, une tension entre les deux options suivantes : faire d’un auteur le précurseur d'une révolution dont notre modernité serait l'héritière directe, ou au contraire, et par réaction, se livrer à un travail de remise en contexte détaillé qui prend parfois le risque de gommer l'originalité possible de ce même auteur. Le Traité sur les signes de Jean Poinsot, dominicain du début du XVIIe siècle, a ainsi (...) d’abord été édité comme un texte annonciateur de la sémiotique de Peirce, la thèse de cette originalité révolutionnaire étant fondée sur le traitement de la catégorie de la relation. Le travail critique qui s’est effectué en réaction tempère, parfois de façon excessive, la nouveauté de cet auteur du point de vue de sa contribution à la pensée des signes. Cet article s’inscrit dans cette démarche de remise en contexte en proposant une comparaison entre le texte de Poinsot et les Quaestiones sur les signes, que l'on doit à Sebastião do Couto, commentateur de l'université de Coimbra. Optant pour une contextualisation qui vise à mesurer l’originalité relative de Poinsot, cette étude porte sur les variations de la description du rapport du signe à l'intention. Nous montrerons ainsi que même si les contenus du discours sur les signes ne comportent que de maigres différences, on peut cependant constater une certaine originalité de Poinsot dans son traitement de la relation, qui l’amène à reconfigurer l’ordonnancement de la question des signes. (shrink)

Parmi les différentes approches possibles de la matière historique, on observe souvent, dans la littérature, une tension entre les deux options suivantes : faire d’un auteur le précurseur d'une révolution dont notre modernité serait l'héritière directe, ou au contraire, et par réaction, se livrer à un travail de remise en contexte détaillé qui prend parfois le risque de gommer l'originalité possible de ce même auteur. Le Traité sur les signes de Jean Poinsot (appelé également Jean de Saint Thomas), dominicain du (...) début du XVIIe siècle, a ainsi d’abord été édité comme un texte annonciateur de la sémiotique de Peirce, la thèse de cette originalité révolutionnaire étant fondée sur le traitement de la catégorie de la relation. Le travail critique qui s’est effectué en réaction tempère, parfois de façon excessive, la nouveauté de cet auteur du point de vue de sa contribution à la pensée des signes. Cet article s’inscrit dans cette démarche de remise en contexte en proposant une comparaison entre le texte de Poinsot et les Quaestiones sur les signes, que l'on doit à Sebastião do Couto, commentateur de l'université de Coimbra. Optant pour une contextualisation qui vise à mesurer l’originalité relative de Poinsot, cette étude porte sur les variations de la description du rapport du signe à l'intention. Nous montrerons ainsi que même si les contenus du discours sur les signes ne comportent que de maigres différences, on peut cependant constater une certaine originalité de Poinsot dans son traitement de la relation, qui l’amène à reconfigurer l’ordonnancement de la question des signes. (shrink)

La scolastique tardive, au début du XVIIe siècle, est le théâtre d’un débat sur la définition du signe, qui se traduit par la division entre signum formale et signum instrumentale. Le premier est l’écho de la tendance médiévale à comprendre les concepts comme des signes. Le second correspond à une définition qui remonte à Augustin, selon laquelle le signe est une chose sensible qui doit être connue pour porter à la connaissance de quelque chose d’autre. Se démarquant de la voie (...) qui avait fait de la seule Logique de Port-Royal le paradigme de la pensée sémiotique de l’Âge classique, cet ouvrage montre, à partir de ce débat scolastique, que le XVIIe siècle se caractérise globalement par une translatio, visible notamment chez Bayle, Gassendi et Hobbes, d’un modèle linguistico-psychologique à une sémiotique emblématique d’une mutation de la logique désormais ordonnée vers l’épistémologie. (shrink)

La tarda scolastica, all’inizio del XVII secolo, è il teatro di un dibattito sulla definizione di segno, che si traduce nella suddivisione tra signum formale e signum instrumentale. Il primo è l’eco della tendenza medievale a considerare i concetti come segni. Il secondo corrisponde a una definizone che risale ad Agostino, secondo la quale il segno è una cosa sensibile che deve essere conosciuta per portare alla conoscenza di qualcosa d’altro. Smarcandosi dalla corrente che aveva fatto della sola Logica di (...) Port Royal il paradigma del pensiero semiotico del XVII secolo, quest’opera mostra, a partire da questo dibattito scolastico, che il XVII secolo si caratterizza globalmente per una translatio, un trasferimento, che è visibile in particolare in autori come Bayle, Gassendi e Hobbes, da un modello linguistico-psicologico a una semiotica ormai orientata all’epistemologia. (shrink)

Based on chapter 3 “The musical Work and its score” of Roman Ingarden’s The Work of Music and the Problem of its Identity, this paper examines the semiotic theory from which the Polish philosopher develops his analysis of music.

Van Rensselaer Potter (1911-2001), le biologiste à l’origine du terme « bioéthique » dans les écrits nord-américains, considère que « real bioethics falls in the context of the ideals of […] Aldo Leopold », un forestier, philosophe et poète ayant marqué le XXe siècle. Associer Leopold à Potter a pour effet de placer la bioéthique dans la famille des éthiques de l’environnement, ce qui la différencie du sens conventionnel retenu en médecine et en recherche depuis le Rapport Belmont (1979), une (...) déclaration ayant propulsé l’institutionnalisation de la bioéthique en Amérique du Nord. Cependant, diviser la bioéthique entre le médical et l’environnemental est réducteur. Potter propose au contraire une bioéthique globale s’intéressant aux enjeux situés à leur interface, dont ceux concernant la terre, la vie sauvage, la surpopulation, la consommation, etc. Cet article vise à amorcer un nouveau chantier d’analyse de la pensée de Potter en s’appuyant sur l’héritage de Leopold en biologie. Une synthèse de cette vision potterienne est proposée de manière à considérer son œuvre comme un tout cohérent s’intégrant aux grands débats qui transcendent les XXe et XXIe siècles. Sa vision apparaît comme une sagesse collective et prospective sous la forme d’une science de la survie et d’un code de bioéthique. Dépassant l’éthique de l’environnement, son association avec Leopold offre un modèle de la complexité s’imposant comme cas indissociable du contexte qui l’englobe, en améliorant nos façons d’intervenir en pratique dans un monde en constante transformation, à titre de gouvernance adaptative et de sagesse de la responsabilité. (shrink)

This is an important book precisely because there is none other quite like it.

Nous présentons ici la traduction d’une conférence donnée par Ernst Cassirer au Cercle linguistique de New York en 1945, intitulée « Le structuralisme dans la linguistique moderne ». Dans ce texte, Cassirer propose une généalogie de l’approche structurale dans la linguistique moderne, en faisant remonter la problématique aux débats épistémologiques des xviii e et xix e siècles sur la constitution des sciences du vivant. La conférence de Cassirer revêt ainsi à nos yeux un double intérêt : d’une part, elle rend (...) compte de l’unité de l’œuvre cassirerienne, puisque l’auteur y mobilise des concepts dont il a posé les premiers jalons dès 1910 dans _Substance et fonction_ ; d’autre part, elle permet de rendre compte de la spécificité méthodologique des sciences de la culture, à partir d’une généalogie conceptuelle de la méthode en train de naître dans les cercles linguistiques de l’époque. Nous tâcherons de présenter les différentes étapes de l’argumentation de Cassirer, allant d’une redéfiniti... (shrink)

This article aims to develop new conceptions of the psychosocial dynamics that drive the re-romanticization of domestic femininity in current financialized capitalism. Feminist scholars have described this heightened cultivation of mothering as a reparative move in response to irreconcilable tensions between cultural ideals of the ‘balancing mother’ and ‘lean-in femininity’. This article adds a materialist-psychosocial lens to these conceptions, to enhance understanding of what drives this craving for domestic femininity. Drawing on a free-association narrative interview study with couples in the (...) financial elite in the comparatively gender-egalitarian Norwegian context, I describe a specific emotional mechanism that resists democratization of gender in this specific group. The interviews reveal a felt need to cultivate ‘the human side of things’ at safe distance from the competitiveness of ‘hard-core finance’. The Nordic earner–carer model with its entwinement of care and professional pursuits, cultivated by the more self-fulfilment-oriented parts of the professional middle-class appears not only unwanted but threatening. In my analysis, I retrieve and develop a psychoanalytically inspired historical-materialist feminism, one that perceives of the gendered division of work as a split in modes of focusing human energy. I suggest that the resurgent cultivation of domestic femininity is nurtured by a self-energizing antagonism between competitive and relational practices. I further argue that the cultivation of domestic femininity in these financial couples points to a potential antagonism between the democratization of love and the specific anxiety-driven competitiveness to which this financial-elite group may be particularly susceptible. (shrink)

Surveillance programs supporting the management of One Health issues such as antibiotic resistance are complex systems in themselves. Designing ethical surveillance systems is thus a complex task (retroactive and iterative), yet one that is also complicated to implement and evaluate (e.g., sharing, collaboration, and governance). The governance of health surveillance requires attention to ethical concerns about data and knowledge (e.g., performance, trust, accountability, and transparency) and empowerment ethics, also referred to as a form of responsible self-governance. Ethics in reflexive governance (...) operates as a systematic critical-thinking procedure that aims to define its value: What are the “right” criteria to justify how to govern “good” actions for a “better” future? The objective is to lay the foundations for a methodological framework in empirical bioethics, the rudiments of which have been applied to a case study to building reflexive governance in One Health. This ongoing critical thinking process involves “mapping, framing, and shaping” the dynamics of interests and perspectives that could jeopardize a “better” future. This paper proposes to hybridize methods to combine insights from collective deliberation and expert evaluation through a reflexive governance functioning as a community-based action-ethics methodology. The intention is to empower individuals and associations in a dialogue with society, which operation is carried out using a case study approach on data sharing systems. We based our reasoning on a feasibility study conducted in Québec, Canada (2018–2021), envisioning an antibiotic use surveillance program in animal health for 2023. Using the adaptive cycle and governance techniques and perspectives, we synthesize an alternative governance model rooted in the value of empowerment. The framework, depicted as a new “research and design (R&D)” practice, is linking operation and innovation by bridging the gap between Reflexive, Evaluative, and Deliberative reasonings and by intellectualizing the management of democratizing critical thinking locally (collective ethics) by recognizing its context (social ethics). Drawing on the literature in One Health and sustainable development studies, this article describes how a communitarian and pragmatic approach can broaden the vision of feasibility studies to ease collaboration through public-private-academic partnerships. The result is a process that “reassembles” the One Health paradigm under the perspective of global bioethics to create bridges between the person and the ecosystem through pragmatic ethics. (shrink)

The term “value of life” can refer to life’s intrinsic dignity: something nonincremental and time-unaffected in contrast to the fluctuating, incremental “value” of our lives, as they are longer or shorter and more or less flourishing. Human beings are equal in their basic moral importance: the moral indignities we condemn in the treatment of e.g. those with dementia reflect the ongoing human dignity that is being violated. Indignities licensed by the person in advance remain indignities, as when people might volunteer (...) their living, unconscious bodies for surrogacy or training in amputation techniques. Respect for someone’s dignity is significantly impacted by a failure to value that person’s very existence, whatever genuine respect and good will is shown by wanting the person’s life to go well. Valuing and respecting life is not, however, vitalism: there can be good and compelling reasons for eschewing some means of prolonging life. (shrink)

This chapter considers the ways in which whiteness as a skin color and ideology becomes a dominant level that sets the background against which all things, people and relations appear. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, it takes up a series of films by Bruce Nauman and Marlon Riggs to consider ways in which this level is phenomenally challenged providing insights into the embodiment of racialization.

The more traditional approaches to the history and philosophy of science and technology continue as well, and probably will continue as long as there are skillful practitioners such as Carl Hempel, Ernest Nagel, and th~ir students. Finally, there are still other approaches that address some of the technical problems arising when we try to provide an account of belief and of rational choice. - These include efforts to provide logical frameworks within which we can make sense of these notions. This (...) series will attempt to bring together work from all of these approaches to the history and philosophy of science and technology in the belief that each has something to add to our understanding. The volumes of this series have emerged either from lectures given by authors while they served as honorary visiting professors at the City College of New York or from conferences sponsored by that institution. The City College Program in the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology oversees and directs these lectures and conferences with the financial aid of the Association for Philosophy of Science, Psychotheraphy, and Ethics. MARTIN TAMNY RAPHAEL STERN PREFACE The papers in this collection stem largely from the conference 'Foun dations: Logic, Language, and Mathematics' held at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York on 14-15 November 1980. (shrink)

This edited collection of eight original essays pursues the aim of bringing the spotlight back on Anton Marty. It does so by having leading figures in the contemporary debate confront themselves with Marty’s most significative contributions, which span from philosophy of mind, philosophy of language and ontology to meta-metaphysics and meta-philosophy. -/- The book is divided in three parts. The first part is dedicated to themes in philosophy of language, which were at the centre of Marty’s philosophical thinking throughout his (...) life. The second part focuses on the problem of the objectivity and phenomenology of time and space, upon which Marty was working in the final years of his life. The final part turns to Marty’s meta-metaphysical and meta-philosophical considerations. The intended audience of this book are primarily scholars and students interested in the relevant contemporary debates, as well as scholars working on the Austrian tradition. (shrink)

In recent years, calls have been made to address the relative dearth of qualitative sociological investigation into the sensory dimensions of embodiment, including within physical cultures. This article contributes to a small, innovative and developing literature utilizing sociological phenomenology to examine sensuous embodiment. Drawing upon data from three research projects, here we explore some of the ‘sensuousities’ of ‘intense embodiment’ experiences as a distance-running-woman and a boxing-woman, respectively. Our analysis addresses the relatively unexplored haptic senses, particularly the ‘touch’ of heat. (...) Heat has been argued to constitute a specific sensory mode, a trans-boundary sense. Our findings suggest that ‘lived’ heat, in our own physical-cultural experiences, has highly proprioceptive elements and is experienced as both a form of touch and as a distinct perceptual mode, dependent upon context. Our analysis coheres around two key themes that emerged as salient: (1) warming up, and (2) thermoregulation, which in lived experience were encountered as strongly interwoven. (shrink)

This paper considers the analogies and disanalogies between a certain sort of argument designed to oppose scepticism about free will and a certain sort of argument designed to oppose scepticism about the external world. In the case of free will, I offer the ancient Lazy Argument and an argument of my own, which I call the Agency Argument, as examples of the relevant genre; and in the case of the external world, I consider Moore’s alleged proof of an external world. (...) I draw attention to analogies and disanalogies between the arguments offered in each case in order to suggest that although the Agency Argument shares with its Moorean relative the unfortunate property of being dialectically ineffective against some of those it is mainly hoping to convince, it will not be dialectically ineffective against all of them. It is also argued that the Agency Argument is less vulnerable than Moore’s proof to worries about its justificatory structure. (shrink)

Recent corporate scandals have put company boards in the spotlight. Legislation, codes of conduct, and guidelines have been developed to improve corporate governance. But while many prescriptions for improving corporate governance focus on the structure of boards, Dr. Richard Leblanc's research suggests that there is no direct causal relationship between board structure and corporate performance. Indeed, many recent failed corporations had exemplary board structure. Richard Leblanc discusses how to assess board effectiveness and improve it.

According to the theory of contextual integrity (CI), privacy norms prescribe information flows with reference to five parameters — sender, recipient, subject, information type, and transmission principle. Because privacy is grasped contextually (e.g., health, education, civic life, etc.), the values of these parameters range over contextually meaningful ontologies — of information types (or topics) and actors (subjects, senders, and recipients), in contextually defined capacities. As an alternative to predominant approaches to privacy, which were ineffective against novel information practices enabled by (...) IT, CI was able both to pinpoint sources of disruption and provide grounds for either accepting or rejecting them. Mounting challenges from a burgeoning array of networked, sensor-enabled devices (IoT) and data-ravenous machine learning systems, similar in form though magnified in scope, call for renewed attention to theory. This Article introduces the metaphor of a data (food) chain to capture the nature of these challenges. With motion up the chain, where data of higher order is inferred from lower-order data, the crucial question is whether privacy norms governing lower-order data are sufficient for the inferred higher-order data. While CI has a response to this question, a greater challenge comes from data primitives, such as digital impulses of mouse clicks, motion detectors, and bare GPS coordinates, because they appear to have no meaning. Absent a semantics, they escape CI’s privacy norms entirely. (shrink)

_Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing_ is a poetic, insightful, and ultimately moving exploration of 'the strange science of writing.' In a magnetic, irresistible narrative, Cixous reflects on the writing process and explores three distinct areas essential for 'great' writing: _The School of the Dead_--the notion that something or someone must die in order for good writing to be born; _The School of Dreams_--the crucial role dreams play in literary inspiration and output; and _The School of Roots_--the importance of (...) depth in the 'nether realms' in all aspects of writing. Cixous's love of language and passion for the written word is evident on every page. Her emotive style draws heavily on the writers she most admires: the Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector, the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva, the Austrian novelists Ingeborg Bachmann and Thomas Bernhard, Dostoyevsky and, most of all, Kafka. (shrink)

Who can say "I am Jewish?" What does "Jew" mean? What especially does it mean for Jacques Derrida, founder of deconstruction, scoffer at boundaries and fixed identities, explorer of the indeterminate and undecidable? In _Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint_, French feminist philosopher Hélène Cixous follows the intertwined threads of Jewishness and non-Jewishness that play through the life and works of one of the greatest living philosophers. Cixous is a lifelong friend of Derrida. They both grew up (...) as French Jews in Algeria and share a "belonging constituted of exclusion and nonbelonging"--not Algerian, rejected by France, their Jewishness concealed or acculturated. In Derrida's family "one never said 'circumcision'but 'baptism,'not 'Bar Mitzvah'but 'communion.'" Judaism cloaked in Catholicism is one example of the undecidability of identity that influenced the thinker whom Cixous calls a "Jewish Saint." An intellectual contemporary of Derrida, Cixous's ideas on writing have an affinity with his philosophy of deconstruction, which sought to overturn binary oppositions--such as man/woman, or Jew/non-Jew--and blur boundaries of exclusion inherent in Western thought. In portraying Derrida, Cixous uses metonymy, alliteration, rhyme, neologisms, and puns to keep the text in constant motion, freeing language from any rigidity of meaning. In this way she writes a portrait of "Derrida in flight," slipping from one appearance to the next, unable to be fixed in one spot, yet encompassing each point he passes. From the circumcision act to family relationships, through Derrida's works to those of Celan, Rousseau, and Beaumarchais, Cixous effortlessly merges biography and textual commentary in this playful portrait of the man, his works, and being (or not being) Jewish. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Memory and Justice:Narrative Sources of Community in Camus's The First ManJohn Randolph LeBlancThere as a certain frustration involved in trying to find Albert Camus's conception of justice in express positive statements. But inasmuch as Camus saw his work in the trope of journey, his complex set of ideas about justice are to be discerned in the narrative structure of his texts. This is particularly so in his last work, (...) the incomplete autobiographical The First Man.1 In the novel, Camus has his protagonist and fictional self Jacques Cormery seek the sources of his orientation to questions of love and justice by attempting to reconstruct the brief life of a father he never knew. It is in the life reconstructed, chiefly through the recollected memories of those who knew the man that Jacques comes to understand his own responses to questions of love and justice. A necessary by-product of the process is that through his questioning, Jacques recreates a community of which he is a product but, until the journey is undertaken, he has never been a part. His journey is, thus, one of self-discovery and inextricably ties justice to community formation. Camus's last novel, I will argue, suggests the importance of memory and narrative to the fundamental questions of political theory, particularly, questions regarding community-formation and the role and nature of justice.IContemporary reflections on the nature of politics take narrative encounters with reality seriously. The significance of narrative to political theory is, I think, tied to the Augustinian recognition that, temporally speaking, we live forward but learn backwards. It is through reconstructing [End Page 140] our experiences as individuals that we learn about who we are and how we got here. Recent political theory has come to recognize that this epistemological structure works at both the individual and the communal level. Michael Walzer, for example, has suggested that a community's culture is the story its members tell so as to make sense of the different pieces of their social life and justice is the doctrine that distinguishes the pieces.2 But distinguishing the pieces can mean and has meant blocking or restricting our access to that reconstruction. While a time-honored political practice, the impulse to control the contents of the narrative by deeming it unworthy or too dangerous to speak became a self-conscious political practice and a particularly dangerous phenomenon in the last century. Controlling the contents of narrative means control in past, present, and future tense. Memory can become a site of resistance because narrative depends on memory for its points of reference. What gets narrated gets remembered. Most often, what does not get narrated either gets lost or must find another way.Narrative and memory have always been political resources, Joshua Foa Dienstag suggests in his important work on memory and narrative in political theory, but the self-conscious control of them is dangerous.3 At the end of a century wherein we perpetrated much we might be tempted to forget, it is increasingly evident that we must remember before we can speak of justice, that is, our stories must be told and heard before we can reconstitute (or re-member) a functional conception of political community. It is in these terms that I want to talk about narrative and its relationship to political community and justice. But what is silenced is as important as what is articulated. Dienstag, who reads political theory as narrative, suggests that, practically speaking, what we have learned is that memory unarticulated is even more dangerous than memory manipulated. Memory unarticulated either festers and becomes a flashpoint for turmoil or is articulated by an interest for its own ends and becomes a tool of control if not oppression. In either case, memory is bastardized to the ends of power politics and distinguishing between authentic and inauthentic experiences becomes the province of politicians. Leaving these distinctions to politicians, I want to suggest, is risky business. When memory represents the absence of a set of experiences rather than their presence, we are confronted by the end of a community rather than its beginning.All cultures, Walzer suggests, have an interest in... (shrink)

Modality is standardly thought to come in two varieties: de dicto and de re. De re modality concerns the attribution of modal features to things or individuals, and enshrines a commitment to Aristotelian essentialism. This chapter considers how David Lewis's conception of de re modality fits into his overall metaphysics. The hypothesis is that the driving force behind his metaphysics in general, and his adherence to counterpart theory in particular, is the distinctly Humean thought that necessary connections between distinct existences (...) are literally unintelligible. Lewis's appeal to counterpart theory in his account of truthmakers is explicitly aimed at delivering a truthmaker principle that eschews necessary connections. Lewis's attitude towards several well‐rehearsed debates in contemporary ontology and the reasons underlying that attitude closely mirror Hume's incendiary verdict on "divinity and school metaphysics." Finally, de re modality is connected with his adherence to the doctrine of "Humean supervenience". (shrink)

The paper argues that the reconciliation of the Causal Theory of Perception with Disjunctivism requires the rejection of causal particularism – the idea that the ontology of causation is always and everywhere an ontology of particulars (e.g., events). The so-called ‘Humean Principle’ that causes must be distinct from their effects is argued to be a genuine barrier to any purported reconciliation, provided causal particularism is retained; but extensive arguments are provided for the rejection of causal particularism. It is then explained (...) how the reconciliation of the causal theory with disjunctivism can proceed on the basis of an ontology of facts. (shrink)