L'Essai sur la Métaphysique d'Aristote fut composé à partir de 1834 et eut pour occasion une question de concours lancée par l'Académie des sciences morales et politiques. Il s'agissait de faire connaître l'énigmatique et glorieux chef-d'œuvre aristotélicien, la Métaphysique, d'en exposer la pensée, d'en faire l'histoire, d'en discuter la portée et les thèses. C'est un tout jeune homme, Félix Ravaisson (1813-1900), qui allait remporter le prix de l'Académie en 1835, à vingt-deux ans, et qui allait publier quelques mois plus tard, (...) en 1837, dans un premier volume, cet extraordinaire mémoire, qu'un second tome viendra compléter en 1845. La valeur de l'Essai sur la Métaphysique d'Aristote est inestimable, et c'est pourquoi sa réimpression était urgente. Hormis la grandiose lecture d'Aristote qu'il propose et dont la très élégante clarté sera sans nul doute appréciée de chaque personne désirant découvrir ou approfondir la connaissance de cette pensée fondamentale et fondatrice, cet ouvrage est une oeuvre d'art dans un domaine où l'on ne s'y attend pas ou plus, celui du commentaire philosophique. Et il ne serait pas trop audacieux de voir dans l'Essai sur la Métaphysique d'Aristote l'acte inaugural de cette grande tradition de restitution où, chacun se faisant pleinement connivent de l'auteur qu'il se choisit, fait également oeuvre d'écrivain en se mettant au service d'une expression privilégiée de la pensée : là où la pensée s'est faite somptueuse, ici en Aristote, l'exposition de celle-ci, en en rendant la cohérence, ne doit pas l'être moins. (shrink)

Mon corps est-il un objet parmi d'autres dans l'espace ou bien crée-t-il l'étendue qu'il perçoit jusqu'à l'écho des étoiles? À quelle spatialité suis-je assujetti pour être relié de l'intérieur au monde et aux autres corps qui m'entourent? Les dimensions de l'espace sont-elles des coordonnées de la matière morte ou sont-elles des variations modales de mon esprit? C'est à la découverte de la spatialité du corps vivant que nous invite Guy-Félix Duportail dans son Analytique de la chair. il nous apprend, entre (...) autres, que la phénoménologie et la psychanalyse se rencontrent en ces lieux de la chair suivant des principes topologiques communs. Guy-Félix Duportail dessine le schéma intérieur de la subjectivité comme se donnant à l'extérieur, dans le monde. La subjectivité incarnée se retourne comme un gant et se retrouve ainsi exposée au-dehors, dans son sinthome, comme disait Lacan, dans son implexe, comme disait Merleau-Ponty. Dans tous les cas, elle se réalise dans une création réparatrice de son mal-être. L'immanence est donc dans la transcendance, et l'espace-temps se réfléchit dans la chair, dans les tourbillons de sa jouissance. La présente Analytique de la chair révèle qu'un corps sans organes (Deleuze et Guattari) est certes moins qu'un noeud, mais demeure plus qu'un emmêlement, et qu'une chair sublime mais sans corps (Levinas, Henry) ne fait du visage qu'un masque, et de la Vie glorieuse du Moi qu'un éloge de la pulsion de mort. (shrink)

La publication au printemps 2005 d'un livre au titre provocateur, Heidegger/l'introduction du nazisme dans la philosophie, n'aurait guère suscité, chez tous ceux qui connaissent quelque peu la pensée du philosophe, d'autre réaction que le silence si l'ouvrage en question, grâce à une campagne soigneusement orchestrée, n'avait été salué par les médias dominants comme un travail sérieux et objectif. C'est la raison pour laquelle il s'imposait de montrer publiquement à quel point la tentative de porter si gravement atteinte à une pensée (...) considérable n'a été possible qu'en contrevenant aux principes auxquels doit se plier tout travail philosophique digne de ce nom. Heidegger, à plus forte raison se comprend donc d'abord comme une réplique. Ses auteurs prouvent, pièces en main et en observant scrupuleusement les règles strictes de la critique, que la thèse scandaleuse se réduit en réalité à un tissu d'approximations, d'erreurs, de contresens dont le ressort ultime est ce type d'incompréhension que provoque une malveillance compulsive. Compte tenu du soutien médiatique apporté à une accusation aussi extrême, il était indispensable que cette mise au point fût faite. Mais il reste l'essentiel, qui est d'exposer positivement l'importance du travail de pensée que Heidegger nous a laissé à poursuivre. Car cette pensée, n'en déplaise à ses contempteurs, est probablement, encore à ce jour, l'une des seules capables de nous permettre de faire face à un nihilisme dont le déferlement est loin d'avoir pris fin avec l'effondrement du nazisme en 1945. (shrink)

This paper argues that Kierkegaard is not an irrationalist, but a "responsible fideist." Responsible fideism attempts to answer two important philosophical questions: "Are there limits to reason?" and "How can the limits of reason be recognized?" Kierkegaard's account of the incarnation as "the absolute paradox" does not see the incarnation as a logical contradiction, but rather functions in a way similar to a Kantian antimony. Faith in the incarnation both helps us recognize the limits of reason and also to a (...) degree overcomes those limits. /// O artigo defende que Kierkegaard não é um irracionalista, mas antes um "fideísta responsável". Como tal, o "fideísmo responsável" tenta responder a duas questões fllosóficas particularmente importantes: "Existem limites para a razão?" e "Como podem os limites da razão ser reconhecidos?" Na sua interpretação da incarnação como "paradoxo absoluto", Kierkegaard não interpreta a incarnação como uma contradição lógica, mas antes a vê funcionando de um modo similar à antinomia kantiana. Fé na incarnação ajuda-nos não só a reconhecer os limites da razão, mas também nos ajuda, pelo menos até um certo ponto, a ultrapassar estes limites. (shrink)

¿Existe una incompatibilidad estructural entre fe religiosa y logos filosófico? Así parecen darlo por supuesto diversas orientaciones filosóficas de la modernidad. Sin embargo, el cristianismo ha convivido desde siempre con la filosofía, la ha acogido y cultivado. Carlos Díaz presenta en este breve trabajo la sintonía profunda que se da en la concreción real del ser humano entre el logos filosófico y el propio de la experiencia religiosa.

"_The Moment of Complexity_ is a profoundly original work. In remarkable and insightful ways, Mark Taylor traces an entirely new way to view the evolution of our culture, detailing how information theory and the scientific concept of complexity can be used to understand recent developments in the arts and humanities. This book will ultimately be seen as a classic."-John L. Casti, Santa Fe Institute, author of _Gödel: A Life of Logic, the Mind, and Mathematics_ The science of complexity accounts for (...) that inscrutable mix of chaos and order that governs our natural world. Complexity explains how networks emerge and function, how species organize into ecosystems, how stars form into galaxies, and how just a few sequences of DNA can account for so many different life forms. Recently, the idea of complexity has taken the worlds of business and politics by storm. The concept is used to account for phenomena as varied as the behavior of the stock market, the response of voting populations, and the effects of risk management. Even Disney has used complexity theory to manage crowd control at its theme parks. Given the startling development of new information technologies, we now live in a moment of unprecedented complexity, an era in which change occurs faster than our ability to comprehend it. With _The Moment of Complexity_, Mark C. Taylor offers a timely map for this unfamiliar terrain opening in our midst, unfolding an original philosophy through a remarkable synthesis of science and culture. According to Taylor, complexity is not just a breakthrough scientific concept, but the defining quality of the post-Cold War era. The flux of digital currents swirling around us, he argues, has created a new network culture with its own distinctive logic and dynamic. Drawing on resources from information theory and evolutionary biology, Taylor explains the operation of complex adaptive systems in social and cultural processes and captures a whole new zeitgeist in the making. To appreciate the significance of our emerging network culture, he claims, we need not only to understand contemporary scientific and technological transformations, but also to explore the subtle influences of art, architecture, philosophy, religion, and higher education. _The Moment of Complexity_, then, is a remarkable work of cultural analysis on a scale rarely seen today. To follow its trajectory is to learn how we arrived at this critical moment in our culture, and to know where we might head in the twenty-first century. (shrink)

This article analyzes ‘commemorative’ images of Diana Spencer for how they invoke tropes of charity and sympathy to produce racialized mediations of history, memory, motherhood and US national identity. Drawing from cultural theory that establishes technologies of memory and forgetting as material forces, this discussion illumines how images of Diana appearing in such popular US magazines as People and Life incorporate visual scripts of race and sentiment that have historically demarcated the relative social value(s) of maternity and reproduction. Understanding visual (...) culture as a force that is both structured by and structuring of hierarchies of power enables us to see how the posthumous circulation of images of ‘Our Princess’ are indeed not ideologically innocent memorializations. Rather, these images are the physical, embodied material of a national monument that provides faithful ‘visitors’ an affective connection to historically idealized notions of whiteness, motherhood, and the family. (shrink)

Las reflexiones recogidas en este volumen constituyeron, en su mayor parte, el contenido del Seminario de Semántica celebrado en la Universidad de Oviedo, y uno de los textos ("Léxico y cognición: ¿hay términos de base?") formó parte del programa de conferencias de Año Europeo de las Lenguas. Conforme al espíritu de esas jornadas centradas en la pluralidad lingüística, esta publicación se hace simultáneamente en dos lenguas: español y francés. Aunque se tomen como referencia aspectos concretos de dos lenguas concretas, la (...) española y la francesa, los problemas que aquí se suscitan son de índole general, ya que afectan, y de manera crucial, a todas las lenguas. (shrink)

An increasing number of research teams are investigating the efficacy of brain-computer interface (BCI)-mediated interventions for promoting motor recovery following stroke. A growing body of evidence suggests that of the various BCI designs, most effective are those that deliver functional electrical stimulation (FES) of upper extremity (UE) muscles contingent on movement intent. More specifically, BCI-FES interventions utilize algorithms that isolate motor signals—user-generated intent-to-move neural activity recorded from cerebral cortical motor areas—to drive electrical stimulation of individual muscles or muscle synergies. BCI-FES (...) interventions aim to recover sensorimotor function of an impaired extremity by facilitating and/or inducing long-term motor learning-related neuroplastic changes in appropriate control circuitry. We developed a non-invasive, electroencephalogram (EEG)-based BCI-FES system that delivers closed-loop neural activity-triggered electrical stimulation of targeted distal muscles while providing the user with multimodal sensory feedback. This BCI-FES system consists of three components: (1) EEG acquisition and signal processing to extract real-time volitional and task-dependent neural command signals from cerebral cortical motor areas, (2) FES of muscles of the impaired hand contingent on the motor cortical neural command signals, and (3) multimodal sensory feedback associated with performance of the behavioral task, including visual information, linked activation of somatosensory afferents through intact sensorimotor circuits, and electro-tactile stimulation of the tongue. In this report, we describe device parameters and intervention protocols of our BCI-FES system which, combined with standard physical rehabilitation approaches, has proven efficacious in treating UE motor impairment in stroke survivors, regardless of level of impairment and chronicity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:When an Arab Laughs in Toledo: Cervantes’s Interpellation of Early Modern Spanish OrientalismE. C. Graf (bio)My purpose has been to place in the plaza of our republic a game table which everyone can approach to entertain themselves without fear of being harmed by the rods; by which I mean without harm to spirit or body, because honest and agreeable exercises are always more likely to do good than harm.—Miguel (...) de Cervantes Saavedra, Prologue to Novelas ejemplares [my translation]We are engaged in a technical enterprise at the species scale.—Jacques Lacan, “L’agressivité en psychanalyse” [my translation]While I was all intent on watching him, he looked at me, and with his hands he spread his chest and said: “See how I split myself!”!—Dante Alighieri, Inferno 28.28–30 Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 1.Sandro Botticelli, The Virgin and Child (c. 1490). Courtesy of the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University; ©1999 President and Fellows of Harvard College. Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 2.Salvador Dalí, Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate One Second Before Awakening (1941). Courtesy of Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid; ©1999 Artists' Rights Society (ARS), New York.For much of this century, Hispanists have labored in an effort to elevate Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha (1605, 1615) to the coveted status of the “first modern novel.” Today this kind of criticism may strike our postmodern sensibilities as a rather traditional enterprise, the kind more interested in establishing an elite hierarchy of literary tastes than in saying anything new about an author or text. For many, the study of literature is still an aesthetic beauty pageant in which “great books” like Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1767) or Marie de la Vergne de La Fayette’s La princesse de Clèves (1678) are paraded across the stage in a contest to seduce the Western intelligentsia. 1 The postmodern student of literature may not have much concern for this age-old territorial contest, but she might be interested to learn that the fallout from Hispanism’s quest for the “first modern novel” has involved so much attention to, indeed complication of, Don Quixote, that the book now resembles more a postmodern text than an early modern one. At the turn of the century, we have been left with what Jorge Luis Borges would recognize as an “aleph”: an infinite ideological labyrinth that reflects and/or cannibalizes all forms, thereby escaping all attempts [End Page 68] to describe it. 2 Whatever we currently mean by “Cervantes” (an author, a collection of texts, an ideological construction, and so forth) carries with it an impressive range of critical responses. Cervantes has been labeled converso (Castro, Canavaggio), Christian humanist (Castro, Bataillon, Forcione, Herrero, Vilanova), disillusioned secularist (Lukács, Cascardi), precapitalist (Johnson), anti-essentialist (Wilson), anti-Eusebian (Presberg), Menippean (Bakhtin), feminist (El Saffar, Rabin, Cruz), sadist (Nabokov), ethnocentric imperialist (Mariscal), medieval (Gorfkle), homophobic (Martín), non-organicist Aristotelian (Read), and either discursively or actually homosexual (Combet, Rossi, Smith, Arrabal). This list is nowhere near complete, but the reader will grasp the robust effects of the plurality of perspectives on Cervantes.Each of these interpretations is valid to varying degrees within various contexts, but at present I am interested in reading Cervantes as the author of a multicultural manifesto on behalf of the Moriscos of Southern Spain. 3 Within the contexts of French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser and Palestinian postcolonial literary critic Edward Said, materialist, postcolonial, and multicultural critiques of various forms of power and their ideologies can be seen as the fundamental propositions of Cervantes’s Don Quixote. 4 Cervantes’s ultimate orientation may perhaps be inescapably Eurocentric, but his responses to the European experience of the rise and expansion of an ethnocentric militaristic nation state are relatively centrifugal when compared to the attitudes of many of his contemporaries.In surveying some of the antihegemonic details of Cervantes’s novel, I am also interested in dispelling the popular myth of Don Quixote. Especially in the English-speaking world, and particularly in the United States, Don Quixote remains captive to a... (shrink)

The main purpose of this article consists in discussing the idea of moral responsibility in Abraham’s case as it is put forward in Fear and Trembling. With this idea in mind, the notion of ethical heteronomy that the author defends is opposed to kantian ethical autonomy. From this viewpoint, religious sacrifice not only cannot but also must not be ethically justified. The discussion is developed considering Kierkegaard’s ideas from the perspective of different contemporary ethical theories.

This work highlights the faith of Jesus as a response to the affiliate relationship between the Father and the Son. This intimate union, characterized by the word Abba, reveals that the very existence of Jesus took place in the bosom of the Father and it was developed in the intimacy with Him. It is in thi.s loving bosom of the Father that, from the beginning, Jesus constitutes the consciousness of a God who is close, loving and able to hear the (...) cries of his people. The Lordship of God is crystallized in the actions of Jesus through the proclamation of the Kingdom. The force that makes Jesus embrace the plan of God is the Spirit, making Jesus desirous and able to carry out the will of the Father. (shrink)

Em sua obra principal, o bispo franciscano Álvaro Pais elenca as principais heresias contra a fé cristã. Reserva uma parte significativa a combater três “erros” de Marsílio de Pádua: as afirnações de que o papa pode ser julgado pelo imperador, que o poder do papa não é superior ao de qualquer presbitero e que, morto o papa, o poder retorna ao imperador. Estuda-se a maneira como tais afirmações são refutadas e conclui-se que Álvaro não dispunha do texto marsiliano, e sim (...) de reportação do mesmo e que repete nessa obra o que já escrevera em outra. (shrink)

Motor training to improve walking and balance function is a common aspect of rehabilitation following motor-incomplete spinal cord injury. Evidence suggests that moderate- to high-intensity exercise facilitates neuroplastic mechanisms that support motor skill acquisition and learning. Furthermore, enhancing corticospinal drive via transcranial direct current stimulation may augment the effects of motor training. In this pilot study, we investigated whether a brief moderate-intensity locomotor-related motor skill training circuit, with and without tDCS, improved walking and balance outcomes in persons with MISCI. In (...) addition, we examined potential differences between within-day and between-day effects of MST. Twenty-six adults with chronic MISCI, who had some walking ability, were enrolled in a 5-day double-blind, randomized study with a 3-day intervention period. Participants were assigned to an intensive locomotor MST circuit and concurrent application of either sham tDCS or active tDCS. The primary outcome was overground walking speed measured during the 10-meter walk test. Secondary outcomes included spatiotemporal gait characteristics, peak trailing limb angle, intralimb coordination, the Berg Balance Scale, and the Falls Efficacy Scale-International questionnaire. Analyses revealed a significant effect of the MST circuit, with improvements in walking speed, cadence, bilateral stride length, stronger limb TLA, weaker limb ACC, BBS, and FES-I observed in both the MST+tDCSsham and MST+tDCS groups. No differences in outcomes were observed between groups. Between-day change accounted for a greater percentage of the overall change in walking outcomes. In persons with MISCI, brief intensive MST involving a circuit of ballistic, cyclic locomotor-related skill activities improved walking outcomes, and selected strength and balance outcomes; however, concurrent application of tDCS did not further enhance the effects of MST.Clinical Trial Registration[ClinicalTrials.gov], identifier [NCT03237234]. (shrink)