1,721,056 research outputs found
Of Immediate Apperception
No full textWritten when Maine de Biran was coming into his philosophical maturity, in 1807, 'Of Immediate Apperception' was the first complete statement of his own philosophy of the will. It was the winning entry to a competition organised by the Berlin Académie des Sciences et Belles-Lettres on the subject of self-awareness and of the possibility of an 'immediate apperception' of the self. It contains the core of Biran's philosophy of effort, as it is developed in dialogue with the tradition of British empiricism in particular. Notably, it is in this work that Biran first reflects on the 'lived body' and it marks the moment in which he fully accomplishes his break away from Condillac and the Ideological school. With enlightening critical apparatus, including an editor's introduction, glossary, and bibliography, the publication of this edition shows how Biran's work is pivotal for the development of French philosophy, and makes clear his influence on the later writings of Ravaisson and Bergson
The Concrete and the Abstract in Modern French Philosophy
No full textIn 1929, Georges Politzer, a young high-school professor of philosophy, and then director of the short-lived Revue de psychologie concrete (1929–1930), declared, in his famous pamphlet La fin d’une parade philosophique: le bergsonisme [The End of a Philosophical Parade: Bergsonism], that the notion of the concrete had become ‘la tarte à la crème’, that is, the buzz of the moment in French academia. Politzer (2013) added, disgusted, that even ‘reactionary’ and ‘hateful’ philosophers would simulate ‘emotion in front of the concrete’, while they were just producing empty and abstract concepts. He was of course alluding to his arch-enemy Henri Bergson, but also to his admirers Jean Wahl and Gabriel Marcel, who used the term extensively during the 1920s. A year before, in his Critique of the Fundaments of Psychology, Politzer (1994) had opposed his project of a ‘concrete psychology’ to the abstractions of French philosophy and psychology, which often presented itself as ‘concrete.’ Politzer’s remarks were prophetic: during the following two decades, the term ‘concrete’ became a buzzword and was used by authors from the political left and right, including Hegelians, phenomenologists, existentialists, Marxists, and personalist Catholics
Life: Modern French Philosophy and the Life Sciences
No full textIn France, from the early nineteenth century, the interaction between what today we call the life sciences and philosophy provoked several important controversies. They resulted in the mutation of ideas about biological and human life; in the transformation of the disciplines of philosophy and medicine; and in the emergence of new disciplines, such as neurophysi- ology, psychopathology, biology, anthropology, and psychology. Compared to simultaneous transformations in Germany, the interactions in France, took a peculiar form, since they depended on the specific division of intellectual labour inside the universities, which had been reformed by Napoleon in 1806.1 Philosophy was taught as an independent discipline in the last year of secondary education (the so-called ‘classe terminale’ of the ‘lycées’) and, in universities, in the framework of the Faculty of Letters (Faculté des Lettres), which was neatly separated from the four other faculties of Theology, Law, Science, and Medicine. The most important scientific breakthroughs in the life sciences were produced by physicians, trained and/or teaching in the Faculty of Medicine (see Huguet, 1991), and, to a much lesser extent, by scholars trained/or teaching in the Faculty of Science. Philosophers and physicians fre- quently competed for the monopoly over topics that they shared, and colleagues across faculties would thus interfere in each other’s work. This conflictual interaction, which often involved the appropriation and re-use of texts from the history of knowledge, resulted in the epistemological reframing of scientific theories and in the readjustment of philosophical concepts under the pressure of empirical evidence.
This chapter analyses the five most important sequences of these interactions from the beginning of the process of disciplinarization (see Roger, 1997, for a study of the previous period). The first section, which spans 1830 to 1852, focuses on the strategies adopted by philosophers in order to defend their area of competence, namely the ‘moral’ part of man, from the physicians’ attempts to naturalize human cognition and behaviour. The second section analyses how, between 1855 and 1864, philosophers were involved in controversies concerning both the difference between human and biological life and between biological life and inanimate matter. The third section shows how Claude Bernard’s Introduction à l’étude de la médecine expérimentale [Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine] (1864) pushed philosophers to adopt a more cautious approach, avoiding claims about the nature of life. The fourth section concerns the limited fortune of the theory of evolution and the rejection of social Darwinism by philosophers and sociologists between 1865 and 1920. Finally, the fifth section exposes two apparently contradictory developments: on the one hand a growing attention towards the history of the transformation of biological concepts and theories, and, on the other hand, the return to bolder metaphysical claims about the nature of life and organisms
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
- …
