Building a Responsibility Model to Foster Information Technology: Contributions from Social Sciences

The economic context advocates a better understanding of responsibilities and an enhancement of these responsibilities within a moral perspective. These arising requirements have oriented our research toward the elaboration of an innovative responsibility model. This paper aims at enriching our responsibility model on the basis of a further analysis of these concepts in human sciences literature

Building a Responsibility Model to Foster Information Technology: Contributions from Social Sciences

The economic context advocates a better understanding of responsibilities and an enhancement of these responsibilities within a moral perspective. These arising requirements have oriented our research toward the elaboration of an innovative responsibility model. This paper aims at enriching our responsibility model on the basis of a further analysis of these concepts in human sciences literature

Paul Ricoeur\u27s Hermeneutics of the Self: Living in the Truth

This dissertation focuses on the relationship of selfhood and ethics from the competing philosophical frameworks developed by Paul Ricoeur and Alain Badiou. Seeking “nothing short of a full victory” on the “battlefield” of history, Badiou argues that Ricoeur deceives his readers by hiding the relationship of the self to history. The purpose of this deception is to defend a definition of history that allows for a Providential sense of history whereby the past could be actively forgotten whereby crimes could be forgiven. In this work I examine Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of the self as developed in Oneself as Another (Soi-même comme un autre, 1990) as well as its relationship to his positions regarding memory, history, forgetting, and forgiveness developed in Memory, History, Forgetting (La Mémoir, l’histoir, l’oubi, 2002). Thematically, I focus on the experience of forgiveness for three reasons. First, it is a non-physical experience within a reflective consciousness that connects to our experience of freedom. Secondly, forgiveness is a sufficiently rich experience of ethical evil. Third, forgiveness has a temporal dimension (like that of promising) that informs our understanding of memory as well as human self-identity. Ricoeur’s conceptions of selfhood, history, evil, ethics, and truth will be examined from the critical perspective offered by Badiou. Over the course of this dissertation I demonstrate that Ricoeur provides conceptions of selfhood and history that disarm Badiou’s criticism of Ricoeur by means of a critical analysis of his theory of subjectivity, as well as his conception of ethics

Thought and action

This thesis is concerned with the relation between thought and action. Philosophical accounts of this relation are inevitably based on assumptions about the nature of language. The first purpose of this inquiry is to assess the validity of these assumptions and the cogency of the theories they support. In order to accomplish this it will be necessary, in the first chapter, to discuss a number of general difficulties in the philosophy of language. Th° chapters that follow attempt to show how a particular way of meeting these difficulties has a significant bearing on how the relation between thought and action is to be understood. "human thought", as Geach reminds us, "is both theoretical and practical: we are concerned both with the way things are and with what we ourselves have to do."^^ Our ultimate purpose is to show that the two aspects of thought Geach refers to are related and to indicate how this relationship is possible. Thinking is an intellectual activity and the word "thought" is sometimes used to refer to intellectual activities in general. What divides theories of thought is not disagreement over its intellectual character but rival conceptions of the intellect. Accounts of thought in modern and, in some respects, ancient philosophy complement two contrasting conceptions of mind. For convenience, the terms "internalist" and "externalist" may be used to suggest how these conceptions differ. The internalist conception is an essential feature of the philosophies developed by Descartes and Locke, and the externalist view is exemplified in the work of such different twentieth century philosophers as Wittgenstein and Ryle. In the internalist tradition the mental or intellectual character of thought is elucidated by reference to the idea of privacy, and in the work of Descartes and Locke the privacy of thought is connected with the assumption that the contents of minds are ideas. Locke defined ideas as what the mind is "applied about whilst thinking", by which he meant that ideas are the instruments, materials or vehicles of thought. On this account thoughts are mental acts involving ideas in various ways. Although Locke's account of thought and language and the relation between thought and action is defective there are a number of assumptions in his philosophy which, if interpreted correctly, suggest how our discussion ought to proceed. In order to bring out the difficulties in Locke's account, and to justify the interpretation we believe it requires, his work will be discussed in considerable detail. Locke has been chosen as a representative of internalism in preference to Descartes because a consideration of the latter's excessively generous interpretation of thought to cover all forms of consciousness falls outside the scope of our inquiry. It is now common to describe thought more specifically, mainly by reference to the notions of reflection, deliberation and rationality. We shall follow this practice, although it is worth mentioning that there are philosophers who still regard "thought" as a general term covering a wide range of mental states anil processes

Psychoanalysis and the law beyond the Oedipus : a study in legal fictions.

PhDThe present thesis considers the function of law in the political from the perspective of psychoanalysis, a discipline which foregrounds the subject. Drawing from the Lacanian contributions to psychoanalytic theory, I begin by assessing the validity of the Oedipal hypothesis for the purposes of understanding the dynamics of collective life. My analysis of civilisation in psychoanalytic terms will expose the subject as the seat of 'certain key phenomena which, despite their deeply intimate character, play themselves out in the field of law, in the confines of the institution, or again in the political realm: essentially, culpability, belief and love. I will argue that, although these phenomena irretrievably obstruct the rational unfolding of discourse, they also impel the precipitation of the subject's attachment to the political, and permit the consolidation thereof through the medium of transference. Yet, and in contradistinction to other strands of psychoanalytic jurisprudence, in this work psychoanalysis will be used neither as an hermeneutic tool nor as an analogical model. Indeed, my purpose is to evidence the existence of a certain continuity between the unconscious as discourse and the political order. This continuity between the unconscious and the political will be presented in terms of the logic of exception, which structures the subject's relation to language, and which Lacan identified as the structural core of the Oedipus complex. I will then apply Lacan's hypothesis of the exceptional structure of discourse to the theories of three political thinkers, chosen for the distinctness of their approach: Legendre, Bentham and Foucault. Finally, I will argue for the dispensability of the function of the Ideal, parasitic occupier of what should remain the structurally `empty' place of exception

Revelation of the Trinity: Karl Rahner's position and an evangelical alternative

The widely accepted Grundaxiom of Karl Rahner's doctrine of the Trinity, "The economic Trinity is the immanent Trinity and vice versa," functions in contemporary theology as a means of reconciling the seemingly contradictory claims: (a) that God has revealed the doctrine of the Trinity to the church; and (b) that he has not disclosed this doctrine verbally in Scripture. Rahner's Grundaxiom, that is to say, serves to legitimate theological reflection on the Trinity that does not presuppose a pre-Enlightenment understanding of Scriptural revelation.In our dissertation, however, we argue: (a) that Rahner's Grundaxiom does not cohere with certain elements of Rahner's own theology; (b) that the Grundaxiom entails conclusions inconsistent with what Rahner regards as Trinitarian orthodoxy; and (c) that a pre-Enlightenment understanding of Scripture, by contrast, constitutes a reasonable foundation for Rahner's ideal of Trinitarian orthodoxy. We conclude, therefore (d) that, barring the possibility of some third foundation for the theology of the Trinity, Rahner's doctrine of the Trinity itself presupposes a pre-Enlightenment conception of Scriptural revelation

By indirections find directions out : thinkable worlds in Abbott and Vonnegut

[À l'origine dans / Was originally part of : Thèses et mémoires - FAS - Département de littérature comparée]This thesis is concerned with the interaction between literature and abstract thought. More specifically, it studies the epistemological charge of the literary, the type of knowledge that is carried by elements proper to fictional narratives into different disciplines. By concentrating on two different theoretical methods, the creation of thought experiments and the framing of possible worlds, methods which were elaborated and are still used today in spheres as varied as modal logics, analytic philosophy and physics, and by following their reinsertion within literary theory, the research develops the theory that both thought experiments and possible worlds are in fact short narrative stories that inform knowledge through literary means. By using two novels, Abbott’s Flatland and Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan, that describe extra-dimensional existence in radically different ways, respectively as a phenomenologically unknowable space and as an outward perspective on time, it becomes clear that literature is constitutive of the way in which worlds, fictive, real or otherwise, are constructed and understood. Thus dimensions, established through extensional analogies as either experimental knowledge or modal possibility for a given world, generate new directions for thought, which can then take part in the inductive/deductive process of scientia. By contrasting the dimensions of narrative with the way that dimensions were historically constituted, the research also establishes that the literary opens up an infinite potential of abstract space-time domains, defined by their specific rules and limits, and that these different experimental folds are themselves partaking in a dimensional process responsible for new forms of understanding. Over against science fiction literary theories of speculation that posit an equation between the fictive and the real, this thesis examines the complex structure of many overlapping possibilities that can organise themselves around larger compossible wholes, thus offering a theory of reading that is both non-mimetic and non-causal. It consequently examines the a dynamic process whereby literature is always reconceived through possibilities actualised by reading while never defining how the reader will ultimately understand the overarching structure. In this context, the thesis argues that a causal story can be construed out of any one interaction with a given narrative—underscoring, for example, the divinatory strength of a particular vision of the future—even as this narrative represents only a fraction of the potential knowledge of any particular literary text. Ultimately, the study concludes by tracing out how novel comprehensions of the literary, framed by the material conditions of their own space and time, endlessly renew themselves through multiple interactions, generating analogies and speculations that facilitate the creation of new knowledge.Cette thèse se penche sur l’interaction entre la littérature et la pensée abstraite. Plus spécifiquement, elle étudie la charge épistémologique du littéraire, le type de savoir qui est transporté par des éléments propres aux narrations fictives vers d’autres champs disciplinaires. En ce concentrant sur deux méthodes théoriques, la création d’expériences de pensée et l’établissement de mondes possibles, des méthodes qui ont été élaborées et sont toujours d’usage aujourd’hui dans des disciplines aussi variées que la logique modale, la philosophie analytique et la physique, et en suivant leur réinsertion à même la théorie littéraire, la recherche développe la postulat que les expériences de pensée et les mondes possibles sont en fait de courtes histoires narratives qui informent le savoir par des moyens littéraire. En utilisant Flatland de Abbott et The Sirens of Titan de Vonnegut, deux romans qui décrivent l’existence extra-dimensionnelle de façons radicalement différentes, un espace phénoménologiquement inconnaissable chez Abbott et une perspective extérieure au temps chez Vonnegut, il devient clair que la littérature est constitutive de la façon qu’un monde— qu’il soit fictif, réel ou autre—est construit et compris. Ainsi, les dimensions établies par des analogies extensionnelles génèrent de nouvelles directions pour la pensée, qui peut ensuite prendre part au processus inductif/déductif de la scientia. En contrastant les dimensions narratives avec la notion de dimension telle qu’elle s’est constituée historiquement, la recherche établit également que le littéraire ouvre un potentiel infini de domaines spatiotemporels abstraits, définis par leurs règles et leurs limites spécifiques, et que ces différents plis expérimentaux prennent eux-mêmes part dans un processus dimensionnel responsable pour de nouvelles formes de compréhensions. Au-delà des théories spéculatives qu’on retrouve dans l’étude de la science-fiction, où est mise de l’avant une équation entre le fictif et le réel, cette thèse examine la structure complexe de plusieurs possibilités superposées qui peuvent s’organiser autour d’ensembles compossibles plus importants, ainsi offrant une théorie de la lecture qui est à la fois non- mimétique et non-causale. En conséquence, l’investigation examine un processus dynamique par lequel la littérature est toujours reconsidérée au travers des possibilités qui sont actualisées par la lecture, alors qu’elle ne définit jamais la compréhension ultime que le lecteur ou la lectrice se fera de la structure globale du texte. Dans ce contexte, la thèse argumente qu’une histoire causale peut être créée à partir de n’importe quelle interaction avec le texte— soulignant, par exemple, la force divinatoire d’une vision du futur particulière—même si cette narration ne représente qu’une fraction du savoir potentiel contenu à l’intérieur de n’importe quel texte littéraire particulier. Ultimement, l’étude conclut en décrivant comment de nouvelles compréhensions du texte, encadrées par les conditions matérielles de leur propre espace et temps, se renouvellent sans cesse grâce à des interactions multiples, ainsi générant des analogies et des spéculations qui facilitent la création de nouveaux savoirs