Piccola filosofia dell'e enuniciazone

Mi sono sovente domandato, contemplando il Fregio mutilo del Partenone, attraverso la nuvola nera dell'inquinamento o nella sala del British Museum - dove sono conservati i marmi di Lord Elgin - a che cosa assomiglierebbe una moderna processione delle Panatee. Quali sarebbero i nostri rappresentanti? Di quanti generi o specie sarebbero composti? A quale etichetta obbedirebbe la loro disposizione? Verso quali vaste mura confluirebbero? Quanti fra loro avrebbero forma umana? Se dovessero parlare, giurare o fare sacrifici in comune, da quali riti civili o religiosi sarebbero chiamati a raccolta e su quale agorà? (...)

Introduction : Paris, invisible city: The plasma

Everything in the city remains invisible, everything and, over and above everything, the city taken as a whole. One might say that we now have satellite maps enabling us to zoom in on every level, so conveniently that in a few clicks we can switch from the entire Ile-de-France to the roof of our building. We do therefore have the right, for once, with regard to Google Earth or the National Geo- graphic Institute’s site, to talk of a panopticon, since we ‘‘embrace the entire city’’ and are able, at the same time, to keep delving down into its minutest detail (...)

A Textbook Case Revisited. Knowledge as mode of existence

The paper starts by a visit to an exhibit at the Natural History Museum in New York which shows in parallel series of fossils of horse evolution and series of how paleontologists have varied in their reconstruction of this evolution. It is the occasion to test again an argument at the heart of science studies and history of science : is there a history of science ideas about nature, or also a history of the objects known by science. If the latter is the case, then do we have the philosophical ressource to think this change of conception through ? Using James, Fleck, Whitehead and more recent science studies results, the paper tries to « desepistemologize » knowledge on the one hand while « reontologizing » it on the other

The Promises of constructivism

Constructivism is a much abused word. But since Ian Hacking has done a review of some of his meanings, an effort is made to see how it can be rescued from the disrepute of 'social constructivism'. Special stress is put on the metaphors of construction and on the models of action implied by its construction and on the models of action implied by its different meanings. An alternative is offered to the classification offered by Hacking and a strong contrast is established between construction and deconstruction

La société comme possession : la preuve par l’orchestre

Si l’on considère la société telle qu’on la représente usuellement, la phrase est dénuée de sens : ce que je possède, vous ne le possédez sûrement pas puisque ce qui est « à moi » n’est pas « à vous ». C’est même ce qui permet de définir la propriété au sens d’exclusivité. Tarde envisagerait-il une sorte de communisme où nous serions tous, en quelque sorte, les possédants en indivision de toutes les propriétés dans lesquelles nous pourrions puiser en fonction de nos besoins ? Ce qui ferait de chacun de nous les possédés par tous les autres qui pourraient, par un retour à cet état de nature que Hobbes a décrit avec effroi, se saisir à volonté de « nos » biens —lesquels seraient aussi bien « à eux » ? (...

Tarde’s idea of quantification

Even though Tarde is said to have had a literary view of social science, he himself was deeply involved in statistics (especially criminal statistics) and took an essentially quantitative view of social phenomena. What is so paradoxical in his view of quantification is that it relies not only on the aggregates but also on the individual element. The paper reviews this paradox, the reason why Tarde was son intent on finding a quantitative grasp for establishing the social sciences and relates the type of data Tarde envisioned with the peculiar new types of information available today in digital formats, datascapes that might vindicate many insights that seemed so odd at the time of Tarde

Politics of Nature: East and West Perspectives

On the one hand, ‘nature’ in relation to ecological issues has become increasingly present in the political agendas of rich and poor nations is obvious to anyone who cares to read the newspapers. But nature has also entered the political realm in another and more troublesome sense

The Powers of Fac Similes: a Turing Test on Science and Literature

The shift from first to second empiricism, requires a new way of handling the empiricism of ‘things’ instead of the empiricism of ‘objects’. To acquire the proper literary resources to do so, it’s useful to turn toward the great American Richard Powers and lift out of its novels some of the tool to present again the connections between characters and technical or scientific entities. But the task is even more interesting when those resources are then used to read again a classic of scientific literature, in this case Alan Turing famous article from the 50s where he imagines his famous test. By comparing those two texts, one explicitly literary and the other implicitly so, a common vocabulary might be emerging for realism

Reflections on Etienne Souriau’s Les différents modes d'existence

In a totally forgotten book, Etienne Souriau, a mid 20th century philosopher had very daringly proposed to tackle straight on the question of the plurivocity of being not, as is so often the case in the history of philosophy, by offering variations on the one central mode –that is knowledge- but by insisting that there might exist entirely different modes. Feeding on the key notion that prepositions too are given in experience, as James said, it is one of the most extraordinary enterprises to give flesh to James’ notion of pluriverse. Since the notion of mode of existence is so germane to the notion of regimes of enunciation, a close reading of Souriau’s book is called for

Networks, Societies, Spheres: Reflections of an Actor-Network Theorist

Keynote speech for the Second International Seminar On Network Theory: Network Multidimensionality In The Digital Age