Domocracy, intellectuals and the state: the case of Albania

Bibliography: p. 154-16

Technetium 99m et 95m. Complexe techneties; etudes cinetique et thermodynamique

SIGLEAvailable from INIST (FR), Document Supply Service, under shelf-number : T 83186 / INIST-CNRS - Institut de l'Information Scientifique et TechniqueFRFranc

Konservatismus

Konservatismus und Liberalismus verfolgen dasselbe politische Ziel: eine „Verfassung der Freiheit“ mit repräsentativen Institutionen, Rechtsstaatlichkeit, Gewaltenteilung und einem Grundrechtekatalog für alle Bürgerinnen und Bürger

Rethinking political foundations with Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt and Eric Voegelin

The problem of understanding political foundings is situated at the nexus between political philosophy and political science. This thesis rethinks founding by asking both the philosophical question of how political order comes into being, and the political science question of how to understand particular founding moments. These two questions stimulate and structure a dialogue between the works of Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt and Eric Voegelin. The approach of founding in all three has a common starting point: they begin from ordinary experience and outline a political science that is mindful of the phenomenality of political life. I show that Strauss’s return to ordinary experience is partial. By limiting political life to the normative claims raised in it and submitting them to philosophical judgment, Strauss moves too quickly beyond political phenomena. His account of founding, as a consequence, vacillates between understanding particular founding acts and conceiving the perfect founding moment in abstract thought. Arendt’s work decisively shifts the problem on the side of practical understanding. Yet, her ontological account of action as appearance subtly displaces her concern for understanding historical actions. I move away from approaching historical foundings as a mode of appearing in the world, by recovering an account of action as experience. On that basis, I suggest a hermeneutics of experience which approaches foundings in light of the quest for meaning. With Voegelin founding is recovered as a symbol that exists only in the quest of understanding. Founding occurs in the experience of struggle to restore a reality that has become symbolically opaque. This experience is shared by the philosopher and the political actor; therefore to understand moments of founding requires the interweaving, and not separation, of political philosophy and political science. At the end, the quest of understanding founding moments is neither derivative, nor preparatory, but encompassing the philosophical question of how order comes into being.</p

Rethinking political foundations with Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt and Eric Voegelin

The problem of understanding political foundings is situated at the nexus between political philosophy and political science. This thesis rethinks founding by asking both the philosophical question of how political order comes into being, and the political science question of how to understand particular founding moments. These two questions stimulate and structure a dialogue between the works of Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt and Eric Voegelin. The approach of founding in all three has a common starting point: they begin from ordinary experience and outline a political science that is mindful of the phenomenality of political life. I show that Strauss’s return to ordinary experience is partial. By limiting political life to the normative claims raised in it and submitting them to philosophical judgment, Strauss moves too quickly beyond political phenomena. His account of founding, as a consequence, vacillates between understanding particular founding acts and conceiving the perfect founding moment in abstract thought. Arendt’s work decisively shifts the problem on the side of practical understanding. Yet, her ontological account of action as appearance subtly displaces her concern for understanding historical actions. I move away from approaching historical foundings as a mode of appearing in the world, by recovering an account of action as experience. On that basis, I suggest a hermeneutics of experience which approaches foundings in light of the quest for meaning. With Voegelin founding is recovered as a symbol that exists only in the quest of understanding. Founding occurs in the experience of struggle to restore a reality that has become symbolically opaque. This experience is shared by the philosopher and the political actor; therefore to understand moments of founding requires the interweaving, and not separation, of political philosophy and political science. At the end, the quest of understanding founding moments is neither derivative, nor preparatory, but encompassing the philosophical question of how order comes into being.This thesis is not currently available in ORA

Soft modes and strain redistribution in continuous models of amorphous plasticity: the Eshelby paradigm, and beyond?

13 pages, 6 figures + references, minor correctionsInternational audienceThe deformation of disordered solids relies on swift and localised rearrangements of particles. The inspection of soft vibrational modes can help predict the locations of these rearrangements, while the strain that they actually redistribute mediates collective effects. Here, we study soft modes and strain redistribution in a two-dimensional continuous mesoscopic model based on a Ginzburg-Landau free energy for perfect solids, supplemented with a plastic disorder potential that accounts for shear softening and rearrangements. Regardless of the disorder strength, our numerical simulations show soft modes that are always sharply peaked at the softest point of the material (unlike what happens for the depinning of an elastic interface). Contrary to widespread views, the deformation halo around this peak does not always have a quadrupolar (Eshelby-like) shape. Instead, for finite and narrowly-distributed disorder, it looks like a fracture, with a strain field that concentrates along some easy directions. These findings are rationalised with analytical calculations in the case where the plastic disorder is confined to a point-like `impurity'. In this case, we unveil a continuous family of elastic propagators, which are identical for the soft modes and for the equilibrium configurations. This family interpolates between the standard quadrupolar propagator and the fracture-like one as the anisotropy of the elastic medium is increased. Therefore, we expect to see a fracture-like propagator when extended regions on the brink of failure have already softened along the shear direction and thus rendered the material anisotropic, but not failed yet. We speculate that this might be the case in carefully aged glasses just before macroscopic failure