Du parallélisme au fonctionnalisme contemporain

Résumé  Cette étude se propose de mettre en relief plusieurs analogies structurelles entre la conception spinoziste et la conception fonctionnaliste, développée par Hilary Putnam, de l'activité mentale. Ces conceptions, l'une classique, l'autre contemporaine, en marge de leurs divergences manifestes, paraissent toutes deux récuser aussi bien le dualisme substantiel qu'une lecture physicaliste de l'activité mentale, représentée en particulier par la théorie de l'identité entre états mentaux et états cérébraux. La confrontation entre la philosophie de Spinoza et celle de Putnam, dans l'ordre de la théorie de l'esprit, s'établit en trois points. Est d'abord examiné le postulat de l'autonomie explicative du mental. Le second point concerne la résolution du problème de l'union du corps et de l'esprit, par le recours aux notions d'organisation et d'isomorphisme fonctionnel, au principe de la thèse d'une identité psychophysique non substantielle. L'étude s'achève sur l'évocation du modèle mécanique de l'esprit, et de son identification à un dispositif automatique abstrait, automate spirituel selon Spinoza, machine de Turing selon Putnam. The aim of this paper is to underline some structural analogies between the spinozistic conception of mental activity, and the functionalist one, as it was developed by Hilary Putnam. Both of these conceptions, one classic and one contemporary, though obviously different from one another, seem to reject substance dualism as well as any physicalist approach to mental activity, namely the mind-brain identity theory. Our comparison between Spinoza's philosophy and Putnam's, as far as the theory of mind is concerned, goes along three lines. We first examine the postulate of the explanatory autonomy of the mental. Then we analyze a solution to the mind-body problem, which involves the concepts of organization and functional isomorphism: such a solution leads to the claim of a non-substantial psychophysical identity. In the end, we focus the analysis on the mechanical characterization of the mind, and on the identification of the mind to an abstract automatic device, represented by the spiritual automaton in Spinoza's philosophy, and by the Turing machine in Putnam's functionalist theory. PascaleGillot, née en 1967, agrégée et docteur en philosophie, est directrice de programme au Collège international de philosophie. Ses travaux de recherche portent sur la constitution des théories modernes de l'esprit dans la philosophie du XVII^e siècle, et sur la relation entre ces théories de l'esprit et laphilosophy of mind contemporaine.     

现象与意象:近现代时期北京城市的文学感知

本文从行为地理学和人本主义地理学的思路出发 ,引用常见的对近现代北京城的文学描述 ,对城市地理现象与城市意象进行了列举和分析。在市政建设、城市地标及若干地段认知等方面比较了意象与现象的差异及形成原因 ,分析了近现代北京城市意象的若干显著特征。指出准确理解并利用北京城市意象在“历史文化名城”保护实践中的重要意义。认为大多数市民和游客对北京这座历史文化名城的认识更多地来自老舍、梁思成、侯仁之等权威人物建立的城市意象 ,一方面又来自城市内部现实的文化遗存、客观历史记录和学者的研究结论。     

论段义孚早期的环境经验研究及其现象学态度

从段义孚在《人文主义地理学》发表之前的作品来看,他对于人的环境经验研究有如下基本观点:1反对生硬的量化记录,推崇基于丰富的感知觉的直接描述式地理学论文写作;2反对用偏狭的意象与心智地图来阐释人类的环境认知,推崇能够将环境认知的过程与结果相结合的"基模";3反对孤立地认识和使用"环境"概念,推崇富有人文精神且能够将环境概念容纳于其中的"世界"概念。对段义孚而言,现象学主要是一种哲学立场,而不是需要从形式上去模仿、从术语上去标示甚至被某些"定论"所绑缚的一种操作指南,因此,与其说他的作品中运用了某种严格的"现象学方法",不如说他的工作体现出一种方法论层面的"现象学态度"。     

The Treatment of Byzantine Place-Names

Abstract

The anonymus author of An Historical Curiosity, One Hundred and Forty-One Ways of spelling Birmingham (London 1880) unaccountably complicated things by listing his spellings in neither alphabetical nor chronological order. But he may also have been revolutionary in treating all spellings with equal respect, as names in their own right, rather than variants of ‘Birmingham’, the authorised version which happens to be a poor reflection of what people actually call the place. His treatment was in mind when I indexed the toponyms in David Winfield's and my Dumbarton Oaks Study of The Byzanting Monuments and Topography of the Pontos – alphabetically, not chronologically. In doing so, I was surprised to find how little theoretical discussion there has been on how to treat Byzantine place-names, or what happens when they are transferred from memory to written record (and back again). We can learn from Western medievalists.     

旅游地品牌化中的旅游形象与旅游口号

本文从旅游地品牌构建的角度对旅游形象进行探讨,得到以下认识:首先,旅游口号是定位口号和营销口号的统称,它们分别表述旅游形象中的理念形象和营销形象。其次,旅游地(品牌)形象规划可分为"确定质量方针--定位理念形象--设计营销形象"三个层次,其中质量方针诉求"内部市场"、营销形象针对"外部市场"、理念形象则是"内"与"外"之间的桥梁和纽带。再次,旅游地品牌是一个属性--利益--价值的阶梯,其中定位口号传播旅游地品牌属性,营销口号传播的则是旅游地品牌利益和价值。     

Fiction and memoir of Britain’s Great War: disillusioned or disparate?

Historical and literary critical orthodoxies hold that unfavourable British literary responses to the First World War did not materialise until Journey’s End and the war-books controversy of 1930. What appears to have happened is that an initial and largely factitious 1930 newspaper controversy has been conflated artificially with artefacts of popular culture from the 1960s to create a linear historical narrative of popular misrepresentation. A review of war fiction and memoir in English published prior to 1929 shows this narrative to be entirely unhistorical: considerable numbers of unfavourable responses to the First World War exist in British writing from this earlier period. The argument that there was a spell of post-war optimism before the general public changed its mind in 1929 is impossible to sustain. There never was a unitary British narrative of the First World War, and if the general perception of it by the British people since 1929 has been negative, the explanation does not lie in Depression-era war books but in whatever caused readers and reviewers of the time to respond favourably to individual accounts of the war rather than to a patriotic gloss.     

« Vivre de sa Plume » Réflexions sur un topos de l’Auctorialité Moderne

What does it mean to « live by the pen »? The expression has often been invoked by historians advancing an account of progress in literary practices marked by the passage of writers from patronage to the marketplace; an account hoping to define authorial « modernity » with respect to an older model of the literary figure who is protected by nobility. Yet a careful examination shows that this progress towards economic autonomy based on the sale of works is hardly as self-evident as it has been assumed. This article thus studies the ambiguities of the historical account implicit in the idea of « living by the pen ». It then proposes a different approach, which considers this idea not as the reflection of a new professional reality, but as an element in a new rhetoric of self-presentation as intellectual. As a topos, the image designates and indeed, constitutes the social liberation of the author from nobility as well as his moral authority when his efforts to live off his writing inevitably fail yet he persists nonetheless to sacrifice his personal happiness for his art.     

Can we share an us-feeling with a digital machine? Emotional sharing and the recognition of one as another*

ABSTRACT

To share an us-feeling means to acknowledge one another. Can we share such a feeling with an extreme form of the other, for instance with a digital machine? The answer that is given in this article is ‘no’. Relevant tests like the Turing Test are based on a third-person perspective, whereas a second-person perspective would be needed.     

Neurobiographies: Writing Lives in the History of Neurology and the Neurosciences

This essay surveys the present state of biographical writing in the history of neurology and neuroscience. Individual lives play a significant role in practitioner-historians' narratives, whereas academic historians tend to be more nonindividualistic and a-biographical. Autobiographies by neurologists and neuroscientists, and particularly autobiographical collections, are problematic as an historical genre. Neurobiographies proper are published with several aims in mind: some are written as literary entertainment, others as contributions to a cultural and social history of the neurosciences. Eulogy, panegyrics and commemoration play a great role in neurobiographical writing. Some biographies, finally, are written to provide role-models for young neuroscientists, thus reviving the classical, Plutarchian biographical tradition. Finally, a recent cooperative biography of Charcot is mentioned as an example of how the biographical genre can help overcome the alleged dichotomy between the historiographies of practitioner-historians and academic historians.     

Neurobiographies: writing lives in the history of neurology and the neurosciences

This essay surveys the present state of biographical writing in the history of neurology and neuroscience. Individual lives play a significant role in practitioner-historians' narratives, whereas academic historians tend to be more nonindividualistic and a-biographical. Autobiographies by neurologists and neuroscientists, and particularly autobiographical collections, are problematic as an historical genre. Neurobiographies proper are published with several aims in mind: some are written as literary entertainment, others as contributions to a cultural and social history of the neurosciences. Eulogy, panegyrics and commemoration play a great role in neurobiographical writing. Some biographies, finally, are written to provide role-models for young neuroscientists, thus reviving the classical, Plutarchian biographical tradition. Finally, a recent cooperative biography of Charcot is mentioned as an example of how the biographical genre can help overcome the alleged dichotomy between the historiographies of practitioner-historians and academic historians.     

Écrire la mort, écrire l’amour dans La Part secrète de Carol Bernstein

La Part secrète (1999) is the second text by Carol Bernstein, an American writer living in Paris, the first having been Le Rival invincible. This latest text exemplifies several contemporary discourses, addressing issues of disease, trauma, biography and autobiography, parentage, and testimony. Although at the crossroads of so many current debates, to date it has not attracted any critical studies. Faced with this lack, due perhaps to the brevity and apparent, but misleading, simplicity of this story, I first consider the text as a narrative about illness, relying primarily on Susan Sontag’s study Illness as Metaphor as well as Arthur W. Frank’s The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics. I then show that via writing the narrator manages to work through his feelings of loneliness, to overcome the lies that surround him and to inscribe himself within his family history. This second part of the article, which analyses the redemptive power of writing to rise above the ravages caused by an unnamed disease, is however only a fragment of the exposition because this act of writing is probably not in fact that of the narrator. It could be that of his daughter, usurping her father’s identity in an act of ventriloquism. Finally, I consider the daughter’s motivations in order better to understand how the writing of La Part secrète illuminates in a disturbing way the father-daughter relationship.     

兰州城市居民意象空间及其结构研究

通过问卷的方式对兰州城市居民的意象空间进行了调查,从266份认知地图中提取和统计相关数据,据此分析了兰州城市居民空间认知的基本类型、构成要素和发展阶段。研究表明,兰州城市居民空间认知的基本类型不仅包括西方学者提出的序列型与空间型,而且还包括单体型;空间认知的构成要素并没有超出Lynch提出的5种:道路、边界、区域、节点和标志物,但各要素所占比重要相对均衡一些;就空间认知的发展阶段而言,初、中级的连接发展阶段和邻里描绘阶段所占比重高达96.61%,说明居民对兰州城市的空间认知水平普遍较低。最后,根据各种地物和要素出现的频率概括出了兰州城市的意象空间结构,发现它与现实中兰州城市空间格局及其重点十分相似。     

HISTORY,AFRICA, AND DEFAMILIARIZATION: A COMMENT

After initially identifying defamiliarization as a central aspect of Nancy Rose Hunt's essay “History as Form,” this comment reflects on the implications that her reading of Georg Simmel and her emphasis on objects and materiality have for the writing of history. If Hunt suggests, with Simmel, that the form of history is autonomous from history as it unfolds, the claim here is rather that there is no necessary relationship between writing and its topic. Considering how earlier European historiography excluded Africa (in particular) from the domain of history, it is no coincidence that this contingent relation between form and history has been particularly energizing for Africanist historiography—leading to innovations both in practice and theory. The comment concludes by briefly discussing three concepts that have informed such innovation: the vernacular, suturing, and multiple temporalities.     

Telling stories: Exploring research storytelling as a meaningful approach to knowledge mobilization with Indigenous research collaborators and diverse audiences in community‐based participatory research

A growing number of geographers seek to communicate their research to audiences beyond the academy. Community‐based and participatory action research models have been developed, in part, with this goal in mind. Yet despite many promising developments in the way research is conducted and disseminated, researchers continue to seek methods to better reflect the “culture and context” of the communities with whom they work. During my doctoral research on homelessness in the Northwest Territories, I encountered a significant disconnect between the emotive, personal narratives of homelessness that I was collecting and more conventional approaches to research dissemination. In search of a method of dissemination to engage more meaningfully with research collaborators as well as the broader public, I turned to my creative writing work. In this article, I draw from “The komatik lesson” to discuss my first effort at research storytelling. I suggest that research storytelling is particularly well suited to community‐based participatory research, as we explore methods to present findings in ways that are more culturally appropriate to the communities in which the research takes place. This is especially so in collaborative research with Indigenous communities, where storytelling and knowledge sharing are often one and the same. However, I also discuss the ways in which combining my creative writing interests with my doctoral research has been an uneasy fit, forcing me to question how to tell a good story while giving due diligence to the role that academic research has played in its development. Drawing on the outcomes and challenges I encountered, I offer an understanding of what research storytelling is, and how it might be used to advance community‐based participatory research with Indigenous communities.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 31, Number 6. December 2015

Front and back cover caption, volume 31 issue 6 Front cover AI and humanity A statue by Stephen Kettle of Alan Turing, sitting pensively at one of his code‐breaking machines in Bletchley Park. Made up from half a million pieces of Welsh slate, this statue was a landmark feature for the Life and Works of Alan Turing exhibition in 2012, which was curated following a public campaign to save the Turing‐Newman Collaboration Collection, a rare collection of his mathematical papers. Members of the Turing family additionally contributed some of the mathematician's personal belongings, including a teddy bear he used to practise his lectures on. Bletchley Park is now a huge heritage attraction, more so since The Imitation Game, a film based on the life of the pioneering computer scientist, came out. Previously known as the UK Government Code and Cypher School, this is now a site for the National Museum of Computing, which ncludes the huts and blocks that hosted a group of codebreakers whose work is said to have helped shorten the war by two years. In this issue, Ting Guo looks at Turing's personal trajectory in life and asks to what extent his search for artificial intelligence was inspired by considerations other than purely technical ones. To design artificial intelligence is to reproduce what is the essential ‘us’, what Pamela McCorduck refers to as an ‘odd form of self‐reproduction’. The desire for such machines, she argues, is a desire equally rooted in fear and allure, which reflects not only the drive for knowledge and human progress, but the discovery of the human self, which is itself driven by fundamental problems of being human. Back cover WORLDS IN MINIATURE Miniature worlds fascinate us. Taking familiar objects, scenes and environments and scaling them down to the minute generates a sense of wonder, forming a special connection between object and audience across which information can flow in subtle and unexpected ways. For centuries, people have used miniaturization to create tiny settlements with streets down which traffic doesn't flow and shops where no purchases are made. In doing so, they generate a fantasy, an idealized portrayal of a world they wish to see, not the one they inhabit. One of the most famous of these miniature communities is Madurodam in the Netherlands. Attracting more than 700,000 visitors a year, this park seeks to replicate particular dioramas of Dutch life, employing a dedicated team of professional modellers focusing on specific aspects of Dutch architecture and urban environments to portray a particular, explicitly positive, image of the Netherlands. The choices made at this site, and others like it all over the world, are part of a complex process of representation in miniature, a selection of iconography and design intentionally assembled to create unconscious impressions in visiting tourists, particularly children, about the full‐sized communities they resemble. As such, their representative powers are partial, a carefully curated miniature snapshot of certain aspects of an entire nation designed to act as a cultural and educational ambassador. In this issue, Jack Davy explores how the process of miniaturization, as evidenced by a Lego figurine, can encapsulate and transmit complex and controversial themes in a child‐like, non‐threatening manner. These processes operate subtly and inexplicitly, shaping our understanding of the wider world around us through the affordances of the small.     

From medicine to psychotherapy: the placebo effect

If placebos have been squeezed out of medicine to the point where their official place in in clinical trials designed to identify their own confounding effect, the placebo effect nevertheless thrives in psychotherapy. Not only does psychotherapy dispose of placebo effects that are less available to medicine as it becomes increasingly technological and preoccupied with body parts, but factors of the sort inhibiting the use of placebos in medicine have no equivalent in psychology. Medicine today is disturbed by the placebo effect in a way psychotherapy is not. Psychotherapy does not have to grapple with such a disconcerting paradox as successful sham surgery, and unlike those physicians who once pretended to treat the patient's body while actually attempting to treat the mind, the psychotherapist can treat the mind in all frankness. Perhaps it is because psychotherapy is less burdened by doubts about the placebo effect that it was able to come to its aid when it was orphaned by medicine. It is vain to expect something with so long a history as the placebo effect to disappear from the practices of healing.     

基于流形学习与光谱解混的文物表面字迹增强——以云冈第38窟为例

文物表面的文字是了解历史的关键信息，对文物表面文字信息的探索成为文物保护的重要环节。结合流形学习与光谱解混，提出一种新的文物表面字迹增强方法。首先，利用基于流形学习的等距映射方法对预处理后的高光谱图像进行非线性降维，得到信息量最大的灰度图像；其次，分析文字与背景的光谱特征，通过多层非负矩阵分解方法得到字迹丰度图；然后，将二者进行加权平均得到字迹增强图像，再与合成真彩色影像进行HSV融合，得到字迹融合影像；最后，为更好地辨认文字，在字迹增强图像上裁剪文字并做形态学变换，得到字迹提取图。以云冈石窟第38窟的一景褪色文字高光谱图像为例进行了验证，结果表明，该方法能够有效地增强出文物表面的褪色文字，且较其他增强方法效果更好。     

Heaney and education

Seamus Heaney inhabited the world of teacher education, as a student, and later as a lecturer, in 1960s Belfast. That world was infused by three ideas: learning as a journey, learning through play, and learning as construction. This article traces correspondences between these and thematic trends in Heaney’s work. It presents the case that Heaney’s writing reflects an informed understanding of children and of learning peculiar to the mind of a great teacher. Moreover, Heaney’s contribution to education is remarkable in that it transcends the school and the academy, and offers a creative vision in which poetry and learning are inextricably linked. As Heaney put it in Among Schoolchildren, the “walls of the world expand” as reader and writer, teacher and learner, poet and child “go beyond our normal cognitive bounds and sense a new element where we are not alien but liberated, more alive to ourselves, more drawn out, more educated”.     

Temps, succession,cogito

In the following pages I consider how Descartes argues the thesis of a permanent, continuous and actual thinking represented by expressionscogito andsum cogitans. Of this thesis I only examine the reasoning leading to those expressions first and then reasoning upon the same, single expressions, I found the continuity of thinking breaks off when the mind, set aside the dubious or deceitful opinions, meets with the clear and distinct ideas, and when it meets with the succession of ideas. In both these cases there emerged a kind of interruption which should have prevented the philosopher from writing «cogito» and «sum cogitans», that is from making use of a verbal form just meaning an actual and continuous action.     

RESEARCH,NARRATIVE, AND REPRESENTATION: A POSTNARRATIVE APPROACH

Narrativism or representationalism is founded on the idea that historical narratives and representations are 1) true and indivisible wholes, whereof 2) the truth needs to be maintained, although a narrativist or representationalist whole cannot be confirmed or disconfirmed, and wherein 3) the past is represented in a figurative sense. These fundamental aspects of narrativism have had a positive impact on historiography, but they are also the three reasons why narrativism has neglected historical research and argumentation. To remedy these problems postnarrativism has been evoked. It opts for presentation instead of representation, cutting through all the links between the past and the historiographical product. The product is not a narrative or a representation but a thesis, a proposal to see the past in a special way. The only element postnarrativism wants to retain of narrativism is colligation because it has an argumentative structure based on epistemic values. Postnarrativism leads to knowledge, built on the practice of warranted assertions instead of truth. My postnarrativism chooses a middle course between a strong narrativism and what I would like to call a “weak,” presentational postnarrativism. I agree with postnarrativists that more attention must be paid to argumentation and research. Moreover, I consider time a neglected issue in narrativism. Nevertheless, I don't want to give up the three above‐mentioned fundamental aspects of it. In my view the assumption of truth with regard to (figurative) representation needs to be maintained, but in a pragmatic, provisional form: a historical narrative or representation can be considered as true as long as it has not been replaced by a better one. Retaining truth and holism, but wanting more room for investigation and argumentation, requires that narrativism's role in historical research and history‐writing be revised. This implies the replacement of the usual research phase by a preparation phase, wherein, next to research, space must be reserved for so‐called writing activities. Preparation means the conversion of a germinal narrative or representation into an accomplished whole. Holism occurs in two representational forms: a narrative and a representation. In both forms, research concepts and the associated temporalities become visible under the surface of the narrativist or representational superstructure.