Langage et géométrie

A semantic study of the use of French spatial prepositions (dans, sur, sous, etc.) leads to the two following results: it is not possible, in a referentialist approach, to simply characterize the meanings of these prepositions as geometrical relations in physical space; on the other hand, it is possible to characterize their meanings as simple topological relations on a «verbal scene» built by language itself. It can be concluded that topology plays an essential structuring role in the cognitive mechanisms operating in language activity.     

Ménage et industrie

MORE WORK FOR MOTHER: THE IRONIES OF HOUSEHOLD TECHNOLOGY FROM THE OPEN HEART TO THE MICROWAVE by Ruth Schwarz‐Cowan. Basic Books, New York, 1983, xiv +249pp, planches.     

Fédération et/ou confédération

A concern to pin ideological labels on Morris has obscured the continuing importance of romanticism and Protestantism for his socialist politics. Romanticism led him to seek self-realisation in an art based on naturalness and harmony, and Protestantism led him to do so in the everyday worlds of work and domestic life. From Ruskin, he took a sociology linking the quality of art to the extent of such self-realisation in daily life. Even after he turned to Marxism, he still defined his socialist vision in terms of good art produced and enjoyed within daily life. Moreover, his over-riding concern to promote a new spirit of art, not his dislike of Hyndman, led him to a purist politics, that is, to look with suspicion on almost all forms of political action.     

Hobbes et le Républicanisme

Hobbes criticizes the theory of mixed government without presenting this mixed government as republican. For him criticizing republicanism means criticizing the definition of freedom as the participation of citizens in the debate on matters concerning them all. We can find the main points of this criticism in theElements of law natural and politic and in theDe cive. InLeviathan Hobbes summarizes this criticism and makes it more dogmatic, while developing in a new way the idea that in all regimes there is an identity of essence in sovereignty. This idea is at variance with the republican thesis stating a difference of nature between free regimes and those that are not and makes it possible to take the Roman republic or the Athenian democracy as models.     

Lacan et les probabilités

Lacan was interested by the treatment of the probabilities, the theory of games and decision, all topics that gave way to an interpretation of Pascal’s calculus of partition and of the famous argument of betting. Starting from a critical examination of Kant’s transcendental aesthetics, that Lacan propounds to the philosophers to replace by logical space and time of the theory of game (as a substitute), the psychoanalyst attempts to prove that Pascal is probably the forefather of the theory of game and decision. A number of interpretations of the «geometer of hazard», which will happen in the years 1970, are in debt, perhaps unconsciously, surely in a secrete way, to the farther lacanian interpretation.     

Histoire et dialectique des idéologies et significations religieuses

The aim of this article is to consider the possibility of a new analytical methodology that could include multidisciplinary approaches into the study of religious ideologies and practices, taking benefit from historical and ethnographic interpretations, but also from linguistic and philological, psychoanalytical, philosophical, sociological, and anthropological considerations. If one tries to study the role or function played by religion in society, considering human beings as builders of symbolic worlds, one should set out to analyze, if not rules, at least general processes of the religious readjustment with respect to the rest of social life, whenever the gap is much too wide, or the religious transfer from one realm to another entirely different.