Causalité Historique et Contemporanéité Relative: De la Relativité Einsteinienne aux Sciences Historiques

The construction of historical frame of reference based on the distinction between and articulation of phenomenological and chronological times. As it relativises the notion of simultaneity and inverts its relation to causality, the special theory of relativity can induce analogous modes of reflection on the themes of “contemporaneity” in the history of art (Panofsky) and in epistemology (Bachelard). This “relativist” method, often misunderstood, sheds light on both historical and presentist methods.     

Mobilité de la population et pauvreté dans une vicomté normande de la fin du Moyen-Age

Important in number and spread very evenly throughout the fifteenth century, the Norman rolls of the monnéage are a very important source for statistical study of the population of Normandy. The information about names they provide allows one to grasp the importance of mobility of population in urban and rural areas. Information about the different categories of exempted persons permits a study of the problem of poverty. The region under scrutiny in this article is the vicomté or vice-county of Bayeux and the city of Caen. Documents concerning this region reveal a highly mobile population, a fact which war by itself cannot explain. The highest rates of mobility are to be found among the populations of the different parishes of Bayeux and Caen. As one might expect, the poor are amongst the most mobile of all. Moreover, the persistence of poverty throughout the fifteenth century, as seen in the rolls of the monnéage, raises the problem of the continued stagnation of this part Normandy.     

Rationalité Contextuelle et Présupposé Cognitif le cas Lombroso

This article proposes an epistemological reflexion about the posture of the historian of human sciences towards his objects. Cesare Lombroso's theory of criminal anthropology was taken here as an example of the discussion because it seemed to be caricatural case. Considering that normative or whiggish perspectives cannot account for the logic of Lombroso's discourse, we attempt to develop here an alternative posture from which extrapolations could be made to other fields. This alternate is found in the introduction of the concepts of contextual rationality and cognitive presupposition and in a reconsideration of the time duration.     

L'impensé du marché

The historiography of the United States in the xviii^th and beginning of the xix^th centuries stresses the key role of market development in the economic growth of the area. Various historical schools argue over the role of moral or household economic attitudes, and over the rhythm and extent of market integration. But because of the peculiar chronology of the economic development of the United States, compared to Great-Britain, it has long been assumed that this market integration, more than any technological progress, has been at the root of the industrial revolution and of industrial capitalism. The concept of market, however, has never been itself criticized and historicized. This paper offers a historically relevant modelization of merchant activity, and offers some hypotheses on the transition from this model to industrial capitalism.     

George Soulié de Morant

George Soulié de Morant was consul in China, an expert of China, and later an acupuncturist. He was indeed the first in Europe to build a theoretical discourse, to make reference to Chinese medical texts, but also, to practice acupuncture. The life and work of George Soulié de Morant, eclectic and nonconformist, show how formal and institutional recognition do not always correspond to the social recognition of the value of expertise.     

The Humanism of André Malraux

In this essay, I explore the influence of Byzantine literature in the New World from a transatlantic perspective. Specifically, I examine the Scala paradisi of Juan Clímaco (570–649) as it is found in the Peregrinación de Bartolomé Lorenzo (1586) by the Jesuit José de Acosta (1539–1600), a text from the colonial period. Surprisingly, this text has received almost no critical attention. I focus on the study of the text (and the context in which it was produced and received), basing my analysis on a comparison of Acosta's text with other similar works. By using a comparative method, I explore the ideological and aesthetic tensions that underlie Acosta's work. Moreover, this analysis makes manifest the cultural and literary continuities (or traditions) and ruptures which, coming as much from the East as from the West of Europe, arrived in the Vice-regency of Peru in the second half of the sixteenth century.     

Le marché dans son histoire

Sans résumé a récemment publiéFran?ois de Neufchateau. Biographie intellectuelle, Paris, Publications de la Sorbonne, 2005. a codirigé avec Steven Kaplan,La France, malade du corporatisme? xviii ^e –xx ^e siècles, Paris, Belin, 2004.     

Relativité et réalité Nottale, Simondon et le réalisme des relations

The exhaustion of the controversy about realism in physics, which is an epistemological consequence of the radical discrepancy between quantum mechanics and relativity, indicates the irrelevance of the traditional opposition between realism and antirealism. Since its purpose is the reunification of microphysics and macrophysics by the means of fractal space-time and scale relativity, Laurent Nottale's theory of Scale Relativity gets over this opposition by postulating the ontological value of the physical relations. The physicist's relational realism hence confirms spontaneously the intuitions of Gilbert Simondon's philosophy of nucleation, which considers the necessary recognition of the ontological value of relations in order to establish the «great synthesis of relativity and quantum physics».     

La spatialité originaire du corps propre

The phenomenological tradition stands opposed to contemp orary cognitive science in this, that so far from being a mere thing in the physical world, a thing whose mind would contain some mental representation, the lived body is constituted in its sense of being for the subject by being used and actively appropriated by this self-same subject, as agent. Though not already generally acknowledged, there are important similarities between this conception and one, which emerges from the literature of brain cartography over the last twenty years, that of a functional morphogenetic neurodynamics, induced and modulated by experience in a relatively autonomous way, in relation both to the anatomic structures of the body, as well as the cytoarchitectonic frontiers of brain tissue. Taking advantage of the latter similarities, neuroscientific data can be employed to confirm the Husserlian theory of constitution against the attempts on the part of cognitive science to discredit it, and this whether we are talking about its later modification at the hands of Merleau-Ponty or the original version, which is that of a subjective (transcendental) auto-constitution of the lived body on the basis of the practico-kinoesthetic experience of «I move my body».     

L'agrandissement de la communauté Uashat mak Mani-utenam : regard sur une collaboration dans la durée entre une université et une communauté innue

This article presents a case study aimed at identifying the success factors and the effects of a collaboration between architecture students and an Indigenous community. This exercise, which is part of a multi-year collaborative relationship, was carried out within the framework of an urban design workshop led by the School of Architecture of Laval University and the Innu community of Uashat mak Mani-utenam, which is close to the city of Sept-Îles, Quebec. The expansion of the community and the development of residential areas were at the heart of this collaborative effort. The analysis of the evolution of the different versions of the development plans, in the light of Innu development criteria, highlights the positive contributions of the workshop, particularly with regard to the community program and the tectonic symbolism. Nevertheless, the maintenance of the status quo is noted with respect to the location and respect for natural elements. Testimonials from key players involved in the project illustrate the authentic nature of the partnership between the research group “Habitats and Cultures” and the community. The quality of the relationship between the researchers and the Innu partners, the duration of the partnership over time, and the promotion of Innu cultural knowledge have favoured the success of the partnership.     

The Panthéonisation of André Malraux

Girard, A. and Gentil, G. (eds), André Malraux ministre (La Documentation Française, 1996), 508 pp., 140F., ISBN 2 11 003674 5

Lang, J., Lettre à Malraux (Hachette/Edition no, 1, 1996), 186 pp., 100F., ISBN 2 863 91792 7

Larrat, J.‐C., Malraux, théoricien de la littérature 1920–1951 (PUF, 1996), 335 pp., 158F., ISBN 2 13 047430 6

Lyotard, J.‐F., Signé Malraux (Grasset, 1996), 361 pp., 138F., ISBN 2 246 45991 5

Zarader, J.‐P., Malraux ou la pensée de l'art (Vinci, 1996), 249 pp., 110F., ISBN 2 910313 11 5     

Actualité de la philosophie de Ferdinand Gonseth

Résumé  Les progrès les plus récents de la physique contemporaine, en particulier la convergence de la physique des particules et de la cosmologie en une authentique cosmogonie scientifique, avivent les enjeux philosophiques de l'entreprise scientifique, mais les rapports conflictuels entre physique et philosophie ne s'en trouvent pas apaisés; un fossé semble même en train de se creuser entre science et philosophie. L'œuvre du philosophe suisse Ferdinand Gonseth qui s'est attaché à élaborer une philosophie qui so it et qui puisse rester au ni veau de la connaissance scientifique peut fournir une aide particulièrement adéquate à ceux qui voudraient contribuer à combler ce fossé. GillesCohen-Tannoudji, né en 1938, est conseiller scientifique auprès du directeur des Sciences de la matière du Commissariat à l'énergie atomique. Il est retraité de cet organisme, dans lequel il a fait toute sa carrière comme physicien théoricien dans le domaine de la physique des particules. Actuellement, il prépare une thèse de philosophie, sous la direction de Dominique Lecourt, sur la philosophie de Ferdinand Gonseth.