Books & Ideas is the English-language mirror website of La Vie des Idées, a free online journal which has gained a large readership and established itself in France as a major place for intellectual debate since 2007.
The complexity of contemporary biology is a source of wonder, fear, and misunderstanding. Thierry Hoquet reviews the major biological theories to help us think through the social implications of a science that is opening up fascinating, though not inevitable, horizons.
Since the 1980s, patient accompaniment has been considered a form of care in its own right. Yet, the “ethic of care,” now a key notion in philosophy, is also part of the solidarity pact that governs the welfare state in France.
“Fixers”, or dragomans, are vital intermediaries and interpreters for both journalists and soldiers in hostile terrain, and play a central role in a network of relationships and transfers. In the Middle Ages they embodied the need for otherness, and continue to do so today.
About: Manon Garcia (éd.), Philosophie féministe. Patriarcat, savoirs, justice, Vrin
About: Benjamin Lemoine, La démocratie disciplinée par la dette, La Découverte
About: Stéphane Dufoix, Décolonial, Anamosa
Jane Mansbridge has made a major contribution to political theory. She has spent her life combining empirical research with a theoretical approach, and has played a vital role in developing the critique of rational choice and the study of democracy as a permanent process continually in flux.
Rorty made conversation a philosophical genre in its own right, which led him to reject any distinctions he considered futile: between analytic and continental philosophy, between the Enlightenment and postmodernity, between philosophy and literature.
In 1947, Princess Elizabeth promised to serve ‘the great imperial family’, as part of the attempt to remake post-war Britain as a global power. The British Empire collapsed; but this language of service and Commonwealth allowed the Queen to take up the postcolonial concerns of the 21st century.
Books & Ideas is slowing down for the summer and will be offering weekly selections of reviews and essays published over the last year. This week’s selection focuses on ways to shift our intellectual categories.
As populism is rising on a global level, Books & Ideas offers a series on media politics in East Asian countries, to be published over the next two weeks. Though situations are extremely diverse, they can teach us a lot on the relationship between the state and journalists in authoritarian contexts. What role is left for the media to play in non-democracies?
The Paris Agreement on Climate Change is three years old this week but is already under attack. In support of further necessary action to address the changing climate, Public Books & La Vie des Idées offer a collaborative series of articles examining the intersection of climate change and capitalism.
Though poorly known in France, the work of the anthropologist Mary Douglas is nonetheless essential for understanding the elementary forms of social organization and daily life. By shedding light on her academic career and personal life, this portrait rehabilitates the thought of a major intellectual.
How do scientific discoveries and progress come about? Against an idealist and triumphalist conception of the history of science, Simon Schaffer’s oeuvre examines science in the making, in close proximity to its practices and actors. Far from diminishing its prestige, this approach restores science to the central place it occupied in Old Regime societies.
For more than thirty years, Joan Scott has been informing and transforming both our history and the way we write history, while encouraging us to question categories and change our modes of thinking. From class struggle to sex differentiation, sexual emancipation and race, she proposes a critical analysis of Republican rhetoric to undermine naturalized forms of inequality.
La crise politique vénézuélienne connaît un nouvel épisode avec une élection présidentielle frauduleuse par laquelle Nicolás Maduro tente de se maintenir au pouvoir au prix d’un nouveau saut en avant autoritaire. La répression étatique atteint des sommets sans précédent.
Au commencement il y a le Spasfon, un succès pharmaceutique français, un médicament banal, prescrit à des millions de femmes chaque mois pour soulager leurs douleurs menstruelles. À la fin, un médicament dont l’efficacité s’avère insuffisamment prouvée, et souvent prescrit comme placebo.
Faut-il voir avec Descartes dans la douleur un avertissement salutaire, mais sans portée cognitive, ou avec Leibniz une “expression” représentative de notre corps ? R. Andrault explore les débats post-cartésiens à l’âge classique.
À propos de : Justine Lacroix, Les valeurs de l’Europe. Un enjeu démocratique, Collège de France éditions
À propos de : Bernard Lahire, Les structures fondamentales des sociétés humaines, La Découverte
À propos de : Régine Le Jan, Amis ou ennemis ? Émotions, relations, identités au Moyen Âge, Seuil