Books & ideas

Making Children into Adults

Bernard Schneuwly — 2024-04-16T11:59:20Z

Vygotsky is a major educational theorist credited with showing how the mind of the child is formed. In this book, Pascal Sévérac explains what Vygotsky's theory owes to Spinoza's.

At the Frontiers of Reality

Christophe Al-Saleh — 2018-06-07T07:00:00Z

Of Trees and Signs

Martin Fortier — 2018-05-14T07:00:00Z

Trees think, explains E. Kohn, because they have the ability to represent the world and today's anthropology can help us go beyond the distinction between the human and the non-human. The risk here, though, is giving a weak definition of thinking.

Umberto Eco

Claudia Stancati — 2017-09-25T07:00:00Z

Umberto Eco is best known to the general public for his novels and critical works in which he developed his theory of reception. Who realizes, however, that this aspect of his work is only one part of a general semiology organized around a philosophy of signs?

How Can We Talk about Sexual Minorities?

Mathieu Trachman — 2017-06-29T07:00:00Z

Minority sexualities give rise to much discourse, which is more widely ranging than it is broadly disseminated. As much as the question of their actual practice, these sexualities raise the issue of how to talk about them. Halfway between essay and fiction, Marco Vidal offers some potential avenues to explore.

On Linguistic Imperialism

Emmanuelle Loyer — 2016-06-09T09:31:01Z

After the domination of French in the 18^th Century, English is now the new world language. As a sociologist, Pascale Casanova shows that using the world language gives authority to those who master it. But what other solution is there, given that a world language is necessary for universal communication?

“Cinema is more authoritarian than literature”

Marie-Pierre Ulloa — 2016-01-07T08:00:00Z

Israeli filmmaker Amos Gitaï discusses the relationship between cinema and literature, memory, space, and language. In particular, he tells us about his screen adaptation of Jérôme Clément's autobiographical novel, which portrays the story of a son's quest in search of his Jewish mother's painful past.

The Geometry of Differences

Lucie Campos — 2015-09-24T12:45:00Z

Published eleven years ago, the Vocabulaire européen des philosophies, also known as the Dictionnaire des intraduisibles, was translated into English in 2014. Barbara Cassin discusses the aim of this project, and how the book is being given a new lease of life thanks to translations in various languages.

Confess and Obey

Frédéric Gros — 2014-09-04T07:00:00Z

In the lecture delivered between January and March 1980, Michel Foucault, after completing his studies of “power-knowledge,” attached new importance to the subject—specifically, to a form of subjectivity experienced in the injunction to speak of oneself, to better submit onself to others.

The Life of Others (and Ourselves)

Alvaro Santana Acuña — 2013-04-04T07:00:00Z

Andreas Glaeser's Political Epistemics is an account of the rise and fall of the East German Socialism as a field of consciousness. Relying on extensive archival research and interviews (including Stasi officers, secret informants & political dissidents), Glaeser offers a “theory of understandings” to provide a new angle on the question of how worldviews become institutionalized.