humans provide plentiful opportunities for specialization and exchange. To be sure the advantage is more in the getting than the giving or letting have, and to be sure cheating can and does take place in cooperative contexts. However it is still often enough the case that the advantages of specialization are more than sufficient to overcome these “transaction costs”. It is interesting that the most prominent use of multilevel selection today (in theories of the evolution of complexity) is exactly the reverse of Field’s. Field emphasizes symmetry, group selection (for social altruism), then individual selection (for cooperation). Others emphasize asymmetry, individual selection (for social relationships which could be cooperative, commensalistic or even parasitic), then group selection of the new aggregate units (for controlling conflict and enhancing cooperation within them). The old debate over the importance of individual versus group selection then is being transformed into one over the temporal order of their importance but with the familiar lines drawn. I find the alternative to Field’s view more persuasive, although there is little evidence human groups beyond the immediate family have or are in the process of evolving as did cells, multicellular organisms, or even colonies. As a social scientist I was disappointed by Field’s treatment of learning and culture. Rather than viewing them as enemies in the nature versus nurture and nature versus culture paradigm wars, some evolutionists are fascinated by the fact that individual learning by trial and error and cultural change based on the social learning of memes are, like the adaptive immune response as well, instances of a general class of selection processes i.e. are detailed analogues of the biological evolutionary process. While the historical evidence suggests that we are neither uniformly antagonistically nor altruistically inclined, the experimental gaming literature reviewed by Field just may support the view that we are generally inclined towards “truck and barter” as Adam Smith originally thought — inclined to cooperate expecting reciprocation. If so, it is entirely possible that such is a feature of the human modular mind evolved over millions of years in our early history as hunters and gatherers as the evolutionary psychologists whose paradigm Field has generally adopted propose. However, multi-process selection theory suggests that it is equally possible that we have learned individually or have culturally evolved to be so inclined.

Console and Classify: The French Psychiatric Profession in the Nineteenth Century (review)

On Being Ill

This book provides an overview of key features of (philosophical) materialism, in historical perspective. It is, thus, a study in the history and philosophy of materialism, with a particular focus on the early modern and Enlightenment periods, leading into the 19th and 20th centuries. For it was in the 18th century that the word was first used by a philosopher (La Mettrie) to refer to himself. Prior to that, ‘materialism’ was a pejorative term, used for wicked thinkers, as a near-synonym to ‘atheist’, ‘Spinozist’ or the delightful ‘Hobbist’. The book provides the different forms of materialism, particularly distinguished into claims about the material nature of the world and about the material nature of the mind, and then focus on materialist approaches to body and embodiment, selfhood, ethics, laws of nature, reductionism and determinism, and overall, its relationship to science. For materialism is often understood as a kind of philosophical facilitator of the sciences, and the author want to suggest that is not always the case. Materialism takes on different forms and guises in different historical, ideological and scientific contexts as well, and the author wants to do justice to that diversity. Figures discussed include Lucretius, Hobbes, Gassendi, Spinoza, Toland, Collins, La Mettrie, Diderot, d’Holbach and Priestley; Buchner, Bergson, J.J.C. Smart and D.M. Armstrong.

https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01233178/document

Materialism: A Historico-Philosophical Introduction

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The importance of being George idealism in the novel - recanonizing Sand idealism and its discontents the politics of idealism the fraternal pact - \"La Petite Fadette\" and \"Nanon\" transmissions - \"Histoire de ma vie\" living on - Flaubert's idealism.

George Sand and Idealism

Acknowledgements Abbreviations Introduction 1. Sade and materialism since 1945 2. Sensationist materialism: system and technique 3. Persuasion: the philosophe's rhetorical profile 4. Sade's system 5. 'Comme fondu dans le fonds commun': clandestine and libertine ingredients in the Sadean melting pot 6. Literality 7. The Drama of matter Bibliography Index

Sade: from Materialism to Pornography

This essay tests the assumption that Diderot was unmentionable during the 1790s because of his association with atheist materialism, and explores how philosophes close to him protected themselves and their work. It focuses predominantly on the Ideologues, Cabanis, and Destutt de Tracy, and also on the physician Bichat and the philosopher-zoologist Lamarck. It identifies certain textual strategies commonly deployed by these writers, including firstly, the curious practice of naming certain officially acceptable luminaries and using them to cover obscure references to other unnamed ‘genies’, secondly, the creation of neologisms for their work (‘biologie’, ‘ideologie’), and thirdly, exaggerated claims of originality. It suggests that the break generally perceived by modern scholarship between the eighteenth-century experimental texts exploring consciousness and matter, particularly those of Diderot, and the post-revolutionary thinkers has been overstated, perhaps because of the very success of the tr...

Caught Between Neologism and the Unmentionable: The Politics of Naming and Non-naming in 1790s France

This anthology contains fiery extracts by forty eighteenth-century authors, from the most famous philosophers of the age to those whose brilliant writings are less well-known. These passages are immensely diverse in style and topic, but all have in common a passionate commitment to equality, freedom, and tolerance. First published by the French Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo assassinations as an act of solidarity and as a response to the surge of interest in Enlightenment values, Tolerance has now been translated by over 100 students and tutors of French at Oxford University.

Tolerance: The Beacon of the Enlightenment

This article explores the concept of ‘normal’ in the late-eighteenth century. It focuses on how these pre-normal meanings illuminate contemporaneous depictions of the role and importance of sexuality. The current sense of the term ‘normal’ enters the dictionaries relatively late in the period, having been a synonymous but less common alternative for ‘perpendicular’ in geometry. Indeed, ‘normal’ is so unfamiliar a word that the important late-nineteenth-century dictionary/encyclopaedia, the Grand Larousse du dix-neuvieme siecle (1866–1877), draws attention to its novelty, explaining that it is initially hard to understand. So this article partly aims to deepen our understanding of the emergence of the term, and thus to fill in the context of Canguilhem's seminal work on The normal and the pathological (1989). It investigates the proliferation of terms that indicate a deviation from the norm, many of which (such as ‘enormous’)predate the idea of the ‘normal’ by many centuries. French and English sources suc...

From pre-normal to abnormal: the emergence of a concept in late eighteenth-century France

This article examines the life and work of Henri-Frederic Amiel, 19th-century Swiss diarist. It argues that his journal provides an exemplary text through which to examine the issues of pathographesis, or the writing out of illness. Situating the diary within the Romantic contexts of melancholy and self-exploration, it shows that Amiel took themes and genre further than ever before, producing a piece of writing that both defines and creates his ills. Amiel's relationship with his diary is tense and tragic: it is therapy but also poison and comes to embody personal and professional sterility. Thus ideas of pathographesis have to be extended to cover the semitextual limbo in which Amiel subsisted, where “writing out” illness was more fraught than merely “writing about” it.

Writing as Pathology, Poison, or Cure Henri-Frédéric Amiel's Journal intime

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