Disease is ubiquitous. Disease afflicts humans. It afflicts animals. It afflicts plants. People refer to disease in their everyday conversation. Newspapers comment upon it. Parliaments enact legislation regarding it. Novelists write about it. Artists depict it. Physicians, veterinary surgeons and agriculturalists seek to combat it. Insurance companies offer reimbursement against it. Anthropologists study it. Philosophers debate its nature, and dictionaries define it. Disease looms large in human consciousness. One might presume that, since disease is so important in daily life, human beings would know exactly what they mean by it. Most people seem to believe instinctively that they understand the nature of disease, and that their ideas about it coincide with other people�s ideas. The definition of disease therefore arouses little controversy in everyday conversation. People use the word disease as readily as they use the words spade, or table or nose. They suggest, when they joke that somebody calls a spade a spade, that the nature of the implement used to dig the garden is so obvious that it requires no further definition. Similarly with a table or a nose. They might debate how many legs a table must have, but�regardless of the answer�rarely deny that it is a table; whilst every human must surely know what a nose is. This high level of agreement about so many commonly used terms perhaps creates an assumption that the meaning of disease is equally obvious and requires no further analysis. Is this, however, really the case? Disease is a somewhat less concrete phenomenon than is a spade or a table or a nose. Its existence, most would agree, is incontrovertible, but its nature is less clear. It is something that seems to befall people and animals and plants. It rarely serves any useful purpose. It often carries dire implications. It is something that most of us would prefer not to have, but rarely succeed in avoiding. It commonly comes unannounced and at inconvenient times. It usually causes distress, but not always. It can have a fatal outcome. Some people appear more prone to it that others. It sometimes sweeps through whole populations producing social devastation, but its manifestations vary. Some diseases affect a person�s whole body, others merely a part of the body; some affect some parts of the body, others other parts. Some diseases only affect humans, whereas others affect both humans and animals. Some spread from animals to humans, others from humans to humans, and others still do not appear to spread at all. Some diseases affect plants, and few that affect plants seem to affect humans, but some humans can acquire diseases when they come into contact with plants that appear to have no diseases. Any reasonable analysis of the nature of disease must account for all these aspects and many others also. The nature of disease is a topic that has attracted the attention of physicians, scientists and philosophers over millennia. The close association that existed between medicine and philosophy in the classical Egyptian, Palestinian and Greek eras ensured that scholars who flourished in those societies examined the nature of disease. Comparable developments occurred in classical Indian and Chinese civilizations. The natural philosophers of Renaissance and post-Renaissance Europe divided into competing schools of thought over the nature of disease. More recent years have witnessed an enormous flourishing of physicians, pathologists, and agriculturalists who study aspects of disease that relate to their individual disciplines. Most of these researchers have, however, examined ever-narrower aspects of specific diseases�such as manifestations, mechanisms and causes�rather than the generic nature of the phenomenon. Some contemporary philosophers, on the other hand, have become interested in general aspects of the topic. They have proposed a number of novel ideas and reached some stimulating conclusions, although they can hardly yet claim to have reached a consensus. This lack of unanimity presumably implies that the issues involved require closer analysis if a formulation is to emerge that most of them can accept. The object of the present thesis is to undertake such an analysis. It will start by outlining in this introduction the general background to the topic. It will then detail the more noteworthy of previously proposed theories about the nature of this phenomenon, classifying them according to their most prominent components, and assessing their several strengths and weaknesses. It will next discuss the specific philosophical issues of definition, causation, and explication in the biomedical context, before suggesting a comprehensive, but succinct, definition that acknowledges many older views about disease, encompasses current usage, and provides a theoretical base from which to work into the future. It will finally test the strengths and weaknesses of that definition to account for observed phenomena and to accommodate some former definitions.

Disease is ubiquitous. Disease afflicts humans. It afflicts animals. It afflicts plants. People refer to disease in their everyday conversation. Newspapers comment upon it. Parliaments enact legislation regarding it. Novelists write about it. Artists depict it. Physicians, veterinary surgeons and agriculturalists seek to combat it. Insurance companies offer reimbursement against it. Anthropologists study it. Philosophers debate its nature, and dictionaries define it. Disease looms large in human consciousness. One might presume that, since disease is so important in daily life, human beings would know exactly what they mean by it. Most people seem to believe instinctively that they understand the nature of disease, and that their ideas about it coincide with other people�s ideas. The definition of disease therefore arouses little controversy in everyday conversation. People use the word disease as readily as they use the words spade, or table or nose. They suggest, when they joke that somebody calls a spade a spade, that the nature of the implement used to dig the garden is so obvious that it requires no further definition. Similarly with a table or a nose. They might debate how many legs a table must have, but�regardless of the answer�rarely deny that it is a table; whilst every human must surely know what a nose is. This high level of agreement about so many commonly used terms perhaps creates an assumption that the meaning of disease is equally obvious and requires no further analysis. Is this, however, really the case? Disease is a somewhat less concrete phenomenon than is a spade or a table or a nose. Its existence, most would agree, is incontrovertible, but its nature is less clear. It is something that seems to befall people and animals and plants. It rarely serves any useful purpose. It often carries dire implications. It is something that most of us would prefer not to have, but rarely succeed in avoiding. It commonly comes unannounced and at inconvenient times. It usually causes distress, but not always. It can have a fatal outcome. Some people appear more prone to it that others. It sometimes sweeps through whole populations producing social devastation, but its manifestations vary. Some diseases affect a person�s whole body, others merely a part of the body; some affect some parts of the body, others other parts. Some diseases only affect humans, whereas others affect both humans and animals. Some spread from animals to humans, others from humans to humans, and others still do not appear to spread at all. Some diseases affect plants, and few that affect plants seem to affect humans, but some humans can acquire diseases when they come into contact with plants that appear to have no diseases. Any reasonable analysis of the nature of disease must account for all these aspects and many others also. The nature of disease is a topic that has attracted the attention of physicians, scientists and philosophers over millennia. The close association that existed between medicine and philosophy in the classical Egyptian, Palestinian and Greek eras ensured that scholars who flourished in those societies examined the nature of disease. Comparable developments occurred in classical Indian and Chinese civilizations. The natural philosophers of Renaissance and post-Renaissance Europe divided into competing schools of thought over the nature of disease. More recent years have witnessed an enormous flourishing of physicians, pathologists, and agriculturalists who study aspects of disease that relate to their individual disciplines. Most of these researchers have, however, examined ever-narrower aspects of specific diseases�such as manifestations, mechanisms and causes�rather than the generic nature of the phenomenon. Some contemporary philosophers, on the other hand, have become interested in general aspects of the topic. They have proposed a number of novel ideas and reached some stimulating conclusions, although they can hardly yet claim to have reached a consensus. This lack of unanimity presumably implies that the issues involved require closer analysis if a formulation is to emerge that most of them can accept. The object of the present thesis is to undertake such an analysis. It will start by outlining in this introduction the general background to the topic. It will then detail the more noteworthy of previously proposed theories about the nature of this phenomenon, classifying them according to their most prominent components, and assessing their several strengths and weaknesses. It will next discuss the specific philosophical issues of definition, causation, and explication in the biomedical context, before suggesting a comprehensive, but succinct, definition that acknowledges many older views about disease, encompasses current usage, and provides a theoretical base from which to work into the future. It will finally test the strengths and weaknesses of that definition to account for observed phenomena and to accommodate some former definitions.

Adapting the question at the end of Keats's 'Ode to a Nightingale', this thesis argues that reading poetic texts involves a form of suspension between waking and sleeping. Poems are not the product of an empirical dreamer, but psychoanalytic understandings of dream-work help to provide an account of certain poetic effects. Poetic texts resemble dreams in that both induce identificatory desires within, while simultaneously estranging, the reading process. In establishing a theoretical connection between poetic texts and drearit-work, the discussion raises issues concerning death, memory and the body. The introduction relates Freudian and post-Freudian articulations of dream-work to the language of poetry, and addresses the problem of attributing desire "in" a literary text. Interweaving the work of Borch-Jacobsen, Derrida and Blanchot, the discussion proposes a different space of poetry. By reconfiguring the subject-of-desire and the structure of poetic address, the thesis argues that poetic "dreams" characterize points in texts which radically question the identity and position of the reader. Several main chapters focus on texts - poems by Frost and Keats, and Freud's reading of literary dreams - in which distinctions between waking and sleeping, familiarity and strangeness, order and confusion are profoundly disturbed. The latter part of the thesis concentrates on a textual "unconscious" that insists undecidably between the cultural and the individual. Poems by Eliot, Tennyson, Arnold and Walcott are shown to figure strange dreams and enact displacements that blur the categories of public and private. Throughout, the study confronts the recurrent interpretive problem of reading "inside" and "outside" textual dreams. This thesis offers an original perspective on reading poetry in conjunction with psychoanalysis, in that it challenges traditional assumptions about phantasy and poetry dependent upon a subject constituted in advance of a poetic event or scene of phantasy. It brings poetry into systematic relation with Freud's work on dreams and consistently identifies conceptual and performative links between psychoanalysis and literature in later modernity.

Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

Texte remanié de: Proefschrift--Taal en letterkunde--Leuven--Katholieke universiteit, 1997. / Bibliogr. p. 370-381.

One of the aims of this study is to identify shifts of cohesion in translation from Spanish into English, with a view to validating Blum-Kulka's proposal that explication is a universal strategy in translation. The study uses the translation work of ten advanced translation students using narrative texts of approximately 250 words in length. Some of these students are native speakers of Spanish and others native speakers of English. Another aim of the study is to examine how cohesive devices are deployed across an ability range of students and to establish whether there are systematic differences in their deployment. The study will also attempt to establish whether the levels of language competence of informants account for specific shifts of cohesion in translation and whether certain shifts of cohesion are motivated by the style of the source and target texts. / Master of Arts (Hons)

Aborder le mécanisme sans référer préalablement à Descartes est encore difficile, même de nos jours. Pourtant, le mécanisme a connu une constante évolution depuis le XIXème siècle et, surtout, il a ressurgi depuis plusieurs décennies dans nos sciences et notre philosophie des sciences. C'est pour essayer de palier, bien modestement, ce retard que ce mémoire est consacré au néo-mécanisme, la version contemporaine du mécanisme. Il ne faut pas croire que cette résurgence est un simple fait historique: nous sommes d'avis que le néo-mécanisme apporte des positions articulées, cohérentes et originales concernant l'ontologie (réductionnisme non-éliminativiste) et l'épistémologie (théorie de l'explication scientifique). Ce mémoire expose, dans le premier chapitre, comment les principes de base du néo-mécanisme, soit le réalisme et le naturalisme pragmatiste, se sont forgés en réaction aux thèses philosophiques des empiristes logiques concernant la théorie de l'explication scientifique et la nature de la causalité. Les chapitres deux et trois présentent, respectivement, deux théories néo-mécanistes exhaustives, c'est-à-dire une théorie qui couvrent les aspects ontologique, épistémologique et méthodologique. Nous verrons, au chapitre deux, comment la première théorie exhaustive du néo-mécanisme, développée par Glennan, Bechtel et Richardson, s'est construite en continuité avec les projets ontologique et épistémologique de Simon et Wimsatt en traitant la notion de mécanisme sous une perspective systémique et les explications mécanistes sous une perspective méthodologique et heuristique (une stratégie de recherche scientifique). Cette première « vague » de néo-mécanistes affirme que le néo-mécanisme est la forme la plus répandue des explications scientifiques tant son application est diffusée. Le troisième chapitre présente la seconde théorie exhaustive du néomécanisme (Machamer/Darden/Craver). Leur théorisation du concept de mécanisme et de l'explication mécaniste s'est faite en référence à la neurobiologie et la biologique moléculaire -la seconde « vague » de néo-mécanistes ne prétend donc pas que le néo-mécanisme soit une théorie générale de l'explication scientifique. Ces néomécanistes ouvreront les premiers débats sur des enjeux internes à la doctrine néomécaniste.

Le titre de ma thèse est “Matter and Explanation. On Aristotle's Metaphysics Book Η”. Le but de cette recherche est de montrer la profonde unité argumentative du livre H (livre VIII), considéré habituellement comme un ensemble d'appendices au livre livre Z, qui le précède. Dans mon travail, conformément à la tendance dominante dans la littérature spécialisée des dernières années, je pars de l'indication donnée par M. Burnyeat dans “A Map of Metaphysics Ζ” (2001). D’après Burnyeat, H achèverait l'analyse de Z en développant le nouveau point de départ dans l'étude sur la substance établi dans le chapitre Z17. Dans ce texte, on considère la substance comme « principe et cause » et, par conséquent, on recherche « la cause pour laquelle la matière est quelque chose ». Cette indication a été utilisée jusqu'à présent pour voir en H l'endroit où ce principe serait appliqué. H aurait ainsi un rôle didactique, explicitant le principe méthodologique établi en Z17. Dans mon travail, je vise à montrer que l’attitude d’Aristote à propos de la notion de substance ne se borne pas, dans le livre H, à une simple synthèse exposant des résultats préalablement acquis. J’estime, au contraire, qu’il procède à une révision profonde du statut de substantialité qui est celui de la matière, c'est-à-dire du sujet ontologique, dont il s’agit alors d’expliquer l'organisation. Cette révision concerne les critères de référence, utilisés dans Z, qui avaient différemment contribué à imposer une lecture déflationniste de la notion de ὕλη. Dans H, au contraire, la matière est abordée en tant que sujet physique sous-jacent aux changements et à travers son rôle dispositionnel à l'intérieur des composées biologiques. Cette perspective de recherche s'accomplit en H6, où Aristote montre la supériorité explicative de son hylémorphisme par rapport à la doctrine platonicienne des Idées. / The main aim of my work – “Matter and Explanation. On Aristotle's Metaphysics Book Η” – is to show the argumentative unity of Book Η (VIII), which has been usually regarded as a mere collection of appendices to the previous Book Ζ. In my thesis I take on the main suggestion provided by M. Burnyeat in “A Map of Metaphysics Ζ” (2001). According to Burnyeat, Η accomplishes the enquiry of Ζ by developing Ζ17's fresh start into the analysis of sensible substances. Starting from Ζ17, Aristotle regards the notion of substance in its explanatory role as “principle and cause” and, as a consequence, he searches for “the cause by reason of which a certain matter is some definite thing”. Burnyeat's suggestion has been so far followed in order to look at Η as at that place where this search is accomplished. Thus, Η would play a didactical-expository role. In my work I aim at showing how in Book Η Aristotle does not confine himself to a mere exposition of the previous outcomes. By contrast, he provides a deep revision of the status of matter's substancehood. Namely of that ontological subject whose organization must be explained. Such a revision concerns those criteria, which in Book Ζ have provided a deflationary reading of the notion of ὕλη. On the contrary, in Η matter is read as subject of physical changes and in its dispositional role within the biological wholes. Such a framework is accomplished in Η6, where Aristotle shows the explanatory primacy of his own hylomorphism over the Platonic Doctrine of Forms.

Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

Tableau d’honneur de la Faculté des études supérieures et postdoctorales, 2015-2016 / Ce mémoire de philosophie des sciences est centré autour de la notion d'explication scientifique. Plus précisément, il sera question d'exposer la théorie pragmatique de l'explication proposée par Bas van Fraassen afin de montrer ses rapports avec la théorie de l'empirisme constructif défendue par le même auteur. Dans un premier temps, afin de bien comprendre les enjeux épistémiques liés à la notion d'explication scientifique et de comprendre le contexte dans lequel van Fraassen développe ses idées, trois des modèles de l'explication scientifique les plus influents en philosophie des sciences contemporaine, soit le modèle déductif-nomologique hempélien, le modèle unificationniste de Philip Kitcher et le modèle causal mécanique de Wesley Salmon seront exposés. Par la suite, une brève présentation des notions les plus importantes de l'empirisme constructif sera effectuée. Finalement, après avoir présenté la théorie pragmatique de l'explication telle que défendue par van Fraassen, je soutiendrai la thèse que ce modèle de l'explication, tout en étant compréhensible et défendable indépendamment de l'empirisme constructif, est entièrement fidèle à l'esprit général de cette théorie antiréaliste de la science.