Documents found
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673.More information
The article examines the religious discourse on the novel as it manifests itself in an edifying novel of the late eighteenth century, Le Comte de Valmont, ou les égarements de la raison (1774), written by the “antiphilosophe” author Philippe-Louis Gérard (1737-1813). This epistolary novel is one of the few works of the time to criticize with such violence the novelistic genre. Far from being confined to traditional attacks on the morality of the novel, the criticism of Gérard puts particular emphasis on the pernicious effects of imagination as exploited by the novel, which operates a distortion in the mind of the reader who then confuses the real and the imaginary. For Gérard, the imagination is thus not only the source of passions, but also the enemy of reason which alone can attain the truth, that is to say the fundamental dogmas of Christianity. In putting forward a conception of imagination reduced to a power misleading reason, Gérard opposes a long tradition of thinkers, from Aristotle to Pascal, Montaigne, and François de Sales, that reserved to imagination a legitimate place in cognitive processes. His novel Le Comte de Valmont manifests the complete rejection of imagination by the exploitation of a poetic of reason. The work is accordingly structured by the themes and philosophical and theological discussions that are the true narrative motor of the novel. The case of Gérard shows that the debate on the novel must be seen as an integral part of wider debates that involve the cognitive potential of narrative fiction and, more generally, the relationship of man to truth.
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674.More information
As Aboriginal visual artists (First Nations, Inuit, and Métis) break away from “identity politics”, non-Aboriginal artists (of European ancestry) increasingly make reference to questions of indigeneity in their work. The article examines this issue by establishing three dialogues between the work of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginals artists living in Quebec : Nadia Myre (Algonquin) and Swiss-born artist Thomas Kneubühler, who address the industrial uses of Aboriginal territories in northern Quebec ; Sonny Assu (Laich-kwil-tach) and the BGL artist collective, who explore new attitudes and behaviours generated by rampant consumerism ; and Innu artist Sonia Robertson and Montreal artist Cynthia Girard, who focus on the relationship between Aboriginal peoples and settlers during the French colonial regime. If, through the lens of these three dialogues, indigeneity appears as an issue shared by both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal artists, it remains impossible to establish equivalence between the two groups. While indigeneity is usually a secondary motif in the work of non-Aboriginal artists, sometimes even going unnoticed by art critics, it remains a central theme for Aboriginal artists, rooted in the often tragic experiences of their communities.
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675.More information
Among the numerous polemical writings published during the first half of the seventeenth century, a few call upon a fictional female persona, who assumes responsibility for the political discourse the pamphlet seeks to disseminate. Accordingly, the Responce de Dame Friquette Bohëmienne [The Response of Dame Friquette Bohemian] (1615) and the Admirables sentiments d'une fille Villageoise [The Admirable Sentiments of a Village Girl] (1649) are based on the ethos of a woman of modest status, attentive to the events of her time and invested with a mission quite foreign to her social rank—convincing a character to modify his political action on behalf of the good of the State. Despite their differences in tone and deliberative aim, these two texts give voice to an unsophisticated woman gifted with political “clairvoyance,” even if her competence in matters of public affairs is supposedly highly doubtful. The paradoxical nature of such an expressed opinion reveals certain enunciable positions that may be attributed to women during that period of burgeoning modernity.
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676.More information
From its foundation in 1622, the Sacred Congregation de Propaganda Fide was the department of the Holy See in charge of North America. Recently, its archives have been systematically examined for the first time. The 173 documents dealing with the North American Indians from 1610 to 1799 provide a wealth of new information on the evolution of native societies and the ties they established with the Catholic Church. They show that there are two turning points in the relationship between the Holy See and the Indians, in the years 1650-1660 and 1770-1780. The first corresponds to the end of Huronia, the second to the period of the North American revolutions.
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677.More information
The paper shows that a norm of governance is a convention in the game of governance; that the convention is Pareto - efficient; and, finally, that it is a norm of legitimacy in the sense of utilitarian ethics. Thereby, it proves in principle that the requirements of legitimacy in a firm or organization can be justified, not only for readers who accept ethical principles on a priori grounds, but also for those who claim profit maximization is the only objective a firm should have.
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680.