Ecole Normale Research Articles

Gestural Cosuppositions within the Transparency Theory

Gestural Cosuppositions within the Transparency Theory

Hacia una Filosofía de la Educación con Emmanuel Levinas

The purpose of this article is to develop elements for a philosophy of education based on Emmanuel Levinas’ thinking and his experience as director of the Ecole Normale Israelite Orientale (ENIO). To that aim, some of his reports about this organisation are examined and the parallelisms between them and his philosophical and Jewish writings are emphasised. In this way, it is shown how his dedication to education imbues Totality and Infinity and arguments are introduced about how the concepts used in this book are easier to understand if they are related with his pedagogical experience. Finally, with this rereading mediated by his biography, ideas which normally are not highlighted in the Levinas’ reception become evident, like the significance of criticism, the inexhaustibility of teaching and the appreciation of the teacher. Therewith, it’s explicitly stated that Levinas’ ethical proposal can become fruitful when thinking about the phenomenon of education and that his reflections can be a point of departure for developing a philosophy of education consistent with his thinking.

On the Conversion Efficiency of CO2 Electroreduction on Gold

Benjamin A. Zhang is a PhD student at Harvard University. His research focus is on the control of mass transport and concentration gradients in electrochemical reactions, in particular CO2 reduction, through nano- and mesostructuring of electrodes. Cyrille Costentin is Professor at Universite Paris Diderot. He received his undergraduate education at Ecole Normale Superieure de Cachan and his PhD at Universite Paris Diderot. He is currently a Visiting Scientist in the group of D.G. Nocera at Harvard University. His interests include mechanisms and reactivity in electron transfer chemistry with particular emphasis on proton-coupled electron transfer and catalysis of electrochemical reactions. Daniel G. Nocera is the Patterson Rockwood Professor of Energy at Harvard University. His group studies mechanisms of biological and chemical energy conversion.

Editorial

This issue spans the entirety of Sartre’s philosophical life, from his mémoire on images written at the age of twenty-two for his diploma at the Ecole normale supérieure to his thoughts about democracy as expressed in his final interview, Hope Now, at seventy-four. Fittingly enough, in between come reflections on sin and love and on the ageing body. As a result, we can get a sense of how Sartre’s thinking changes and develops throughout his career and is always engaged, right to the end.

Maurice Blondel: Transforming Catholic Tradition by Robert C. Koerpel

Reviewed by: Maurice Blondel: Transforming Catholic Tradition by Robert C. Koerpel Jude P. Dougherty KOERPEL, Robert C. Maurice Blondel: Transforming Catholic Tradition. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2019. xi + 265 pp. Cloth, $55.00 In the opening pages of his book, Koerpel reminds the reader that all Christian denominations proclaim scripture to be the Divine Word of God. In addition to sacred scripture itself, Roman Catholicism places a significant role on tradition in the interpretation of that Word. "Tradition," as a term used in the present treatise, includes the many doctrines, teachings, customs, practices, actions, persons, writings, events, places, and happenings that have occurred in the life of the Church, some of them great, such that Yves Congar may rightly speak of "the monuments of tradition." Maurice Blondel was born 1861 into a prominent family in Dijon, France. At age 20, he left his paternal home to study philosophy at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris. Twelve years later in 1893 he published Action, a version of his doctoral dissertation, which may be broadly characterized as an interpretation of Christianity from a point of view integrating Neoplatonism with modern pragmatism. Upon completion of his degree, he was at first denied a teaching post to which he would have been entitled, because his book was considered a work of Catholic apologetics, far too theological to be considered a work of philosophy. In fact, it was a philosophical attempt to define the relationship between philosophical reasoning and Christianity. He subsequently completed a second dissertation on the Vinculum Substantiale of Leibniz, and with the help of Edmund Boutroux and Raymond Poincare he was able to secure a position at the University of Lille. He later accepted a position at the University of Aix-Marseille, where he would teach the rest of his career until his death in 1949. Blondel lived in a period when the positivism of August Comte was taking hold. He entered the Ecole Normale Superieure one a year after Henri Bergson and Emile Durkheim had finished. Pierre Duhem and Edouard Le Roy were also among his notable similarly engaged contemporaries. In spite of the ascendency of the positive sciences, there was a sense that Europe had lost something in the secularization that followed the French Revolution. Positivism had robbed religion of its rational foundation, a cornerstone of scholastic teaching since the Council of Trent. Durkheim, like Blondel, began the study of religion from a philosophical perspective, but from the negative point of his ingrained atheism. Action begins with a discussion of freedom and necessity. Blondel maintains that freedom is never absolute but is real only when exercised in deliberation, that is, in choosing among alternatives. If the human person is to be fully free, its perfection depends on its conforming its "willed-will" to the source of its liberation. The totally free gift of God is absolutely necessary for human freedom. [End Page 798] Koerpel believes that "Blondel's form of thought allowed Christian thinkers to rediscover the sublime syntheses between nature and grace, faith and reason, and theology and history, a synthesis capable of rendering an account of hope open to the practice of charity." And further, to his credit, "Blondel succeeded in reintroducing the notion of transcendence into French philosophical discourse." Other important works followed Action. In 1904 Blondel published History and Dogma, in which he addresses the mode in which revelation appears in history. He speaks of reason's capacity to examine the immanent affirmation of the transcendent absolute implicit in human action. In 1934 he published the two-volume La Pensee. Nearly two decades later, an essay, Exigences philosophiques du christianisme, written shortly before his death, was published posthumously in 1950. Koerpel does justice to each in his exposition and insightful commentary, impossible to recapitulate here. Koerpel finds that what set Blondel's approach apart from his coreligionists' is that he begins with the absence of the supernatural instead of with its presence. It is through the unfolding of the logic of action that we see the necessity of God's self-giving for the fulfillment of human destiny. It is obvious Blondel's neo-Kantianism destroys the rational basis for belief. The...

Interdisciplinary Case Study: Geochemistry Meets the Clinic in Search for a Metal ALS Biomarker

Interdisciplinary Case Study: Geochemistry Meets the Clinic in Search for a Metal ALS Biomarker

L’impact de l’enseignement de la didactique sur la pratique professionnelle des enseignants normaliens du secondaire

In this publication we show, the pedagogical interest of taking into account proposals from research in teaching and learning at didactic physics, in the teaching of this subject to the students teachers of the Ecole Normale Superieure of Kouba (ENS).We show concretely the impact of the introduction of the “exploded schema” in mechanics, as a research proposal, in the initial didactic training of our students in their professional practice.

Peculiarities of Training Physicists in Universities Abroad

The paper highlights peculiarities of the vocational training process in the field of physics for postBachelor's degree programs in higher educational institutions of some countries of Europe, North Americaand Australia, analyzes the algorithm of the educational process, the contents of the relevant curricula andother approaches to the organization of the educational process. The article substantiates the role ofvocational training in physics in the context of the further development in the nuclear industry and manyother areas of fundamental research. The emphasis is placed on the importance of comparative studies in theera of globalization. At the same time, particular attention is drawn to the fact that the vast majority ofcomparative studies highlight the processes in the general secondary education of the developed countries ofthe world. Meanwhile, insufficient attention is paid to the analysis of the main tendencies in vocationaltraining of specialists with higher education in foreign universities, especially specialists in natural sciences.The paper also provides an analysis of doctoral research works on pedagogy that deal with the theory andmethodology of vocational training of specialists in physics. The corresponding problem field is currentlyproved to be presented by few works which do not consider the phenomenon in full.The generalizations made in this paper are based on the analysis of Master's programs in physics andPhD programs that are being implemented at the Munich and Hamburg Universities (Germany), the HigherSchool of Ecole Normale (France), the United Kingdom's Nuclear Technology Education Consortium (whichunites 12 universities), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California (USA),Melbourne and Sydney Universities (Australia).The paper concludes that it is necessary to adopt a series of measures of managerial and educationalmethodological nature that will allow Ukraine to return the position of one of the leaders in providing highereducation in the field of physics. The emphasis is put on signing bilateral agreements with foreignuniversities on the mutual exchange of faculty members who train future physicists and arrangements forstudent internships in leading European, North American and Australian laboratories.

Entretien avec Christian Baudelot

Christian Baudelot (1938) is a well-known French sociologist, disciple of Pierre Bourdieu, and author of important studies that explore social inequalities in education and work, and the topic of suicide. He is Emeritus Professor at the Ecole Normale Superieure (ENS) in Paris, and former Dean of the Department of Social Sciences (1990-2003). He has also taught Sociology at the University of Nantes, where he was Director of the department of Sociology (1984-1993), and at the University of Lille 1 (1966-1978); other positions he has held include assistant professor at the University of Yale, and visiting professor at the Institute of French Studies in New York, at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and in various Chinese universities. In the interview, Baudelot traces the key developments in his academic career: from his chance – lucky – meeting with Pierre Bourdieu, to the years of his sociological formation. He is a worthy successor of the generations of French sociologists which have given the Ecole Normale Superieure its international prestige: from Durkheim to Halbwachs, Bougle, Aron, Touraine, Boudon, Bourdieu, Passeron and, more recently, Baudelot’s own generation. The ENS has always been fertile terrain for those interested in questions that emerge on the dividing lines between different disciplines: the point where scientific breakthroughs and discoveries are much more likely to occur, according to Christian Baudelot.

La Contre‐Revolution Compatible. Ces Chiffres Qui (nous) Gouvernent. FabriceBardet. Les Belles Lettres, Paris, France, 2014. 374 pp. $29.00 (paper)

GovernanceVolume 32, Issue 1 p. 199-200 BOOK REVIEW La Contre-Revolution Compatible. Ces Chiffres Qui (nous) Gouvernent. Bardet, Fabrice. Les Belles Lettres, Paris, France, 2014. 374 pp. $29.00 (paper) Didier Chabanet, IDRAC Business School and Triangle–Ecole Normale Supérieure of LyonSearch for more papers by this author Didier Chabanet, IDRAC Business School and Triangle–Ecole Normale Supérieure of LyonSearch for more papers by this author First published: 21 December 2018 https://doi.org/10.1111/gove.12380Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onEmailFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume32, Issue1January 2019Pages 199-200 RelatedInformation

ChemSystemsChem: All Systems Go!

<i>ChemSystemsChem</i>: All Systems Go!

Meet the First Authors.

Meet the First Authors.

Atonement : A Conversation with Ian McEwan

This is the edited transcript of an interview with Ian McEwan which was conducted on 22 May 2018 at the Ecole Normale Superieure de Lyon in front of an audience of students. The editor selected the parts of the conversation which concentrated on Ian McEwan’s 2001 novel Atonement and its 2007 film adaptation by Joe Wright. Ian McEwan kindly and meticulously revised the final written transcript of this interview.

From corps to discipline, part one: Charles d'Almeida, Pierre Bertin and French experimental physics, 1840-1880.

Academic careers in French science during the mid-nineteenth century were made within the Université de France, an integrated state system of secondary and higher education controlled by a centralized Parisian educational administration. Among the most respected members of the corps universitaire were Charles d'Almeida and Pierre Bertin, two historically obscure physiciens whose significance derives from their substantial contributions to the social organization, teaching and communication of French experimental physics. This two-part comparative biography uses their entwined careers to make a case for the emergence of a discipline of French experimental physics from the corps during the tumultuous politico-cultural transition from the Second Empire to the Third Republic. Of fundamental importance are disciplinary regimes of teaching and inspection within the corps, the foundation of the Société française de physique and the Journal de physique, and the diversification of the traditional pedagogical role of the Ecole normale supérieure, which, from around 1860, began to offer a career pathway for aspiring scientific researchers. Having established in this paper the socio-institutional mechanisms for the stabilization of a distinct field, in part two I characterize the epistemological-methodological aspects of French experimental physics.

Dante Fedele, Naissance de la diplomatie moderne (XIIIe-XVIIe siècles). L’ambassadeur au croisement du droit, de l’éthique et de la politique

This volume is the final form of the Doctoral thesis of Dante Fedele (Research Fellow, KULeuven), written in French under the supervision of Michel Senellart and defended at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Lyon in 2014. Fedele has accomplished an impressive synthesis of literature on diplomacy, stretching from the Middle Ages to Louis XIV. Contextual approaches are currently on the rise.1 However, the present work is both a relativisation and a defense of doctrine as the dominant language of diplomacy.2 The juxtaposition of ethical, political and legal lenses offers novel insights. The introduction clearly states that doctrine is not studied as an autonomous system of thought, but within a dialectical approach. Firstly, the diplomatic process is seen as a ‘reflexive practice’ (p. 28), a constantly evolving dialogue with concepts borrowed from previously elaborated types of knowledge. Secondly, de lege ferenda diplomatic theory is not ‘fictitious’, but an ‘operating’ fiction, a term borrowed from Pierre Bourdieu (p. 30).

Smartphone audio port data collection cookbook

The audio port of a smartphone is designed to send and receive audio but can be harnessed for portable, economical, and accurate data collection from a variety of sources. While smartphones have internal sensors to measure a number of physical phenomena such as acceleration, magnetism and illumination levels, measurement of other phenomena such as voltage, external temperature, or accurate timing of moving objects are excluded. The audio port cannot be only employed to sense external phenomena. It has the additional advantage of timing precision; because audio is recorded or played at a controlled rate separated from other smartphone activities, timings based on audio can be highly accurate. The following outlines unpublished details of the audio port technical elements for data collection, a general data collection recipe and an example timing application for Android devices.&#x0D; Received: 5 January 2018, Accepted: 20 April 2018; Edited by: A. Martí, M. Monteiro; Reviewed by: P. Jeanjacquot, Ecole Normale Superieure de Lyon – Institut Francais de lEducation, France; DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4279/PIP.100006&#x0D; Cite as: K Forinash, R Wisman, Papers in Physics 10, 100006 (2018)&#x0D; This paper, by K Forinash, R Wisman, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0.&#x0D;

Interview with a Thought Leader on Systems Medicine—Charles Auffray, PhD

Charles Auffray is CNRS Research Director at the Joliot Curie Transdisciplinary Laboratory and Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon, Founding Director of the European Institute for Systems Biology and Medicine (EISBM) and Chair of the European Association of Systems Medicine (EASyM).

Protein-hydrogel crystal expands and contracts

Shampoo plus conditioner, camera phones, and the spork are all common two-in-one products. In the same spirit of ingenuity, Akif Tezcan and coworkers at the University of California, San Diego, have now created a material that is not just a crystalline protein or an amorphous hydrogel but a hybrid of both (Nature 2018, DOI: 10.1038/s41586-018-0057-7). The hybrid can expand and contract several times without losing crystallinity. And if it fractures during expansion, it heals itself spontaneously, which crystalline materials typically cannot do. “I have to admit that this paper is beautiful,” says porous materials specialist Christian Serre of Ecole Normale Superieure, in Paris. “It clearly bridges the giant gap between crystalline solids and soft matter by demonstrating that flexibility and crystalline order can coexist.” The material’s ability to expand and contract repetitively could be useful to improve the quality of X-ray diffraction analysis of proteins, a feat the researchers demonstrated

Jacques Derrida. Heidegger: The Question of Being and History. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. 288 pp.

Previous articleNext article No AccessThe CI ReviewJacques Derrida. Heidegger: The Question of Being and History. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. 288 pp.Raoul MoatiRaoul Moati Search for more articles by this author Raoul Moati is an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy of the University of Chicago. He is also a member of the Chicago Center for Jewish Studies, a member of The Emmanuel Levinas Center (Université Paris-Sorbonne) an associate member of the Husserl Archives (Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris) and a member of the editorial board of Les Oeuvres complètes of Emmanuel Levinas published by Grasset (Paris). He is the author of several books, amongst them Derrida/Searle:Deconstruction and Ordinary Language (2014) and Levinas and the Night of Being (2017).PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Critical Inquiry Volume 44, Number 2Winter 2018 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/695370 Views: 248Total views on this site © 2017 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Beckett's Thing: Painting and Theatre by David Lloyd

Reviewed by: Beckett's Thing: Painting and Theatre by David Lloyd Derval Tubridy Lloyd, David. 2016. Beckett's Thing: Painting and Theatre. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. £75.00 hc. £24.99 sc. xiii + 253 pp. David Lloyd's erudite and incisive study, Beckett's Thing: Painting and Theatre, articulates the importance of Samuel Beckett's close attention to painting as material culture and social signifier, identifying the ways in which his engagement with three key painters—Jack B. Yeats, Bram van Velde, and Avigdor Arikha—influenced the development of his theater. Beckett's Thing forms part of a growing body of scholarship on Beckett and the visual arts that both identifies the paintings and art-historical contexts that influenced the Irishman's writing (Gordon Armstrong, James Knowlson, Mark Nixon, Fionnuala Croke, Conor Carville), and traces his influence on Modern and contemporary art (Lois Oppenheim, Mary Bryden, Daniel Albright, Derval Tubridy, Catherine Laws, Christa-Marie Lerm Hayes, Carla Taban, Katherine Weiss, Robert Reginio, David Houston Jones). Yet, while he draws on the significant developments of each of these strands of research, Lloyd provides a distinctive perspective, focusing on Beckett's deep interest in specific paintings by Yeats, van Velde, and Arika, and asking, "How far can we find in his appreciation of actual paintings clues not to any specific image that Beckett may have adopted, but to the visual principles that underlie and evolve through his work as a whole?" (7). His critical perspective framed by ethics and aesthetics, Lloyd positions Beckett's engagement with painting as a way of thinking, [End Page 880] an extension of the writer's exploration of the impossibilities of language, representation, and expression. Drawing on his earlier readings of Beckett in terms of the decolonial subject, Lloyd develops the implications of representation as a form of politics to argue that Beckett's "thoroughgoing dismantling of the regime of representation { … } fractures not only the aesthetic but with it the political and ethical dimensions through which the modern subject is articulated" (233). Painting certainly was Beckett's thing. His early years were spent immersed in the Dutch and Renaissance paintings hanging in the National Gallery of Ireland. Beckett wrote to his good friend, Irish poet Thomas MacGreevy, on 13 September 1932: "I seem to spend a lot of time at the National Gallery, looking at the Poussin Entombment and coming stealthily down the stairs into the charming toy brightness of the German room to the Breughels." In the summer of 1927 he travelled to Florence and to Venice, where he saw Giorgione's The Tempest at the Accademia, to which he would allude in his 1931 essay on Proust. While working as a lecteur at the Ecole Normale Superièure in Paris, he frequented the Louvre in the company of MacGreevy (who was working there as a guide), later referring to paintings by Franciabigio and Pisanello in his early stories. In 1933–34 Beckett immersed himself in art history, transcribing passages from R. H. Wilenski's An Introduction to Dutch Art (1929). A sojourn in London while writing Murphy in the 1930s facilitated trips to galleries and museums there (he even applied for a curatorial post at the National Gallery), and his subsequent trip through pre-war Germany, detailed in six diaries now called the "German Diaries," exposed the young writer not only to the avant-garde of European painting, but to the political nexus within which expression and representation are embedded. Beckett's notes on his visit to the studio of Karl Ballmer in November 1936 give a glimpse of the aesthetic concerns that would animate his critical writing at that time. Viewing Ballmer's Kopf in Rot (1930–31), Beckett was alert to the tension between abstraction and representation, noting that the object of Ballmer's work is "not exploited to illustrate an idea," and that communication itself is "exhausted by the optical experience that is {both} its motive & content" (German Diaries, November 26, 1936). Informed by the publication of Beckett's letters, and further scholarship on his notes and diaries pertaining to the writer's early appreciation of European art, Lloyd asks three vital questions: What did Beckett "learn from painters that eventually informed...