Ubiratàn D’AMBROSIO is a mathematician and emeritus professor of the State university of Campinas (Unicamp, Brazil). He is internationally recognized for his works of Ethnomathematics, a new domain questioning the traditional education of the mathematics and the theories of knowledge, which can be applied in different cultural contexts. He was honored in particular in 2001 by the International Commission of History of the Mathematics (ICHM) with Kenneth Prêmio for their contributions in the history of the mathematics and received in 2005 the medal Felix Klein awarded by the International Commission of Mathematical Instruction, (ICMI) because of their contributions in the field of the education of the mathematics. Member of the CIRET and of the PSA’s Scientific Committee, he makes us the honor to publish a new text mattering in PLASTIR, after that recently published on the transdisciplinary approach in the education and the epistemological cages (PLASTIR 43, 09/2016). Indeed, the author approaches with a big acuteness the route of the information through our brain-body entity there, our reality orders in sum, the perception of which is modulated by the society and the brewing of customs and cultures. But where the analysis of the ethnomathématicien takes all its flavor, it is when it exceeds the pure cognitivist or sociopolitical analysis to enter the cutting up of the underlying mechanics in contexts and in cultures and make us discover as a kind of obvious fact what, in circumstances as diverse as the evolution of the species or the criminal psychology, is of common prerequisites, cultural behaviors passed on and of their interactive dynamics: » Individual and social behavior generate the context of cultural behavior, which includes the processes of cultural transmission and the exposure and mutual influence of different cultures, the object of study the dynamics of cultural encounters. » Going out, we understand how the same phenomenology can lead two individuals totally different to become allied in an action or a common ideology. The emergence of the prospect in architecture or technologies seems to us crystal clear also, as combination of ‘’artifacts’’ and of ‘‘mentifacts’’: « So, it emerges technology, as a combination of artifacts and mentifacts. Technology represents the way man deals with reality and deal with situations and problems. Artifacts, not only as material instruments, such as tools and practices, but also mentifacts, which are abilities and also religion and ideology as substrates of artifacts, are responsible for these actions. An example is the emergence of Gothic in architecture, which combines the material, the ogive construction, and the spiritual, pointing to the sky. A similar explanation for the emergence of perspective. » « Mentifacts » representing, among others, our memories and our individual representations, which stacked in the facts and in the artefacts constitute a tangible reality among of other than explicit Ubiràtan D’ambrosio about the cyclic processes. So many pregnant perspectives at the time of the artificial intelligence and of the theoretical opposition between the so sophisticated, typically binary systems they are, and the divergent, oblique or misty systems, in other words being a matter of the human strategy drawing within this dialogical « artifacts-mentifacts », the fruit of « The plasticity of the mind » rather than of the brain fonctionality stricto-sensu.
THE REVELATION OF VOID AT THE HEART OF THE NATURE
Auguste NSONSISSA is a lecturer in philosophy at the University Marien Ngouabi of Brazzaville (Congo). His PhD (2006) which concerned the interdisciplinary and epistemological approaches of Edgar Morin, led us to publish him several times in PLASTIR, particulary in the n° 24 and 31. Besides his position in Brazzaville, he is a professor HDR in the faculty of Arts and the Human Sciences of the Superior Teachers’ Training College and associated researcher at the university Paris V – René Descartes and at the CNRS (National Center for Scientific Research). Member of several societies of philosophy and of the IIAC (Center Edgar Morin), he recently contributed to the World Congress for the Complex Thought dispensing some morinniens rules facing the teaching of philosophy in Congo. He published several works in philosophy, in metalogics and in epistemology, the latest one of which, « The dynamics of the nature – Study on the theme of the space in the history of the philosophy of the sciences » (Harmattan Ed. 2017) is directly in touch with the consequent essay he submits to us here. Auguste Nsonsissa, goes for our most great pleasure, indeed to go farther to this text by speaking about a real revelation of the void. He summarizes us his approach in these terms : « The theme of the void is little explored even today from the point of view of the comparative epistemology; even though it would have been in the field of the history of science. The term is often used itself, but less well discussed in the philosophic world where it is almost approached in a rough and vague way. In this article, there is no question to draw up an exhaustive list of its various philosophic approaches or to make an analysis of all the abstract levels at which this transverse concept appeared in physics just like in mathematics. Especially as the point of view which I adopt here is the one of the compared epistemology and will not certainly be identical to that of the history and the methodology of the sciences. » Except the anti-aristitotelician interrogation that he subjects us on the place which occupies the void in the nature, the author places his approach in the intersection of the physics and the bio-epistemology, by operating once more this fundamental distinction between the epistemology and the history of science itself. Distinction which we share and which he teaches in an transdisciplinary spirit today opposing monolytic teachings or educational frames not taking into account the complexity and the transversality at school or in university courses.
THE MATHEMATICS OF MORPHOGENESIS AT RENÉ THOM
Abdelkader BACHTA is professor of philosophy at the University of Tunis. These propensities concern essentially the epistemological relationships maintained by the scientitific theories, in particular connected to the mathematics. In this context, he was published several times of PLASTIR and his René Thom’s work recently gathered in the form of an entitled book : « The scientific modelling – Studies on the modelizing thought of René Thom » (MtL publishing House, Tunis, on 2016), by comparing it with the approaches of the other disciplines, in particular the physical sciences and the philosophy (postivism, Cartesianism, model making, topology, ontology). In this essay, besides a parallel led between the surrounding areas of Turing and Thom, he confronts for the first time the mathematician with the biologist thought of Waddington. More exactly, he suggests studying the mathematics of morphogenesis which follow the theory of the disasters and the model of which is the theoretical embryology of Waddington, through the specificity of the tomian approach. This one distinguishes itself clearly from the experiment of Turing and from the thought of Thomson, as far as they are basically not quantitative, but fundamentally topological and morphogenetical. They are so more relevant from the Aristotelian frame than the Pytagorician and the Platonic one followed by the Newtonian revolutions in which Thom does not recognize himself. Abdelkader Bachta concludes from it that the mathematics of the morphogenesis of Thom establish by themselves an epistemological revolution, and that from this point of view, he is situated in the qualitative lineage of Aristote’s hylé, or still, without clarifying it enought here, Arabic mathematicians of the Middle Ages like Kindi, Birouni, Ibn Al Haythem or Ibn Roshed, who, as him, saw in Aristote » The first master « .
MUTATIONS AND NEBULAS: THE DIALOGUE BETWEEN THE PHILOSOPHY AND THE SCIENCES
Mar THIERIOT, faithful collaborator of PLASTIR (see her blog), is a philosopher, poet and French-Brazilian painter. Born in Brazil, stemming from Brazilian and French cultures, she spends her childhood in São-Paulo, then joins France in the adolescence where she will live in Lorraine, surrounded with artists in the Cultural center of the Abbey of Prémontrés where his father was director. This unique experience will determine its interest in contemporary art and contemplative life. She will paint in secret for years to be then absorbed completely in studies of philosophy before returning to the paint and the poetry. This slow maturation takes place according to her « in an effort to bound the outlines of a consciousness of the non intentional : a consciousness that we are unconsciously acted by our feelings and that we have to compromise with it thanks to the cultural objects, the transitional, floating objects which circulate between us. » After the obtaining of a Control then a Post-Graduate Diploma in sciences of the Education at the University of Lyon (1995), she returns in Brazil where she ends a PhD in Education Culture and Society. She will work on it during 14 years as professor of philosophy on UNIFIEO at Osasco, situated in the suburb of São-Paulo, period during which she frequented dedicatedly the MAC (Museum of contemporary art of São-Paulo) where she will see works taking form under his eyes as those of Claudio Tozzi, Siron Franco, Ivald Granato and Cabral or still the sculptures of Caciporé and the buildings of Tomie Otake. In 2008, she emigrates in Quebec with the aim of making a post-doctoral internship in philosophy at the university Laval on the theme of the human mutations (published in PLASTIR and recently 2016 as a book : Ed. Amalthée, 2016). Theme particularly important for Mar Thieriot as far as it is a question of knowing how to compromise with its feelings, what establishes a factor determining for the evolution of the human relations. She lives today in Montreal and is divided between the poetry, the paint and the philosophy, studying in particular the interrelations appropriate to the feminine and her traumas, the intelligence, beauty and the evil – » A Faustian version of the woman, capable of getting up after her many falls…« , and the place of the yoga and the meditation in the control of the human feelings when they are confronted with pains and with crises. If we a little lingered on bio of the author, it is because her contribution, strewed with paintings, on the mutations and the cloudiness illustrate perfectly the prupose. That she recovers there except that « ‘to do something of oneself’, involves a mourning, that to reproduce a model to have the approval of his educators, that repeat, imitate to risk the creation in deep waters of the singular sense« , before reaching the conclusion that the error is a part of the process of learning and of search, even is necessary for it at the threshold of the creativity, which measures the search for this misty sense… Course based on the trust and the opening, where each works to deliver other one of his solitude and his devils, where little by little arises the climate convenient to the hatching of fertile cloudiness, once freed from their mortiferous gangues.. Then, everything gets clearer and » the reflexive and dialogical capacity of the subjects to the world » can bloom in the heart of a text, in the meanders of the education or between the philosophy and the science, all at the same time objects and subjects of the human mutations.