¹ Robert Blanché, La Logique et son histoire, Paris, Armand Colin, 1970.

² Cf. Jean-Blaise Grize in Intellectica, Review of the Association for Cognitive Research, vol. 1, No. 4, 1987; and Claire Rémy, L'Intelligence et son miroir, Voyage autour de l'intelligence artificielle, Lausanne, Ed. Iderive, 1990.

³ Jean Dubucs gives a synthesis of this in the latest edition of the Encyclopaedia Universalis, 1989, article "Logiques non classiques", pp. 977-992.

⁴ Benjamin Lee Whorf, Language, Thought, Reality, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1956; see explanatory table on p. 132.

⁵ Claude Lévi-Strauss, La Pensée sauvage, Paris, Plon, 1962, p. 17.

⁶ This is the problematic presented, for the realm of art, by the exhibition "Le corps en morceaux", shown in 1990 at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.

⁷ Norbert Wiener, Ex-Prodigy: My Childhood and Youth, and I Am a Mathema tician, The Later Life of a Prodigy, both Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press.

⁸ See in particular Cybernetics, or Control and Communications in the Animal and the Machine, 1958; The Human Use of Human Beings. Cybernetics and Socie ty, Boston, Houghton Mifflin Co., 1950; God and Golem, Inc., Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1964. The remarks I quote are taken from the first work, pp. 8, 9, 11.

⁹ Ibid.

¹⁰ Vassily Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art. Über das Geistige in der Kunst was written in 1910 at a time when the artist was painting his first abstract works. The essay seemed so daring and revolutionary that no publisher would print it. Finally it was published by Piper in Munich in 1912.

¹¹ In Wiener's case cybernetics was born of circumstances as well, namely the state of war in which the planet, particularly the United States, was engaged. Without the war being the priority objective, it is true that cybernetics owes much to the search for improvements in anti-aircraft defense against enemy war planes: "To find some method of predicting the future position of the plane". This introduced the notion of feedback, retroactivity, but its scope can be understood better from the work's sub-title; op. cit., 1948. See note 8.

¹² Erwin Panofsky, La Perspective comme forme symbolique, Paris, Éditions de Minuit, 1975. Quotations on page 147, 42.

¹³ Pierre Francastel, La Figure et le lieu. L'ordre visuel du Quattrocento, NRF, Bibliothèque des sciences humaines, Paris, Gallimard, 1967.

¹⁴ Pierre Francastel, Peinture et Société. Naissance d'un espace plastique de la Renaissance au cubisme, Lyons, Audin, 1952.

¹⁵ Among others, Sigraph in the United States; Arts Electronica in Linz, Aus tria; Imagina in Monte Carlo; Video Art Festival in Locarno, Switzerland.

¹⁶ Edmond Couchot, Images, de l'optique au numérique. Paris-London-Lausanne, Éd. Hermès, 1988, p. 16. See also Nouvelles images, nouveau réel. Ca hiers internationaux de sociologie, January-June, 1987, Paris, PUF.

¹⁷ Daniel Andler, ed., "Une nouvelle science de l'esprit. Intelligence artificielle, science cognitive, nature du cerveau", Le Débat, Émergence du cognitif, No. 47, Nov. - Dec. 1987, Paris, Gallimard.

¹⁸ Lucien Sfez, Critique de la communication, Paris, Éd. du Seuil, 1988. After the observation, trite in itself, that our world is dominated by technology, the author specifies the three models that in his eyes flow from the position that one takes with regard to the machine. Either one lives by using it (live with the machine), or one experiences it as an environment (live in the machine), or one exists through it (ex ist by the machine). This last model, which the author calls the "Frankenstein model" and for which he creates the term "tautism", receives the majority of his criticism, denouncing "cognitive science": "autistic science, because deaf to events of the external world; tautological, because it reproduces its own structure infinitely: totaliz ing, because it is enclosed in its own circularity…; totalitarian, because it decides there is no other mode of knowledge than that consisting in reporting every think ing object to the computer". Why be upset?

¹⁹ The best approach to the problem as a whole seems to me to be found in Daeda lus, Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Winter, 1988, vol. 117, No. 1, Cambridge (Mass.), entirely devoted to artificial intelligence and in par ticular to the development of neo-connectionism. The authors, among some of the best experts, are remarkably unafraid to situate their contributions in the perspec tive of philosophical questioning.

²⁰ Gilles Deleuze, Le Pli, Leibniz et le baroque, Paris, Éd. de Minuit, 1988. Quo tations, pp. 8-9. As Deleuze notes, associating Whitehead, Bergson and Leibniz in the same fundamental intuition, "Events are in flux … but … This does not mean there are no eternal objects … that enter into the event. Rather at times these are Qualities, like a color or a sound, that qualify a component with prehensions; some times Forms, like a pyramid that delimits an expanse of space; or sometimes Things, like gold or marble that break matter down. Their eternity is not opposed to creativity. Inseparable from the process of actualization or realization in which they enter, they have permanence only within the limit of the flow that realizes them or pre hensions that actualize them", p. 108.

²¹ The traveling exhibition, Frontiers of Chaos—Computer Graphics Face Com plex Dynamics, illustrates the fractal geometry invented by Benoit B. Mandelbrot (Cf. Les Objets fractals, forme, hasard et dimension, Paris, Éd. Flammarion, 1975). The exhibition has been the subject of a book by H. O. Peitgen and P.H. Richter, The Beauty of Fractals—Images of Complex Dynamical Systems, Berlin-Heidelberg-New York-Tokyo, Springer-Verlag, 1986. To give an idea of its contents, in presenting the exhibition that began in New York in September 1986, the author entitled his essay, "The Beauty of Fractals: How to Imitate the Mountains and the Clouds and to Generate Wild and Wonderful Shapes". Mandelbrot's theory is widely used in infography. Cf. also "Un baroque fractal" by Severo Sarduy and Klaus Ottman, Art Press, 144, Feb. 1990, Paris, pp. 28-33.

²² Jean-Blaise Grize, op. cit., pp. 47-48. I will not even discuss the famous paradoxes, including the one about liars. "All Cretans are liars. But I am Cretan. Therefore… which can be summarized as ‘This statement is false' and that con tinues to attract the attention of commentators." See B. Godart-Wendling, "Le paradoxe du menteur: essai de résolution dans le cadre d'une approche dynamique", Intellectica, Langage et cognition, No. 6, Paris, ARC, 1988/2, pp. 123-168.

²³ Le Théorème de Gödel, Kurt Gödel, Ernest Nagel, James R. Newman, Jean-Yves Girard, Paris, Seuil, 1989 (translation of Gödel's Proof, New York Universi ty Press, 1958, based on Gödel's original text, Über formal unentschiedbare Sätze der Principia Mathematica und verwandter Systeme I, 1931). Quotations pp. 19, 143, 155.

²⁴ Stéphane Mallarmé, Oeuvres complètes, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Paris, Gal limard, 1945. Quotations, pp. 363, 364, 368.

²⁵ Akira Miyoshi, "The Silent Beat of Japanese Music", Japanese Essences, (Japan as I see it - 3), Shichi Yamamotu, Kenichi Fukui et. al., eds., Tokyo 1985. Quotations, pp. 103-105.

²⁶ Joseph Needham, La Science chinoise et l'Occident, Paris, Seuil, 1973. Quo tations pp. 14, 37, 40-41 (original edition Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1969). This leads to the following conclusion: "I often illustrate the evolution in China with a curve that rises slowly but surely towards a higher level, sometimes much higher, than the one reached in Europe between, for example, the second and fifteenth centu ries. But after the beginning of the scientific Renaissance in the West, with the Galilean revolution (which one could almost say was the discovery of the fundamental technique of scientific technology itself), the curve of science and technology in Eu rope begins to rise abruptly, almost exponentially, reaching the level achieved by Asian societies, thereby overturning the conditions that had existed throughout the preceding two or three centuries". There is a complement, which today seems a summons to reflection. "This violent break in equilibrium today is beginning to correct itself". How can we not think of our growing concern for our endangered planet? How not to think of the extraordinary development of ecology, once looked upon as a rather quaint exercise?

²⁷ Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, New York, Vintage Books, 1980.

²⁸ Jean Baudrillard, Les Stratégies fatales, Paris, Grasset, 1983. "Once upon a time it was the Sphinx who asked men the question about man, which Oedipus thought he had solved and which we in turn thought we had solved. Today man asks the Sphinx, the inhuman, the question about the inhuman… The object (the Sphinx) is more subtle but does not respond. But by disobeying laws, by thwarting desire, it responds secretly to some enigma."

²⁹ Norbert Wiener, God and Golem Inc., A Comment on Certain Points where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1965.

³⁰ Warren S. McCulloch, Embodiments of Mind, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1965.

³¹ See L. Sfez, op. cit., note 18.

³² Christopher G. Langton, Artificial Life, New York, Addison-Wesley Publish ing Company, Inc., 1989. His postulate is as follows: Extremely complicated be havior can be produced in "machines" governed by extremely simple rules because, as the author observes, "Perhaps the most intriguing thing about life resides in the fact that it is more an organization of matter than a property of matter itself". His conclusion is: "Artificial Life forces us to re-examine our place in the universe and our role in nature."

³³ Simulation of Adaptive Behavior: From Animals to Animats, is the sub-title of a symposium organized in Paris in September 1990 by The Rowland Institute for Science, Cambridge, Mass. "The objective of the conference is to bring together researches in ethology, ecology, cybernetics, artificial intelligence, robotics and other areas concerned in order to develop our understanding of behavior and underlying mechanisms that make it possible for animals and, potentially, for robots to sur vive in uncertain environments."

³⁴ Éditions Gallimard, in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade series, has just published Les Présocratiques that Jean-Paul Dumont, along with Daniel Delattre and Jean-Louis Poirier, rightly present as "the memory of our Western civilization", while noting that therein is revealed "what philosophy and science were at their begin nings, namely theology, mathematics, astronomy, geography, history and medicine" (p. IX).

³⁵ Cf. O.B. Hardison, Disappearing through the Skylight. Culture and Technol ogy in the Twentieth Century, Viking, 1989, p. 347. And this conclusion, to which I subscribe: "We have passed in review the fundamental truths that are disappear ing in the principal areas of our modern culture, in science, history, language, art. An examination of intelligent machines suggests that the idea of humanity is itself in the process of changing so rapidly that it could be said, legitimately and without exaggeration, that it is even on the path to extinction." But does disappearance in one place mean a reappearance somewhere else? In another manner? "Birth is but a name given by men…" (see above).