The majority of women who freeze their eggs for non-medical or social reasons, commonly referred to as elective egg freezing (EEF), do not eventually utilize their frozen eggs. This would result in an accumulated surplus of unused frozen eggs in fertility clinics worldwide, which represents a promising source of donation to infertile women undergoing IVF treatment. Rigorous and comprehensive counseling is needed, because the process of donating one’s unused surplus frozen eggs involves complex decision-making. Prospective EEF donors can be broadly (...) categorized into those who have achieved motherhood and those who remained childless and have given up on motherhood aspirations. A two-step systematic counseling protocol is proposed. Firstly, it is imperative to verify and ensure that these women do not want to conceive any children with their surplus frozen eggs before proceeding with further counseling and signing of consent forms. Secondly, various motivating and dissuading factors in the donation of unused surplus frozen eggs should then be comprehensively discussed with egg freezers to facilitate informed decision-making. Key motivating factors for donation include reciprocity in wanting to share the joys of motherhood among egg freezers who already have children, goodwill to help others in need, and avoiding the wastage of surplus frozen eggs after expending so much money, time, and effort. Key dissuading factors include fear of accidental incest between natural and unknown donor-conceived offspring, as well as apprehension of unexpected future contact with unknown donor-conceived offspring due to either donor anonymity being abolished in their jurisdiction or widespread consumer DNA testing. (shrink)

Our aim in this paper is to bring to light the importance of the notion of économie animale in Montpellier vitalism, as a hybrid concept which brings together the structural and functional dimensions of the living body – dimensions which hitherto had primarily been studied according to a mechanistic model, or were discussed within the framework of Stahlian animism. The celebrated image of the bee-swarm expresses this structural-functional understanding of living bodies quite well: “One sees them press against each other, (...) mutually supporting each other, forming a kind of whole, in which each living part, in its own way, by means of the correspondence and directions of its motions, enables this kind of life to be sustained in the body” (Encyclopédie, article “Observation,” by Ménuret de Chambaud). What is important here is that every component part is always a living part, i.e., every structural unit is always functional. Interestingly, while the twin notions of ‘animal economy’ and organisation are presented as improvements over a mechanistic perspective, they are nonetheless compatible with an expanded sense of mechanism and by extension, with materialism as reflected notably in the writings of Ménuret and Bordeu. We thus propose both a revision and reconstruction of the historical status of the ‘animal economy’, and a reflection on its conceptual status. (shrink)

This volume brings together for the first time some of the most helpful and insightful essays on the four most influential and discussed philosophers in the history of existentialism: Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre.

Aristotle discovered the principle of the golden mean. He saw that the moral good is one but the bad is two. Individuals deviate from the goal not in a single direction but in two opposite ones. The principle holds not only in ethics but in many other spheres. Concerning “proofs for the existence of God” there are two extremes which seem equally mistaken: the proofs, and even the search for proofs, are vain; the proofs are completely satisfactory and coercive. The (...) first extreme is now fashionable; the second was the fashion in the Middle Ages. I shall propose a view intermediate between the two. (shrink)

Préface: La politique naturelle. -L'homme. -Principes. -La civilisation. -La science politique. -La démocratie. -Les questions sociales. -Retour aux choses vivantes.

Ce que nous voulons montrer dans cette contribution, c’est que Schelling, dans le Système de l’idéalisme transcendantal, pose, avant l’apparition de l’objectivité de l’ob-jet ou du monde, un moment an-objectif : la sensation. Il s’agit de mettre au jour ici le commencement du monde ou de l’objectivité de l’objet à partir du conflit entre l’activité réelle et l’activité idéelle dans le Moi, commencement qui n’est possible que par ce moment de la sensation comme sans-objet.What we aim to show in this (...) article is that, in the System of transcendantal Idealism, Schelling establishes that, before the coming of the objectivity of the ob-ject or of the world, there is an an-objective moment : sensation. The beginning of the world or of the objectivity of the object comes from the conflict between the real activity and the ideal activity in the I. This beginning is only possible with this moment of the sensation as objectless. (shrink)

I want to make the case that Wittgenstein’s limiting of knowledge claims to what we can doubt makes a significant contribution to aesthetics. We have known since Aristotle that works of art do not correlate very well with concerns for truth. Wittgenstein helps explain that fact without any idealist machinery with which to praise the distinctive value of the arts. In his framework, the arts matter simply because they focus on situations in which there need not be epistemic doubt. The (...) relevant questions become not ‘Is this true?’ but ‘Is this an illuminating presentation of some aspect of our cultural practices?’. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article aims to initiate a discussion of the concept of perjury in Derrida’s later writing by engaging with some of his 1997–99 seminars on Le parjure et le pardon and placing them in relation to a number of works he published around the same time. It shows how, on Derrida’s account, perjury is not secondary to or parasitic upon truthful expression but an inexpungeable animating condition of the truth. It draws out the ethical and legal implications of this (...) claim and suggests that it is integral to understanding what is sometimes presented as Derrida’s “ethical turn.” Finally, in a more critical moment, it suggests taking issue with Derrida’s characterization of the ethical life as a staccato series of isolated, discrete, even incommensurable situations or encounters, and proposes to supplement his emphasis on the ethics of the other with an equally robust ethics of the self. (shrink)