Since the completion of the Human Genome Project (HGP), biomedical sciences have moved away from a gene-centred view and towards a multi-factorial one in which environment, broadly speaking, plays a central role in the determination of human health and disease. Environmental exposures have been shown to be highly prevalent in disease causation. They are considered as complementary to genetic factors in the etiology of diseases, hence the introduction of the concept of the “exposome” as encompassing the totality of human environmental (...) exposures, from conception onwards (Wild in Cancer Epidemiol Biomark Prev 14:1847–1850, 2005), and the launch of the Human Exposome Project (HEP) which aims to complement the HGP. At first sight, and seen as complementary to the genome, the exposome could thus appear as contributing to the rise of novel postgenomic deterministic narratives which place the environment at their core. Is this really the case? If so, what sort of determinism is at work in exposomics research? Is it a case of environmental determinism, and if so, in what sense? Or is it a new sort of deterministic view? In this paper, we first show that causal narratives in exposomics are still very similar to gene-centred deterministic narratives. They correspond to a form of Laplacian determinism and, above all, to what Claude Bernard called the “determinism of a phenomenon”. Second, we introduce the notion of “reversed heuristic determinism” to characterize the specific deterministic narratives present in exposomics. Indeed, the accepted sorts of external environmental exposures conceived as being at the origins of diseases are determined, methodologically speaking, by their identifiable internal and biological markers. We conclude by highlighting the most relevant implications of the presence of this heuristic determinism in exposomics research. (shrink)

Several technological developments, such as self-service technologies and artificial intelligence, are disrupting the retailing industry by changing consumption and purchase habits and the overall retail experience. Although AI represents extraordinary opportunities for businesses, companies must avoid the dangers and risks associated with the adoption of such systems. Integrating perspectives from emerging research on AI, morality of machines, and norm activation, we examine how individuals morally behave toward AI agents and self-service machines. Across three studies, we demonstrate that consumers’ moral concerns (...) and behaviors differ when interacting with technologies versus humans. We show that moral intention is less likely to emerge for AI checkout and self-checkout machines compared with human checkout. In addition, moral intention decreases as people consider the machine less humanlike. We further document that the decline in morality is caused by less guilt displayed toward new technologies. The non-human nature of the interaction evokes a decreased feeling of guilt and ultimately reduces moral behavior. These findings offer insights into how technological developments influence consumer behaviors and provide guidance for businesses and retailers in understanding moral intentions related to the different types of interactions in a shopping environment. (shrink)

Christopher Boorse’s bio-statistical theory of health and disease argues that the central discipline on which theoretical medicine relies is physiology. His theory has been much discussed but little has been said about its focus on physiology or, conversely, about the role that other biomedical disciplines may play in establishing a theoretical concept of health. Since at least the 1950s, epidemiology has gained in strength and legitimacy as an independent medical science that contributes to our knowledge of health and disease. Indeed, (...) it not only provides important information about disease distribution and aetiology, but the risk-factor approach it employs seems to challenge BST’s binary conception of health and disease. The objective of the article is to show, firstly, how important information deriving from descriptive and analytical epidemiology forms part of our contemporary medical concepts of health and disease, and secondly, that these elements are not taken into account by BST in a satisfactory way. The article’s central contention, therefore, is that if the project of defining the theoretical concept of health is to be maintained, more importance should be accorded to the contribution made by epidemiology—alongside physiology—in defining health. (shrink)

Saffran, Newport, and Aslin (1996a) found that human infants are sensitive to statistical regularities corresponding to lexical units when hearing an artificial spoken language. Two sorts of segmentation strategies have been proposed to account for this early word‐segmentation ability: bracketing strategies, in which infants are assumed to insert boundaries into continuous speech, and clustering strategies, in which infants are assumed to group certain speech sequences together into units (Swingley, 2005). In the present study, we test the predictions of two computational (...) models instantiating each of these strategies i.e., Serial Recurrent Networks: Elman, 1990; and Parser: Perruchet & Vinter, 1998 in an experiment where we compare the lexical and sublexical recognition performance of adults after hearing 2 or 10 min of an artificial spoken language. The results are consistent with Parser’s predictions and the clustering approach, showing that performance on words is better than performance on part‐words only after 10 min. This result suggests that word segmentation abilities are not merely due to stronger associations between sublexical units but to the emergence of stronger lexical representations during the development of speech perception processes. (shrink)

With the election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States, the discourse of an authoritarianism and the echoes of a fascist past have moved from the margins to the center of American politics. A culture of war buttressed by the forces of white supremacy and militarization has been unleashed in a series of policies designed to return the United States to a history in which the public sphere was largely white and Christian, and the economy and the (...) state were governed by a ruling corporate elite. Militarization and a war culture have become normalized in the United States and this article explores the ways in which a neo-fascism has emerged that furthers war not only abroad but also at home, especially with regards to the ongoing assaults waged by the state against Muslims, immigrants, women’s reproductive rights, and poor minorities of class and color. Against the rise of neo--fascism, this article advances the idea that education is central to any viable notion of politics, that progressives... (shrink)

According to Alasdair Cochrane, liberty can have value for most animals only because it allows them to obtain other desirable things, such as well-being. With this he concludes that humans can continue to use other animals as long as they treat them well. In this article, I reject this conclusion by arguing against the positive conception of liberty in favor of its negative or republican conception. I suggest that it is sufficient for a being to be capable of agency in (...) order to have an interest in liberty, which deserves to be protected by the right to be free. (shrink)

Jessy Giroux | : J’aborde dans cet article un problème que je nomme le « spectre épistocratique ». Le problème se présente ainsi : s’il existe des vérités politiques, c’est-à-dire des positions politiques qui soient véritablement bonnes, ne devrait-on pas faire de l’atteinte de ces vérités politiques l’objectif central de notre système politique, ce qui pourrait nous conduire à limiter le pouvoir populaire afin de laisser les individus « éclairés » prendre toutes les décisions politiques ? J’explore différentes stratégies (...) possibles afin de défendre la démocratie contre l’attrait d’une telle épistocratie, et je conclus que la meilleure stratégie consiste à souligner qu’une démocratie délibérative bien organisée démontre un potentiel épistémique supérieur à tout autre système politique. Je termine en montrant comment une telle conclusion parvient à nous informer sur le phénomène de la contestation politique. | : In this paper, I consider a problem that I call the “epistocratic specter”. The problem goes as follows : if there are political truths, by which I mean political positions that are truly good, shouldn’t we make the attainment of such truths the central goal of our political system, which could lead us to restrict popular power and let only truly “enlightened” individuals make every political decision ? I explore various possible strategies in order to defend democracy against the appeal of such an epistrocratic system, and I conclude that the best available strategy is one that emphasizes that a well-organized deliberative democracy possesses an epistemic potential that is superior to that of any other political system. I conclude by showing how this fact can inform our understanding of the phenomenon of political dissent. (shrink)

La possibilité d’une définition naturaliste de la santé et d’une distinction entre le normal et le pathologique qui ne repose pas sur des normes culturelles, sociales ou subjectives est au cœur des débats en philosophie de la médecine. Or le concept statistique de la normalité, fondamental pour une définition objective de la santé, soulève d’importantes difficultés. Christopher Boorse défend une « théorie bio-statistique » qui, en articulant ce concept à une notion non normative de fonction biologique, résoudrait ces difficultés. L’identification (...) de la santé et de la normalité au sens statistique demeure toutefois centrale dans sa définition. Après avoir précisé le rôle que joue la normalité statistique dans la BST, nous dégageons, à partir de l’épidémiologie contemporaine, un certain nombre de problèmes et questions que cette définition naturaliste soulève.The liability for a naturalist definition of health and for a value-free distinction between the normal and the pathological is at the core of discussions on health and disease in philosophy of medicine. But the statistical concept of normality, a central one for any objective definition of health, raises numerous problems. Christopher Boorse argues for a « biostatistical theory » which aims at solving these difficulties by articulating a statistical concept of normality and a non-normative concept of biological function. However the BST is still based on identifying normality and health with the most frequent. After analyzing in details the true role of statistical normality in BST, I will show how results and data from modern epidemiology can be mobilized to reveal several limits and difficulties with respect to this naturalist definition of health and disease. (shrink)

Canguilhem criticized the concept of “public health”: health and disease are concepts that only apply to individuals, taken as organic totalities. Their extension to a different level of organization is purely metaphorical. The importance assumed by epidemiology in the construction of our knowledge of the normal and the pathological does, however, call for reflection on the role and the status of the population level of organization in our approach to health phenomena. The entanglement of the biological and the social in (...) human life and in contemporary societies justifies this level of analysis for better understanding the complexity and the interaction of health determinants both at the level of individuals and their interactions and at that of the population. But is this population level just a useful level of analysis that makes it possible to bring to light the social determinants of health at the individual level, or does it rest instead on characteristics of the population that are irreducible to individual characteristics, but which are nevertheless important for understanding and taking action with respect to both population and individual health? Defending this second alternative, I show how the epidemiological point of view, and in particular that of social epidemiology, leads us to rethink the possibility of a concept of “population health” that is not reducible to the sum of individual instances of health. (shrink)

Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) and Personalized Medicine (PM) share a common goal: reducing the gap between the results of biomedical research and their clinical application. PM is, however, often presented as a “new paradigm” for medicine, just as EBM was in the 1990s. It covers a wide variety of projects but the core idea that generally unites them is the ambition of better taking account of individual specificities than did EBM with its statistical and population-centred approach. In this article, I concentrate (...) on PM in cancerology, the essence of which is to target treatments based on the molecular profile of the patient. This targeting is made possible by gaining better knowledge about the molecular mechanisms of cancers. The classification of patients as a function of their molecular profile entails the creation of patient sub-groups. This creates a problem for the traditional evaluation of therapeutic treatment promoted by EBM, in particular the use of randomized trials using sizeable cohorts. But a better understanding of the mechanisms and the greater precision of treatments could reduce the need for these trials. Does PM thus represent the revenge of a physio-pathological and mechanistic culture in clinical research against the statistical and empirical one of EBM? My objective is to show how current practices of PM leads to epistemological changes in our estimation of what count as relevant types of information and proof in medicine, in particular in the field of therapeutic evaluation. I defend the idea that PM, far from obviating the need for statistical approaches and the search for correlations, ultimately poses new challenges for EBM. PM drives EBM to strengthen the articulation and the integration of statistical and mechanistic data with a view to providing a better service for each patient. (shrink)

Trophées, nourriture, sujets d’expérimentation, ressources, souffre-douleurs, jouets, vêtements… Depuis le Néolithique au moins, les êtres humains considèrent les animaux comme des moyens. -/- Pourtant, les critères sur lesquels repose cette hégémonie de notre espèce n’ont pas la pertinence qui leur permettrait de justifier de tels traitements. C’est ce suprémacisme humain que l’antispécisme entend dénoncer. -/- Dans ce court essai, Valéry Giroux bat en brèche les caricatures, et montre que l’antispécisme, par analogie avec l’antiracisme, est avant tout une base de (...) réflexion éthique et politique. En affirmant que l’humanité doit renoncer à certains des privilèges qu’elle s’est injustement octroyés aux dépens des animaux, elle défend l’idée qu’un monde délivré du spécisme serait non pas encore parfait, mais incontestablement plus juste. (shrink)

In the Québécois political vision of the twentieth century, sovereignty became synonymous with mastery. French Canadians sometimes claimed solidarity with racialized and Indigenous peoples, yet they saw their liberation as a matter of taking their rightful place in the seat of the oppressors. The idea of mastery has prevented the Québécois from seeing that their liberation is bound up with that of other groups oppressed by colonial powers. The Eye of the Master confronts the missed opportunities for a decolonial version (...) of indépendance in Quebec by examining the quest for mastery that has been at the root of every version of independence offered to the people of Quebec since the mid-twentieth century. Exploring political discourse, popular culture, and the family photo album, Dalie Giroux revisits the mythology of being “masters in our own house” and identifies the obstacles blocking a more comprehensive version of liberation based on solidarity. Drawing from the living forces of Indigenous thought and anti-racist, ecological, and feminist movements, Giroux envisions life without conquest, domination, exploitation, and surveillance. Making the case for a different future, beginning in the here and now, The Eye of the Master offers a major new intervention in contemporary political thought to Canadian readers and all those who imagine a different North America. (shrink)

Adoptant une perspective populationnelle inspirée des « sciences de la santé de la population », cet article développe une critique de la manière dont la médecine personnalisée envisage l’individu et la population et défend l’idée qu’une approche conjointe de la santé de l’individu et de la santé de la population est une condition pour une médecine humaniste.

This article presents a comparative analysis between Georges Canguilhem’sEssay on Some Problems Concerning the Normal and the Pathological, published in 1943 and the English language debate that started in the 1970s between the naturalists and the normativists. Seemingly, this comparison illustrates the opposition between the French historical epistemology and the Anglo-American philosophy of sciences. However, I put into perspective what is generally considered an opposition between the two traditions by analyzing certain conceptual similarities.

Fraud, speculative bubbles and collapse, plus the resulting bankruptcies and hard times are a continuing part of the corporate environment. The 21st century is no exception, and its first decade has seen more than its share of abuse. This is somewhat surprising, given the level of regulation and oversight required. The focus here is primarily on Enron as a microcosm of all that can go wrong in a sophisticated, high-tech environment. Enron represents the long-term use of greed based primarily on (...) executive compensation incentives; poor corporate governance; executives willing to break the law or overlook others who did; the use of political lobbying; plus accommodating auditors, attorneys, analysts and regulators. Other fraud and abuse cases considered include WorldCom, Tyco, and Adelphi. In addition, the widespread corruption associated with the stock options scandals and the current housing collapse/banking crisis are reviewed, suggesting that the massive regulatory effort of Sarbanes-Oxley and other reforms have not solved the underlying problems. (shrink)

Plus qu’un régime ou un mode de vie, le véganisme est un mouvement social et politique visant à libérer les animaux du joug humain. S’opposant au carnisme, les véganes renoncent autant que possible à utiliser des produits ou des services issus de leur exploitation. Leurs arguments rencontrent aujourd’hui un écho de plus en plus favorable parmi les consommateurs, alors même que les animaux, sur terre et dans la mer, n’ont jamais été tués dans de si grandes proportions. Cet essai est (...) l’occasion pour ses auteurs de montrer que la société que les véganes appellent de leurs vœux (et préfigurent par leurs pratiques quotidiennes) repose sur une conception élargie de la justice. Une justice qui devrait embrasser l’ensemble des êtres doués de sensibilité. (shrink)

Legal systems in the Western world currently regard animals as property. This status implies that they are not subjects of rights. None of the recent legal measures aimed at protecting animals have conferred on them the legal status of person, which is arguably a necessary condition to benefit from the most fundamental individual rights. In this chapter, we argue that the type of control of animals that is based on property rights and domination is ethically unacceptable. We also argue that (...) extending personhood and its corresponding rights to all sentient beings is the best way to ensure that they are not made to suffer unnecessarily and that they are protected from domination. While there may exist morally legitimate occurrences of human control over other animals, justice requires that we abolish all forms of their exploitation. (shrink)

Schooling and cultural politics - Cultural workers and cultural pedagogy_.

Bergson raconte que pour remédier à l'insufisance de l'évolutionnisme de Herbert Spencer, il s'était d'abord tourné vers l'histoire de la philosophie depuis ses origines. Il dut alors se rendre à l'évidence, dit-il, que, pas plus que celui de Spencer, aucun des systèmes n'avait tenu compte du temps réel. On avait étudié les propriétés de l'espace pour appliquer directement ensuite ses conclusions au temps en se contentant de remplacer l'idée de juxtaposition par celle de succession. Ainsi serait né ce que Bergson (...) appelle le temps homogène ou temps-espace auquel la durée concrète échappe tout à fait. (shrink)

Ce texte présente une tentative de trouver une notion de «prudence philosophique» chez Nietzsche. Il procède de la critique d’une contribution de Daniel Tanguay dans laquelle l’auteur s’oppose au diagnostic posé par certains exégètes de l’œuvre de Leo Strauss d’une certaine proximité entre la pensée du maître américain et celle de Nietzsche. L’argument principal de Tanguay tient en cette idée que la prudence, qui est le propre de la sagesse philosophique et qui est au cœur de la pensée de Strauss, (...) est absente chez Nietzsche. La démonstration proposée est sous-tendue par une thèse sur la figure du philosophe et sur la nature de la vie philosophique. Développant une argumentation contre cette conclusion, je veux préciser les conditions de possibilité et le sens d’une prudence philosophique nietzschéenne. En particulier, la recherche d’une notion de prudence chez Nietzsche demande d’explorer d’une part une possible distinction entre eros et volonté de puissance, et d’autre part une possible distinction entre nature et volonté de puissance. Cette double distinction permet de définir une conception nietzschéenne du philosophe et de la philosophie qui n’est pas dogmatique, et dans laquelle on trouve une autre forme de la prudence, celle du don. [This paper finds its starting point in a critique of Daniel Tanguay’s opposition to the idea of a kind of proximity between the thought of Leo Strauss and Nietzsche. Tanguay’s argument is to the effect that Strauss provides us with a notion of prudence philosophique, while Nietzsche, a dogmatic thinker, doesn’t. Underlying this diagnosis is a thesis regarding the nature of the philosopher and of the philosophical life. To counter this interpretation, this paper attempts to flesh a notion of prudence out of Nietzsche’s published works. More specifically, it explores the distinction between Eros and Will-to-Power on the one hand, and the distinction between Nature and Will-to-Power on the other. This twofold distinction allows for a non-dogmatic Nietzschean notion of philosophy in which can be found another brand of prudence that takes the form of a gift.]. (shrink)

Bien que Hegel ne propose pas de solution satisfaisante au problème de l'injustice sociale, il est important d'analyser ce problème, car il définit les limites de la société civile. Dans ce court article, je veux montrer que l'injustice sociale est caractérisée par l'insatisfaction, qui produit une classe de hors-caste, car elle n'a ni biens, ni droits. De plus, il y a faille et problème, car Hegel conçoit la société civile à partir d'une axiologie de l'harmonisation et de l'intégration que démentent (...) les processus économiques. En revanche, la perspicacité du diagnostic hégélien démontre bien que l'absence d'intégration et de reconnaissance sociale est un mal aussi grand que la privation matérielle.Although Hegel offers no solution to the problem of social injustice, it is important to analyse this problem, for it defines the limits of civil society. In this short paper, I shall try to show that social injustice is characterized by the dissatisfaction that produces a class of outcaste people who have no goods, nor rights. Furthermore, there is a shortcoming and a problem in Hegel's conception of civil society: it is based on an axiology of harmonization and integration, which is contradicted by economic processes. However, the perspicacious hegelian diagnosis shows clearly that the absence of integration and social recognition is as great an evil as material deprivation. (shrink)

Tous les êtres humains sont égaux devant la loi. Tous ont des droits fondamentaux qui les protègent contre la torture, la mise à mort et l'asservissement. Tous jouissent du statut juridique de personne, par opposition à celui de simple chose susceptible d'être appropriée. Cela vaut pour les membres de l'espèce Homo sapiens sans exception, mais pour aucun autre animal. Une telle discrimination est-elle juste ?

L'étude du passage de la société civile à l'État dans la philosophie politique hégélienne révèle l'irruption de deux formes d'inégalité, l'une politique , l'autre sociale , the other social .Moreover, the analysis of the hegelian diagnosis of the French Revolution enables us not only to place Hegel somewhere between Plato and Rousseau, but also brings out the inadequacy of characterizing Hegel either as a liberal or as a conservative.

In the current political landscape fascism is on the rise and the threat to democracy is imperiled both as an ideal and promise (DiMaggio, 2022; Hedges, 2022b; Street, 2022). A number of Republican...

This article addresses the relative silence of American intellectuals in the face of what can be termed the greatest act of terrorism ever committed by a nation-state, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I analyze this indifference by American intellectuals as partly due to their taming by a cultural apparatus that functions largely as a disimagination machine in conjunction with the neoliberal forces of commodification, privatization, and militarism. I argue that terror and violence are now addressed within a public pedagogy (...) driven by a spectacle of violence that defines itself as entertainment but is actually a form of public pedagogy that thrives on an excess of representation and an attempt to produce a collective surrender to political cynicism and apocalyptic despair. In this instance, despair and cynicism, if not a retreat from any sense of moral responsibility, are deeply embedded in a mode of politics in which education is central to a flight from social responsibility and an embrace of modes of depoliticization. The article concludes by calling upon educators, intellectuals, artists and others to create the institutions, public spheres, and other sites necessary to develop a critical formative culture capable of reclaiming public memory while simultaneously producing critically engaged intellectuals and a vibrant democratic polity. (shrink)