Television series explicitly pursue an entertainment goal rather than a learning one; nevertheless, they convey information about care. French and American series depicting doctors and care workers have reached record-breaking audiences. Spectators try to understand care as an activity through dramatic situations. They are all the more curious and liable to consider the activity of the nurses as a vicariant model that they wish to become a doctor or a care worker. Which behaviors get the spectators’ attention? Which reasoning do (...) they deduce from them? Does the paramedical training then modify the representations they form about care and the nursing profession while watching television series? (shrink)

'You're 82 years old. You've shrunk six centimetres, you only weigh 45 kilos yet you're still beautiful, graceful and desirable' – so begins André Gorz's 'open love letter' to the woman he has lived with for 58 years and who lies dying next to him. As one of France's leading post-war philosophers, André Gorz wrote many influential books, but nothing he wrote will be read as widely or remembered as long as this simple, passionate, beautiful letter to his dying wife. (...) In a bittersweet postscript a year after Letter to D was published, a note pinned to the door for the cleaning lady marked the final chapter in an extraordinary love story. André Gorz and his terminally ill wife, Dorine, were found lying peacefully side by side, having taken their lives together. They simply could not live without one another. An international bestseller, _Letter to D_ is the ultimate love story – and all the more poignant because it's true. (shrink)

Summary Despite his repudiation of antisemitism, Renan influenced the development of antisemitic ideologies in both France and Germany. His typology of ?Semite? and ?Aryan? was adopted especially in Germany and and combined with biological concepts of race to become the foundation of the concepts of ?Semitism? and ?Antisemitism?. Renan, however, always insisted on a linguistic/cultural definition of race and regarded the biological conception, while it might have had some primitive reality, as outmoded and immoral in European civilization. After 1870 the (...) growth of German racial antisemitism led Renan to elaborate repeatedly on race as a civilisational phenomenon that in modern Europe should have lost its biological origins. His argument that modern Jews were integral members of the French ?nation? and ?civilization? was profoundly influential on the emergence of the theory of the modern ?nation? as the liberal state. Gobineau's theory of race also lent itself to exploitation by racial antisemites, though it was not overtly antisemitic. Unlike Renan, however, Gobineau in his later years inclined to a vague personal antisemitism. The main difference was one of temperament as well as devotion on Renan's part to a liberal idea of the nation, as opposed to Gobineau's aversion to liberalism and modern civilization. (shrink)

Lauréate du prix Mnémosyne en 2016, Pauline Mortas démontre dans ce livre issu de son mémoire de master 2 une belle capacité à traquer la multiplicité des représentations entourant « la première fois » au xixe siècle. Puisant dans des sources issues du milieu ecclésial comme du milieu médical, du roman de mœurs comme de la pornographie, sans oublier les traités d’éducation ou les jugements rendus dans les tribunaux, l’historienne confirme par cette multiplicité de regards ce que Michel Foucau...

French rebels ate no cupid's earfor ribald amorous naughty complications enfeeblefist's robust ambitions, nurse corruption, enthrallfighter's reason and nudge coward's eros.First, rub a nose clean, engenderfriendly relations and name candidate earmarkedfor roses and nature's compliments: emptyflattery. Read a newspaper, count eminentfailures, rate all notorious collaborators enemies,find rapture at nocturnal clandestine election,foster rebellion, animate novice's campaign energies,frisk, ransack antiquated notions, claustrophobic elementaryfallacies, rattle a nation's complacent experience.Fly, rant at nominations, crass errors,flawed rotten apples, nepotism's classic entryfor rakish adventurers. Nine councillors endfree (...) rampage as neurotics clamor excitedlyfor religious absurdities, needling curious envy. (shrink)

GNèS LEJBOWICZ. — Pour comprendre votre réflexion, pouvez-vous nous parler en introduction de votre parcours au sein de l’armée ? 2 JEAN-RENé BACHELET. — Je ne suis pas un officier « de droit divin » ; mon père a été tué dans la Résistance, et j’ai été enfant de troupe à 10 ans. Je suis d’une génération qui est à cheval sur deux ères : celle d’un temps ancien qui se termine avec la fin du monde bipolaire et celle de (...) temps nouveaux, chaotiques et ouverts par une exceptionnelle conjugaison de ruptures, notamment géostratégiques. (shrink)

En novembre 2002, a eu lieu, à l'Université de Liège, une rencontre entre chercheurs d'horizons divers autour du Cap des Tempêtes de Lucien François, publié dans cette même collection. Le droit sans la justice? Aux yeux d'Augustin et de la tradition du droit naturel en général, il est impossible d'abstraire l'un de l'autre sans donner raison au fameux pirate répliquant à Alexandre le Grand : " Parce que j'opère avec un petit navire, on m'appelle brigand ; toi, parce que tu (...) opères avec une grande flotte, Empereur! ". Que répondent à cette objection les théoriciens positivistes qui séparent quant à eux droit et justice? Comment rendent-ils compte, sans la justice, de la différence entre un Etat et une troupe de brigands, une arrestation et un rapt, une extorsion et un impôt? L'un des plus réputés d'entre eux, N. Bobbio, parlait de cette question comme du " cap des Tempêtes " que ne peut éviter d'affronter tout positivisme juridique. Le cap des Tempêtes. Essai de microscopie du droit est précisément le titre que L. François, Professeur émérite à l'Université de Liège, a donné à son dernier ouvrage. Il s'agit sans doute d'une des tentatives les plus radicales pour approcher le phénomène juridique en dehors de tout présupposé moral, selon une perspective " microscopique " originale qui met le même soin à analyser une file d'attente, un racket, ou l'organisation complexe de ce que nous appelons " l'État ". Quelles sont les conséquences philosophiques de cette approche microscopique du droit? Sur quels présupposés repose-t-elle? Y a-t-il une anthropologie, voire une ontologie, qui la sous-tendent? Et in fine, est-il réellement possible de concevoir le droit en faisant abstraction de tout principe, du moins de tout horizon, de justice? (shrink)

Adaptation to the impacts of climate change is a rapidly emerging, new area of knowledge and policy that is coevolving with political negotiations in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. As such, it offers the opportunity to study the coproduction of knowledge and social order within the climate change regime. A subset of adaptation knowledge relates to cost estimates of adaptation policy. Here the methodology of the adaptation cost studies are reviewed and compared to economic theory. Although presented as (...) technical and apolitical applications of economic theory, this analysis shows that these studies in fact differ significantly and consistently from theory in that they largely ignore autonomous adaptation and almost universally cost complete adaptation rather than an efficient level of adaptation. It is suggested that these differences are related to the political nature of adaptation cost estimates, which are closely connected with normative claims for both adaptation funding for developing countries and compensation for the unavoidable climate change impacts. As such, adaptation cost estimates are an example of boundary objects, used to manage normative and highly politicized claims for restitution using scientific and therefore apolitical language and framings. (shrink)

The rise, in the 1980s, of what is now labelled appropriation-photography can be understood as the full absorption of the logic of the ready-made into photographic art. Like its Duchampian predecessor, the deployment of the ready-made was used to question the nature of institutionalized art-photography: was art inherent to the photo's medium; was it an auratic attribute of the author; conferred by the institution; or ratified by its consumption? It also enabled a critique of the politics of representation at stake (...) in photographic practice outside of the immediate institutions of art. However, the correlation of appropriation-photography and a politics of representation relies upon the reduced logic of the subversive effect of a re-presented image. David Levinthal's photographs of mass-produced toys extends the reduced logic of the ready-made cultural artefact through their playful configuration, as well as through the more complex forms of photographic technique this allows. This enables a distinctive critical re-presentation of cultural myth. However, Levinthal also introduces a number of photographic techniques, which would seem to renege on the avant-garde claims of appropriation-photography, such as the reintroduction of pictorial composition and the use of large-scale Polaroids that emphatically reassert the unique and the expertly crafted image. This article examines this ambiguity in Levinthal's work, particularly with respect to its presentation of myth, and diagnoses it as symptomatic of the conditions of recent art-photography. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:“It’s All Personal”Frances Rieth MaynardI was (am?) the mother of a full-term infant born in 1998 with hypoplastic left heart syndrome. This was my 3rd pregnancy; I had two prior pregnancies resulting in healthy children. Until that final week before birth, my pregnancy had been uneventful; my blood pressure, weight gain, and lab work charted normally. At my prenatal check (with a new physician as mine was away), (...) my measurements were off. That OB-GYN referred me to a perinatologist who was able to perform an ultrasound (checking for infant size) and advised that I should deliver soon because the infant was markedly growth retarded. I was induced two days later. My small daughter was born with skeletal leg deformities and brought to the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). I was familiar with that NICU since I had worked there as an RN prior to this pregnancy. I was comfortable with the environment, the people, and the overall culture of the place. Indeed, I had been a pediatric nurse for the previous 10 years working primarily in intensive care.After my daughter’s birth, I was able to intuit meaning by the placement of her bassinet in the unit (e.g., it was not too close to the nurse’s station; she had no oxygen or tubing, and she was not in a private room). I believed that her journey home would be longer than I had planned but that it would occur. On that first day, a pediatric cardiolo-gist arrived to perform an ultrasound. I was familiar with this scene too; I did not view this process as anything more than routine. I was relieved to have [End Page 24] a physician who I knew and trusted to watch over my daughter. This allowed me to go back to my room to rest as I do not believe I had slept well (if at all) after being informed there was a potential problem a few days earlier.Less than two hours after returning to my room, my daughter had been intubated and begun on prostaglandins as the echocardiogram had revealed a hypoplastic left heart defect. The neonatologist started to discuss options for transport so my daughter could be treated at a larger hospital. I tried to catch my breath and process what I was being told. We spoke by phone with my husband who quickly deferred all decision-making responsibility to me because I was “the person with the medical expertise.” My thoughts raced with all these unforeseen circumstances, yet time seemed to slow down. I requested that an evaluation be made of other potential conditions before transfer since my daughter was also small for gestational age, something we had learned less than a week earlier, and she had some skeletal defects, an issue of which we were unaware until after she was born.A head ultrasound revealed an absent corpus callosum, the region of the brain that connects the two cerebral hemispheres and allows them to communicate by sending and receiving signals from each other.Given all the enormous medical issues my daughter was facing, I asked for her ventilator to be withdrawn and my husband concurred. We wanted our daughter to be baptized and to die a “natural death.” Our neonatologist indicated that our choices were reasonable. But, before the ETT could be withdrawn, I was advised that an ethics consult had been called by one of the nurses. I became angry, scared, and saddened at the thought of strangers (to me) deciding the fate of my daughter. The neonatologist told me not to be concerned, and I later learned that the ethics committee had “signed off” on the wishes of my husband and myself. My daughter was extubated and died 3 days later.This happened 25 years ago. In retrospect, it is interesting to me that I began to distrust the nurses, wondering which one had called the consult. I could not understand how anyone could doubt that I, as a mother, was not making the best possible decision, among bad alternative choices, for my daughter. I began to view the anonymous persons of the powerful ethics committee as a “them... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The 2005 Meeting of the Society for Buddhist-Christian StudiesFrances S. Adeney, SecretaryThe annual meeting of the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies was held in Philadelphia on November 18, 2005. The theme of the program was visual and aural expressions in Christianity and Buddhism and their relationship to religious practice.The focus of the first session was visual images of sacred art. Victoria Scarlett presented the paper "The Iconography of Compassion: Visualizing (...) Guanyin and the Virgin Mary." She noted that meditation exercises that explore visual imagery can mediate the experience of the holy in both Buddhism and Christianity. By comparing and contrasting the images of Guanyin and the Virgin Mary through both commentary and slides, she pointed toward the qualities of compassion, healing, empathy, generosity, and selfless love presented in both Buddhism and Christianity. Scarlett stressed the role of visualization in generating compassion and taking responsibility for cultivating and living the devotional life. Engaging the religious imagination in those visual ways, she said, can help us generate compassion in our world today.Alice Keefe presented the second paper, "The Visual Dimension of Religion in Comparative Perspective." She challenged the assumption that visual experience is a derived or secondary aspect of religious life. As Tibetan Buddhism clearly shows, through its depiction of Buddhas, lamas, bodisattvas, and deities, the divine is form as well as formless. In Christian Orthodox traditions, the icon is viewed as material and glory, the transcendent visible to the human eye. Visual images in both Buddhist and Christian traditions indicate the possibility of transformation as one imagines one's own body as a body of light.Keefe challenged us to bring the centrality of the visual in Buddhism and some portions of Christianity into our academic discussion. Western thinkers present the body in opposition to the spiritual, sometimes understanding images as idolatrous. We assume that the generative locus of meaning is in the subjective consciousness and seek out ideas, ignoring the body. However, communicating an idea is not the [End Page 181] object of visual attention to an icon—rather, it involves the constitution of a self in relation to others. Through practices that activate the visual dimension of religions, we come to know ourselves as part of a pantheon of beings.Rita Gross responded to both papers, focusing on the biases of Western religion in the study of Buddhism. The prohibition of idolatry in Western religion has been identified with the sense of sight, rather than hearing or the use of words. Furthermore, idolatry is always a category defined by outsiders, Gross asserted. People who use the sense of sight to reach beyond themselves to the sacred know what they are doing. The papers and visual images presented gave the attendees insight into how that might happen in Buddhism and Christianity.Michael Monhart and Jisho Shizuka opened the second session with their presentation of "Chanting as Practice: Japanese Shingon Buddhist Sutra Chant." After a brief history of the Shingon sect, the presenters focused on a central aspect of Shingon chanting practice: a realization of one's inherent Buddha-nature in this life. Through activating the mysteries of the ritual activities of the body, voice, and mind, chanting develops the specific connection between Buddha-nature and human nature. An explanation of the chanting itself—its modes, patterns, and energies—led to the conclusion that sound and word become reality through their use by the practitioner of ritual, a conclusion that was demonstrated by the chanting of three sutras.Bill McJohn and Joseph Anderson next presented their work, "The Aural Dimension of Religion: Chanting Psalms in Gregorian Chant." McJohn focused on the history of chanting the Psalter, beginning in the monasteries of the fourth century. Singing the Psalms was motivated by a desire to pray constantly, and as the monastic communities developed, a practice of working through the 150 psalms developed. A shorter version, which eventually became the rosary, also developed. Anderson noted that the recitation of the Psalms is the analog to Buddhist chanting of the sutras. One is actually speaking as the Christ in recitation of the Psalms. Both also find a balance between time and timelessness as they are re-created in different ways... (shrink)

On 14 and 15 December 2005, on the eve of the Sixtieth Anniversary of the adoption of UNESCO's Constitution, a group of scholars from a wide range of cultural and scholarly backgrounds assembled at UNESCO Headquarters.

Some 41 million Americans, many of them children, currently live below the official poverty level. As a proportion of the population, the number has been stable for several decades. But what it mea...

Morality, Mortality as a whole deals with certain aspects of ethical theory and with moral problems that arise primarily in contexts involving life‐and‐death decisions. The importance of the theoretical issues is not limited to their relevance to these decisions; however, they are, rather, issues at the heart of basic moral and political theory. This first volume comprises three parts. Part I, Death: From Bad to Worse, has with four chapters, and an appendix, discussing death and why it is bad for (...) the person who dies. Part II, Saving Lives: General Issues, has six chapters, and explores a cluster of moral problems that arise in saving lives. The general question raised is whether we should always, in aiding life, act so as to save the greater number of lives or to produce the greatest amount of good. Part III, Scarce Resources: Theoretical Issues, Specific Recommendations, and Organ Transplants, has five chapters, and deals with the problem of the acquisition and distribution of organs for transplantation. It allows us to apply the theoretical discussion of saving lives and relevant/irrelevant utilities presented in the previous parts. However, the discussion can be understood independently of the first two parts, and the conceptual issues and procedures on which it focuses are relevant to dealing with any scarce resource, including money and time, which are needed to use other plentiful resources. Although the book contains much theoretical and methodological argument, it is firmly grounded in practical ethical issues, and is illustrated throughout by examples. (shrink)

Studies of protests against mobile phone masts typically concentrate on the potential health risks associated with mobile phones and their masts. Beck’s Risk Society has been particularly influential in informing this debate. This focus on health, however, has merely served to limit the discussion to those concerns legitimated by science conveniently ignoring other disputed issues. In contrast, this article contends that it is necessary to use a wider notion of risk to understand fully how the current political emphasis on active (...) citizenship may have contributed to the protests. It examines how neoliberal governmentality and the move to empower people are in contention with one another. The study draws upon case material from a small village protest group in United Kingdom and argues that much of the tension arises from the encouragement of the public on one hand to become active citizens but on the other to be passive consumers. (shrink)

Lorenzo Sacconi’s recent re-statement of his social contract account of business ethics is a major contribution to our understanding of the normative nature of CSR as the expression of a fair multi-party agreement supported by the economic rationality of each participant. However, at one crucial point in his theory, Sacconi introduces the concept of stakeholders’ conformist preferences – their disposition to punish the firm if it defects from the agreement, refusing to abide by its own explicit CSR policies and norms. (...) We take issue with him over this concept: we show that the assumption of conformist preferences is a moral premise, and it arguably weakens the normativity of the theory as a whole. As an alternative, we propose an evolutionary game theoretic approach. We draw upon recent applications of evolutionary game theory to moral philosophy (Skyrms, Danielson), and we use a computer simulation of the trust game. According to this approach, the failure of the logic of reputation, which is the problem conformist preferences were introduced to solve, is overcome through the dynamics of interaction. (shrink)