The yeast two‐hybrid system is a genetic method that detects protein‐protein interactions. One application is the detection by library screening of new interactors of a protein of known function. In the August issue of Nature Genetics, Fromont‐Racine et al.1 showed for the first time that the construction of the protein interaction map of a complex pathway, such as that of the mRNA splicing machinery, is now possible, because of the combination of recent technical improvements elaborated in several laboratories. With a (...) yeast cell mating procedure that increases screen efficiency, they used their complex yeast genomic library of 5 × 106 clones to test 700 × 106 interactions against 15 proteins. They identified and classified 170 potential interactors, including approximately 70 proteins of previously unknown function. More than 25% of the interactors are probably biologically relevant. The achievements of Fromont‐Racine et al. have opened the way to the systematic analysis of the protein interaction networks of the 6,000 open reading frames‐yeast proteome. This task requires, however, automation of the library screens and creation of a two‐hybrid library database. BioEssays 20:1–5, 1998. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

The main contribution of this article is to apply Herbert Marcuse’s work in contemporary neoliberal society. Specifically, this article will focus on Marcuse’s critique of advanced industrial society and the role that technology plays in the quantification of the self. In this article, I will argue that in recent years, the development of technology has created the possibility to measure, calculate and quantify even the most trivial aspects of our lives, reducing people to numbers. The quantification of people is done (...) with the specific purpose of enhancing efficacy and productivity. I will unpack this notion by first looking to Marcuse’s critique of an advanced industrial society which he argues has the unique purpose of quantifying people to achieve a universal norm of calculated efficiency. Specifically, I will refer to Marcuse’s critique of industrial rationality as the prevailing rationality in advanced industrial societies which encourages the quantification of people. Secondly, I argue that Marcuse’s critique has evolved in the work of contemporary thinkers such as political economist Wendy Brown and cultural theorist Byung-Chul Han. I argue that Brown expands on Marcuse’s theories and contextualises those theories in contemporary neoliberalism. Specifically, I will focus on the concept of governmentality as a political rationality in neoliberal societies and how it advances a one-dimensional political passivity in neoliberal subjects. Finally, I refer to Han, whose theories explore the influence of new forms of technology in a neoliberal society and the development of the neoliberal subject as a “quantified self”. (shrink)

Françoise Dastur describes her efforts to practice history of philosophy in a non-historical fashion. She discusses her concept of the historical, and argues that the only true way to be of one's time is to be against one's time.

Freedom is modernity's most important promise, but also its most controversial promise. No other concept has led to so many expectations, disappointments, changes, and destruction. This book examines German theologian and ethicist Wolfgang Huber's concept of "communicative freedom," which is proposed as a contribution to the debate on freedom within modernity. It is argued that communicative freedom integrates radically different understandings of freedom into one comprehensive concept. This concept allows for a constructive and critical affirmation of modernity. (Series: Theology in (...) the Public Square/Theologie in der Offentlichkeit - Vol. 3). (shrink)

Françoise Dastur describes her efforts to practice history of philosophy in a non-historical fashion. She discusses her concept of the historical, and argues that the only true way to be of one's time is to be against one's time.

oise Baylis, 1234 Le Marchant Street, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada B3H 3P7. Tel.: (902)-494–2873; Fax: (902)-494-2924; Email: francoise.baylis{at}dal.ca ' + u + '@' + d + ' '//--> . Abstract Recently, there has been a growing interest in public health and public health ethics. Much of this interest has been tied to efforts to draw up national and international plans to deal with a global pandemic. It is common for these plans to state the importance of drawing upon a well-developed (...) ethics framework and we argue that this framework should reflect the values and insights of feminist relational theory. More specifically, we argue that pandemic planning must be squarely situated in the larger realm of public health and that an ethics framework for public health will be one that recognizes the need to pay particular attention to the vulnerability of subpopulations lacking in social and economic power. We propose an ethics framework for public health that builds on the notions of relational personhood (including relational autonomy and social justice) and relational solidarity. In this way, we aim for a public health ethics that, as appropriate, promotes the public interest and the common good. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

This work was supported, in part, by a Stem Cell Network grant to Françoise Baylis and Jason Scott Robert and a CIHR grant to Françoise Baylis. We sincerely thank Alan Fine, Rich Campbell, Cynthia Cohen, and Tim Krahn for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. Thanks are also owed to Tim Krahn for his research assistance. An earlier version of this paper was presented to the Department of Bioethics and the Novel Tech Ethics research team. (...) We thank the participants at each of these meetings for their helpful comments. (shrink)

Now that stem cell scientists are clamouring for human eggs for cloning-based stem cell research, there is vigorous debate about the ethics of paying women for their eggs. Generally speaking, some claim that women should be paid a fair wage for their reproductive labour or tissues, while others argue against the further commodification of reproductive labour or tissues and worry about voluntariness among potential egg providers. Siding mainly with those who believe that women should be financially compensated for providing eggs (...) for research, the new stem cell guidelines of the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR) legitimise both reimbursement of direct expenses and financial compensation for many women who supply eggs for research. In this paper, the authors do not attempt to resolve the thorny issue of whether payment for eggs used in human embryonic stem cell research is ethically legitimate. Rather, they want to show specifically that the ISSCR recommended payment practices are deeply flawed and, more generally, that all payment schemes that aim to avoid undue inducement of women risk the global exploitation of economically disadvantaged women. (shrink)

This volume brings together a collection of ten original essays which present new analyses of social and relational equality in philosophy and political theory. The essays analyze the nature of social equality and its relationship with justice and with politics.

What kind of equality should we value and why? Current debate centres around whether distributive equality is valuable. However, it is not the only (potentially) morally significant form of equality. David Miller and T. M. Scanlon have emphasised the importance of social equality—a strongly egalitarian notion distinct from distributive equality, and which cannot be reduced to a concern for overall welfare or the welfare of the worst-off. However, as debate tends to focus on distribution, social equality has been neglected and (...) we do not have a clear understanding of what it is and why it might be valuable. This paper aims to address this gap. (shrink)

With the advent of CRISPR gene-editing technology, designer babies have become a reality. Françoise Baylis insists that scientists alone cannot decide the terms of this new era in human evolution. Members of the public, with diverse interests and perspectives, must have a role in determining our future as a species.

Much research is currently being conducted on health care practitioners' experiences of moral distress, especially the experience of nurses. What moral distress is, however, is not always clearly delineated and there is some debate as to how it should be defined. This article aims to help to clarify moral distress. My methodology consists primarily of a conceptual analysis, with especial focus on Andrew Jameton's influential description of moral distress. I will identify and aim to resolve two sources of confusion about (...) moral distress: the compound nature of a narrow definition of distress which stipulates a particular cause, i.e. moral constraint, and the distinction drawn between moral dilemma and moral distress, which implies that the two are mutually exclusive. In light of these concerns, I argue that the definition of moral distress should be revised so that moral constraint should not be a necessary condition of moral distress, and that moral conflict should be included as a potential cause of distress. Ultimately, I claim that moral distress should be understood as a specific psychological response to morally challenging situations such as those of moral constraint or moral conflict, or both. (shrink)

Consider k((G)) in the language of valued fields enriched with a unary predicate for the set of constants and another one for the cross-section. For perfect k, this structure is undecidable if it does not satisfy Kaplansky's conditions.

We study the structures $$, where $K$ is an ordered field and $K^\mathrm{r}$ its real closure, in the language of ordered fields with an additional unary predicate for the subfield $K$. Two such structures $$ and $$ are not necessarily elementary equivalent when $K$ and $L$ are. But with some saturation assumption on $K$ and $L$, then the two structures become equivalent, and we give a description of the complete theory.

This chapter serves as an introduction to the collected volume. In the first section, we aim to provide background on important themes in social egalitarianism and to set the context for understanding which significant questions the chapters in this book pose and attempt to answer. In this section we focus especially on what could be said to characterize socially egalitarian relationships, on which relationships are of concern, and on what might make social egalitarianism distinct. In the second section, we provide (...) a brief explanation of the structure of the book and each of its chapters. (shrink)

The prominence and peculiarity of color in French symbolist verse have often been noted. Yet the dominance of color in symbolism is not the result of aesthetic preference or mere poetic technique, as has been previously argued; rather, color functions, with the synaesthetic poetic context of which it is an integral part, as the direct manifestation of a particular metaphysical stance. Color leads to the heart of what symbolism is, for it is the paradigmatic literary expression of a general spiritual (...) crisis—a crisis in epistemology. The nineteenth century extended seventeenth-century empiricism—an empiricism which had invented mathematical measurement as the gauge of reality and which resulted in a predilection to see most authentic knowledge as quantifiable. The logical corollary of such a predilection is that all sensory experience is regarded as suspect. Newtonian physics had rationalized the laws of the universe in reducing its properties to atomical structures and laws of motion. Nothing, it seemed, was left unexplained. Those areas of perception which remained unquantifiable were dispelled as illusion or attributed to the necessary limitations of the human mind. The theories of John Locke act as a kind of historical watershed in this regard: they are the classic philosophic expression of the disjunction between sensory experience and knowledge which, in its nineteenth-century versions, would lead to the symbolist revolt. Françoise Meltzer is a professor of French literature and of comparative literature at the University of Chicago. Her previous contribution to Critical Inquiry is the translation of Christian Metz's "Trucage and the Film" . She is the author of The Trial of Psychoanalysis, Salome and the Dance of Writing, and Hot Property: The Stakes and Claims of Literary Originality. (shrink)

This article critically examines the competitive, adversarial nature of the Western neoliberal style of democracy. Specifically, this article focuses on Amartya Sen’s notion of a “universal democracy” as a means of addressing socio-economic inequalities through Sen’s capability approach. Sen’s capability theory has become an acclaimed and widely used theory to evaluate and understand development and inequalities. However, we employ a distinctive critique by engaging Amartya Sen through Herbert Marcuse’s analysis of one dimensionality and the adversarial nature of Western democracy. We (...) further highlight how contemporary neoliberal society employ a particular, adversarial form of public participation. Through this, we underline the various neoliberal problemata, such as Western idealism, political passivity, and a “flattening of choice,” within contemporary democracies and locate how their competitive, winner-take-all nature has become essential to contemporary, Western democratic models. Consequently, we argue that democracy, as a functional concept and form of public engagement, should be fundamentally re-examined in order to address inequalities. (shrink)

In this chapter, Fourie identifies and systematizes the impairments associated with having privilege and evaluates their implications for theories of relational equality and distributive justice. Having certain social privileges, for example, being a man in a patriarchal society, can also be damaging; in other words, there are “impairments of privilege.” Fourie delineates six kinds of impairments—epistemic, evaluative, emotional, health-related, affiliative, and moral. She then goes on to assess the implications of the impairments of privilege for two theories in political philosophy. (...) Relational egalitarianism, she argues, has the theoretical resources to identify and address the problems associated with these impairments, whereas distributive egalitarianism does not. Furthermore, she argues that assessing the impairments of privilege through relational egalitarianism helps to characterize a society of equals: we must address the causes of functional impairments, express respect for the worse off by not normalizing the experiences of the privileged, and minimize competitive positionality. (shrink)

Écrire une biographie, en l’occurrence celle de Raïssa Bloch (1898-1943), retracer l’itinéraire d’une personne, ainsi côtoyée des années, est toujours « une expérience humaine », comme l’écrit Agnès Graceffa en prélude des remerciements aux descendants de proches qu’elle a rencontrés et aux archivistes qui l’ont guidée dans sa « quête ». Son beau livre est « né de la découverte fortuite de plusieurs lots de lettres de Raïssa Bloch et de Michel Gorlin [son mari] à leurs amis », notamment à (...) la... (shrink)

« Entrer dans la guerre par l’amour écrit sur papier est une gageure » écrit Arlette Farge dans la préface de cet ouvrage de Clémentine Vidal-Naquet, issu d’une thèse soutenue à l’EHESS en 2013. Comme celle de mettre le couple et le lien conjugal au centre d’une analyse de la Grande Guerre. Avec finesse et inventivité historiographique, l’historienne, qui explicite toujours sa démarche et son cheminement intellectuel, a relevé le défi, apportant une contribution majeure à une histoire sensibl...

In this chapter, I propose that conceptions of justice in bioethics must be feminist, meaning they must be able to capture how the domains of health, healthcare and medicine exacerbate the subordination of those perceived to be women and girls and how injustice impacts their health. After providing context in the first section, I identify three problems with conceptions of justice in the bioethics literature that interfere with their potential to be feminist. They tend to adopt the ahistoricism and distributivism (...) characteristic of theories of justice that have been dominant in political philosophy, and they often rely on gendered conceptions of health that result in troubling comparisons of men and women’s health. My argument is primarily “negative”: it is a critique of generalist conceptions of justice in bioethics. However, in the final section I present characteristics of what a feminist conception of justice needs to look like and indicate how feminist bioethicists are using such a conception in assessing issues of injustice in bioethics. I emphasize the centrality of actual structural injustices, relational egalitarianism, and the assessment of values in conceptions of health and the health sciences. (shrink)

In this article, I will argue that early post-Apartheid South Africa adopted certain neoliberal principles which compromised the efforts to combat economic inequality. In particular, I will show that the economic policies that South Africa adopted during its early democracy reflect core neoliberal principles which promote a neoliberal political rationality. These economic policies indicate a pivotal approach from the African National Congress government in addressing economic inequality in South Africa. The dramatic shift from traditional Marxist policies to neoliberal policies reveals (...) the significant influence of a neoliberal global market system during South Africa’s early democracy. However, the neoliberal policies failed to address the problem of economic inequality in South Africa. Instead, these policies seem to have deepened the existing economic inequality in contemporary South African society. (shrink)

" La science avance plus vite que l'homme ". La formule de François Mitterrand se révèle, chaque jour davantage en matière de bioéthique, d'une étonnante actualité! Alors qu'il est encore bien malaisé de porter un jugement éthique et juridique sur le développement des biotechnologies, chacun s'interroge sur la justification et les risques des techniques les plus récentes, les perspectives qu'elles ouvrent à l'homme, mais également leur compatibilité avec la dignité de la personne. Lors d'un colloque pluridisciplinaire et international organisé par (...) la Faculté de droit de Nancy, le Centre Juridique Franco-Allemand et le Groupe de recherche de droit médical de l'Université de la Sarre, juristes, philosophes et médecins se sont penchés ensemble sur ces questions essentielles. Leurs réflexions et les discussions qu'elles ont engendrées, à la lumière des sensibilités française et allemande, font l'objet du présent ouvrage. En langue française, les diverses contributions sont suivies d'un résumé en allemand. Les fulgurants progrès des biotechnologies offrent incontestablement à l'humanité des chances nouvelles. Mais face à des biologistes dont certains se prennent déjà pour Dieu, il devient d'une urgente nécessité de réaffirmer les Droits de l'Homme. Qu'il s'agisse de procréation médicalement assistée, de thérapie génique ou d'expérimentation sur l'homme, une conclusion s'impose : lorsqu'elle menace la dignité de la personne, la liberté de la Science doit être limitée. L'avenir de l'espèce humaine est peut-être à ce prix... (shrink)

Ce numéro 16 de la revue CLIO, Histoire, Femmes et Sociétés présente un visage un peu particulier. Il s'agit de la publication des actes d'une rencontre européenne organisée à Lyon, à la Villa Gillet, le 8 décembre 2000, à l'occasion du cinquième anniversaire de la sortie du premier numéro de la revue. Fondée sur l'échange et la confrontation, cette journée d'études succédant à une rencontre interdisciplinaire tenue à Vienne en mai 1996, a été l'occasion de faire un premier bilan du (...) travail a... (shrink)

Au croisement de deux thématiques récentes dans l’approche des guerres – celle des sorties de guerre et celle de l’intime en guerre, défini comme l’espace où se construisent l’image de soi et le rapport aux autres –, l’ouvrage de Dominique Fouchard, issu d’une thèse, s’intéresse à la démobilisation « à hauteur de famille », comme le titre joliment la conclusion. Avec l’ambition de comprendre, par-delà la diversité des histoires individuelles, ce qui s’est joué au retour des soldats dans leur...

What is a just way of spending public resources for health and health care? Several significant answers to this question are under debate. Public spending could aim to promote greater equality in health, for example, or maximize the health of the population, or provide the worst off with the best possible health. Another approach is to aim for each person to have "enough" so that her health or access to health care does not fall under a critical level. This latter (...) approach is called sufficientarian. Sufficientarian approaches to distributive justice are intuitively appealing, but require further analysis and assessment. What exactly is sufficiency? Why do we need it? What does it imply for the just distribution of health or healthcare? This volume offers fresh perspectives on these critical questions. Philosophers, bioethicists, health policy-makers, and health economists investigate sufficiency and its application to health and health care in fifteen original contributions. (shrink)

Début 1871, Helmholtz donne une conférence à Heidelberg, devant un public de non spécialistes, sur « la genèse du système planétaire », dont le sujet sera ce qu’il appelle la théorie de Kant-Laplace. Plutôt que de commencer par expliquer ce qu’il faut entendre par cette dernière, Helmholtz expose devant ses auditeurs la représentation que l’on se fait désormais de la formation des corps célestes et de leur devenir probable, en s’appuyant sur les progrès des connaissances, la découverte de nouvelles lois, (...) l’usage d’instruments de plus en plus perfectionnés. C’est ainsi que la validité de l’hypothèse de Kant et de Laplace se trouve confirmée a posteriori et leur audace légitimée. Aussi, la démarche adoptée par Helmholtz relativise-t-elle implicitement, et peut-être à son insu, la rigueur postulée de la bonne méthode scientifique. La cosmogonie esquissée par Helmholtz ressemble à un spectacle bien étudié dont les auditeurs sont les spectateurs, les savants, les acteurs, et la science épurée, l’enjeu. L’analyse de ce texte a donc pour objectif principal d’identifier et de rappeler les éléments contextuels qui lui confèrent son épaisseur, depuis la guerre franco-prussienne jusqu’aux tensions idéologiques, philosophiques, scientifiques qui en sont l’arrière-plan. (shrink)

We consider the reduct to the module language of certain theories of fields with a non surjective endomorphism. We show in some cases the existence of a model companion. We apply our results for axiomatizing the reduct to the theory of modules of non principal ultraproducts of separably closed fields of fixed but non zero imperfection degree.