In matters of rights, constitutions tend to avoid settling controversies. With few exceptions, rights are formulated in open-ended language, seeking consensus on an abstraction without purporting to resolve the many moral-political questions implicated by rights. The resulting view has been that rights extend everywhere but are everywhere infringed by legislation seeking to resolve the very moral-political questions the constitution seeks to avoid. The Negotiable Constitution challenges this view. Arguing that underspecified rights call for greater specification, Grégoire C. N. Webber (...) draws on limitation clauses common to most bills of rights to develop a new understanding of the relationship between rights and legislation. The legislature is situated as a key constitutional actor tasked with completing the specification of constitutional rights. In turn, because the constitutional project is incomplete with regards to rights, it is open to being re-negotiated by legislation struggling with the very moral-political questions left underdetermined at the constitutional level. (shrink)

Marcel Mauss published his essay The Gift in the context of debates about the European sovereign debt crises and the economic growth experienced by the colonies. This article traces the discursive associations between Mauss’ anthropological concepts and the reformist program of French socialists who pushed for an “altruistic” colonial policy in the interwar period. This article demonstrates that the three obligations which Mauss identified as the basis of a customary law of international economic relations served as key references in the (...) French debate about the relationships between metropolises and colonies in the interwar period. Mauss made this relation between colonial policy and the ethnology of the gift explicit in his book, The Nation. Moving beyond Mauss’ interwar writings, the article traces the genealogy of his later reflections to his involvement in prewar debate... (shrink)

How do people learn to talk about the causal and temporal relations between events, and the motivation behind why people do what they do? The narrative practice hypothesis of Hutto and Gallagher holds that children are exposed to narratives that provide training for understanding and expressing reasons for why people behave as they do. In this context, we have recently developed a model of narrative processing where a structured model of the developing situation is built up from experienced events, and (...) enriched by sentences in a narrative that describe event meanings. The main interest is to develop a proof of concept for how narrative can be used to structure, organize and describe experience. Narrative sentences describe events, and they also define temporal and causal relations between events. These relations are specified by a class of narrative function words, including “because, before, after, first, finally.” The current research develops a proof of concept that by observing how people describe social events, a developmental robotic system can begin to acquire early knowledge of how to explain the reasons for events. We collect data from naïve subjects who use narrative function words to describe simple scenes of human-robot interaction, and then employ algorithms for extracting the statistical structure of how narrative function words link events in the situation model. By using these statistical regularities, the robot can thus learn from human experience about how to properly employ in question-answering dialogues with the human, and in generating canonical narratives for new experiences. The behavior of the system is demonstrated over several behavioral interactions, and associated narrative interaction sessions, while a more formal extended evaluation and user study will be the subject of future research. Clearly this is far removed from the power of the full blown narrative practice capability, but it provides a first step in the development of an experimental infrastructure for the study of socially situated narrative practice in human-robot interaction. (shrink)

This article illustrates instrumental variable (IV) estimation by examining an unexpected finding of the research on career adaptability and job satisfaction. Theoretical and empirical arguments suggest that in the general population, people’s abilities to adapt their careers are beneficial to their job satisfaction. However, a recent meta-analysis unexpectedly found no effect when personality traits are controlled for. We argue that a reverse effect of job satisfaction on career adaptability, originating from affective tendencies tied to personality, might explain this null effect. (...) Our argument implies that the estimates obtained with traditional ordinary least squares (OLS) regressions are biased by endogeneity, a correlation between an explanatory variable and the error term in a regression model. When experimental manipulations are impossible, IV estimations, such as two-stage least squares (2SLS) regressions, are one possible solution to the endogeneity problem. Analyzing three waves of data from a sample of 836 adults, the concurrent and time-lagged effect of job satisfaction on career adaptability was revealed to be more consistent than the reverse. Our results provide an explanation, rooted in affective dispositions, as to why recent meta-analytical estimates unexpectedly found that career adaptability does not predict job satisfaction at the interindividual level. We also discuss IV estimation in terms of its limits, weight the interpretation of its estimates against the temporality criterion for causal inference, and consider its possible extension to analyses of change. (shrink)

Cet article prend pour point de départ une critique souvent adressée au minimalisme moral de Ruwen Ogien : il y a bien de la normativité dans le rapport à soi, nous avons des obligations vis-à-vis de nous-même. Après avoir rappelé cette objection (en la reformulant et en la renforçant), l’on se demande si une forme de minimalisme peut malgré tout lui survivre. Cet article répond par la positive, en proposant une reformulation radicale de la thèse minimaliste, qui parvienne à maintenir (...) le rejet du paternalisme tout en prenant en compte l’existence d’une normativité dans le rapport à soi. Il explique en quel sens une telle thèse peut encore être considérée comme minimaliste, puis entreprend d’examiner ses principales conséquences. (shrink)

La question de l’ennemi et de la guerre chez Rosenzweig est importante non seulement pour comprendre l’auteur, mais aussi son œuvre : L’Étoile de la Rédemption. Avec la relation d’hostilité, la temporalité rédemptrice basée sur le commandement d’amour s’affronte au problème des rapports qu’ont le judaïsme et le christianisme avec la guerre et le nationalisme.

The text opening the 'Great Peace Part' ('Taiping bu') in the Ming Taoist Canon, the Great Peace Scripture Digest (Taiping jing chao) is widely confused with the famous Great Peace Scripture (Taiping jing) which follows it in the Canon. The first full analysis and reassessment of the Great Peace Scripture Digest, this paper reviews the textual morphology of its ancient and modern editions, discusses current hypotheses concerning its date and authorship, and investigates its literary structure and form, pointing to clusters (...) of prosodic patterns. Light is shed on strata of diachronic origin coexisting in the text, which should not be regarded as being the product of an inconstant solitary compiler, but rather as the conflation of shortened renditions of the Great Peace Scripture perhaps dating to the Tang and pre-Song or early Song eras. A full linear analysis of the text, including a concordance, completes the literary study. (shrink)

Résumé L’objet de cet article est d’analyser les récits de bestialité qui se multiplient dans la littérature des XVIe et XVIIe siècles, dans les écrits juridiques, médicaux, polémiques et surtout dans les relations de voyages. Ces anecdotes qui mettent en scène des accouplements, voire des enfantements, entre hommes et bêtes, amènent à questionner les rapports troubles entre l’épistémè de la Renaissance et les savoirs ethnographiques acquis durant cette première époque coloniale, savoirs qui s’imprègnent parfois des récits mythologiques locaux. Inspirées par (...) une perspective anthropomorphique comme par le modèle de la fable, ces anecdotes zoophiles témoignent de la diversité des réflexions sur un possible interrègne, sur les zones de partage instables entre l’homme et l’animal, mais aussi sur la projection de stéréotypes animaliers sur des populations étrangères. (shrink)

Breast cancer is a major public health challenge. Organized mammography screening (OS) is considered one way to reduce breast cancer mortality. EU recommendations prone mass deployment of OS, and back in 2004, France introduced a national OS programme for women aged 50–74 years. However, in 2012, participation rate was still just 52.7%, well short of the targeted 70% objective. In an effort to re-address the (in) efficiency of the programme, the French National Cancer Institute has drafted an expert-group review of (...) the ethical issues surrounding breast cancer mammography screening. (shrink)

Auxiliaire de justice, indépendant et mandaté par son client, l’avocat occupe une place singulière dans le système judiciaire français et sa parole se caractérise a priori par une grande liberté. A l’examen cependant, on constate que son espace de parole est soumis aux règles rituelles du procès qui tendent progressivement à le restreindre, et que le contenu de cette parole est contraint par les exigences de sa mission même s’il bénéficie d’une protection dont l’effectivité est une garantie fondamentale du procès (...) équitable. Ainsi, si indéniablement l’avocat peut dans certaines situations, dire plus que le citoyen ordinaire, il doit surtout en toutes circonstances veiller à dire mieux que ce dernier. (shrink)

Touching on issues of power, authority, and domination, Manhunts takes an in-depth look at the hunting of humans in the West, from ancient Sparta, through the Middle Ages, to the modern practices of chasing undocumented migrants.

Interrogating the relationship of the sovereign power of the nation state to the scientist's expert knowledge as a legitimating--and sometimes challenging- ...

Many state laws specify procedures for determining surrogate or proxy decision-makers for end-of-life care in the absence of an advance directive, living will, or other designation. Some laws also set forth criteria that the decision-maker must follow when making medical decisions for an incapacitated patient and determining whether to withdraw life-sustaining treatment. This article provides analysis of a medical ethics case on the question of how to address family allegations that the proxy decision-maker suffers from dementia and is unable to (...) make decisions for the patient. Cases such as this involve interwoven legal and ethical considerations including: how to address concerns that the proxy is making questionable or unreasonable decisions, how to evaluate the proxy's decisional capacity, strategies for enhancing communication, and standards for removing a proxy. This article suggests that “surrogacy ladders” in state law serve not only as a procedural mechanism, but also protect important ethical values such as tiers of moral authority for decision-making, relational autonomy, and privacy. (shrink)

La philosophie analytique récente a vu naître d’importants débats de méthode concernant la bonne manière de pratiquer l’ontologie, qui voient s’opposer les partisans déclarés de Quine à ceux de Carnap. Au cœur de ces débats se trouve l’idée que le monde possède une structure ontologique propre, indépendante de notre manière de le conceptualiser ou de l’organiser. C’est cette idée qui est ici plus précisément examinée, dans le but de la clarifier. Cet article défend la thèse que, si le monde possède (...) bien une structure intrinsèque, celle-ci est de nature physique et non ontologique. Quant à cette dernière, elle ne peut être conçue indépendamment d’une subjectivité consciente et constituante. Si cet argument est correct, il donne raison à l’école néo-carnapienne, mais surtout il étaye l’idée qu’il ne saurait y avoir d’ontologie que transcendantale, une idée dont les germes semblent être en train de poindre au sein de l’école analytique. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to show how systematic Charles Taylor’s philosophy is. It rejects two opposite readings: one claiming that Taylor’s thought is too diverse to have real unity; the other, that it is the product of a “monomaniac” (Taylor’s own word). I claim that his thought has a very distinct structure, comprising two levels. On the first, “meta-hermeneutic” level, Taylor defends a thesis about hermeneutics (namely, that it cannot be dispensed with): this unifies his anthropology, epistemology, moral (...) philosophy, philosophy of language and political philosophy. On the second, “hermeneutic” level, Taylor builds an impressive historic construal of modern identity and its dilemmas. More importantly, while these two levels are irreducibly distinct, they relate to each other in interesting ways, giving Taylor’s philosophy its systematicity. I finally confront this view with other readings, and argue that it is the best way to understand Taylor’s work. (shrink)

Au xviie siècle, la question de la durée de la vie fait l’objet d’un nouveau traitement en termes d’arithmétique politique. Cette mathématisation, avec la construction de la notion de « vie moyenne », permet une intégration de l’art de prolonger la vie aux techniques de gouvernement. Élaborée dans le cadre des pratiques financières de rentes viagères, la notion émigre vers l’économie politique, où la vie n’est plus conçue comme support d’intérêts mais comme force productive. Le problème se pose alors en (...) termes de philosophie politique : le pouvoir peut-il se fonder sur des impératifs de maximisation de la vie moyenne pour contraindre ses sujets ? La question fut posée au sujet de l’inoculation de la petite vérole. Dans le débat qui déchira les Lumières françaises, c’est en réalité la question du fondement de ce que Michel Foucault appelait le biopouvoir qui est en jeu. (shrink)

The purpose of this dissertation is to clarify Aristotle's conception of the nature and utility of the dialectical tools, as well as to help in establishing proof for the existence of a coherence between his logical theory and his philosophical practice. The first book of the Topics is unanimously considered to be Aristotle's introduction to his dialectical method. Thus, a certain familiarity with this book is necessary for whomever undertakes a study of one of its fundamental elements, such as the (...) tools. The first part of the dissertation is, therefore, devoted to this task. After situating the tools in the Topics, we will study Aristotle's proemium , especially as concerns the presentation of the dialectical argument and the goals of dialectic. For it is in order to procure such arguments that the tools are said to be useful, and it is how Aristotle uses the method for one of the aforesaid purposes that we will be studying later. We will then examine the chapters devoted to the parts of the dialectical argument . Among these are the predicables, which enter into the constitution of the propositions that will be laid down as dialectical problems, or taken as dialectical premises. Now, it is precisely because the tools furnish such premises that they allow us to obtain an abundance of arguments apt to solve such problems. These arguments can be syllogisms or inductions. We will next analyze Aristotle's presentation of the four tools . After which, we will propose a more essential and complete definition of them than is usually assigned. They are in fact described by Aristotle and his commentators in terms of the abundance of dialectical arguments they serve for. To my mind, however, it is better to speak of them as abilities ordered to obtaining probable premises. In the second part, we will examine the use made of the tools in certain sections of the De Anima and the Metaphysica. We will thus be in a better position to verify that when he is arguing dialectically, he is really using the tools as he described them in the Topics and as we explained them. Finally, we will propose a few explanations of the use of the tools in those passages where it seems that it is more a question of knowing than of dialectical reasoning. (shrink)