Since the middle of the twentieth century, the governance of the global system has been organized around the United States and the advanced industrial democracies. In the shadow of the Cold War, these countries established a wide array of global and regional institutions to manage economic, political, and security relations. The Bretton Woods institutions, GATT, the United Nations, and various functional institutions provided the bulwark for an open and managed postwar world economy and global order. An American-led alliance system provided (...) a structure for regional security in Europe and East Asia. When the Cold War ended, these far-flung institutions were extended into a more fully global multilateral system of governance. The United States dominated the global order. But, more so than did leading states in previous eras, it established its dominance through institutions. It was an American-led liberal hegemonic order. (shrink)

The crisis of the American-led international order would seem to open up new opportunities for rising states—led by China, India, and other non-Western developing countries—to reshape the global order. As their capacities and influence grow, will these states rise up and integrate into the existing order or will they seek to overturn and reorganize it? The realist hegemonic perspective expects today's power transition to lead to growing struggles between the West and the “rest” over global rules and institutions. In contrast, (...) this essay argues that although America's hegemonic position may be declining, the liberal international characteristics of order—openness, rules, and multilateralism—are deeply rooted and likely to persist. And even as China seeks in various ways to build rival regional institutions, there are stubborn limits on what it can do. (shrink)

A study is reported testing two hypotheses about a close parallel relation between indicative conditionals, if A then B , and conditional bets, I bet you that if A then B . The first is that both the indicative conditional and the conditional bet are related to the conditional probability, P(B|A). The second is that de Finetti's three-valued truth table has psychological reality for both types of conditional— true , false , or void for indicative conditionals and win , lose (...) , or void for conditional bets. The participants were presented with an array of chips in two different colours and two different shapes, and an indicative conditional or a conditional bet about a random chip. They had to make judgements in two conditions: either about the chances of making the indicative conditional true or false or about the chances of winning or losing the conditional bet. The observed distributions of responses in the two conditions were generally related to the conditional probability, supporting the first hypothesis. In addition, a majority of participants in further conditions chose the third option, “void”, when the antecedent of the conditional was false, supporting the second hypothesis. (shrink)

Toujours, dans toute proposition affirmative veritable, necessaire ou contingente, universelle ou singuliere, la notion du predicat est comprise en quelque facon dans celle du sujet, praedicatum inest subjecto, ou bien je ne sais ce que c'est que la vetite. Parce qu'elles mettaient principalement l'accent sur les liaisons conceptuelles, les precisions de ce genre ont ete interpretees comme autant d'indices permettant de reconstituer le contenu du predicat de verite a partir de presupposes coherentistes. Dans le concensus qui s'est etabli sur ce (...) point, le role hermeneutique tres excessif accorde a la notion de systeme a eu une portee aussi considerable que le contenu des quelques textes generalement allegues. Si on admet, au contraire, qu'il y a bien une doctrine leibnizienne de la verite, alors on est amene a inscrire la position de Leibniz dans le contexte du debat relatif a l'adaequatio rei et a souligner davantage ce qui l'apparente a une theorie de la verite-correspondance. Cet argument principal est soutenu par des analyses de detail dans la logique. Un attention particuliere est apportee aux valeurs des variables du nouveau calcul, a la fonction du predicat de possibilite, au probleme relatif a la constantia subjecti et au statut des entites intensionnelles. L'image de l'ontologie leibnizienne s'en trouve modifiee et precisee: a la fois possibiliste et factualiste, elle est traversee de tensions importantes et occupe une place tout a fait singuliere dans cette partie de la philosophie qui connait aujourd'hui un si profond renouveau. (shrink)

There has been a persistent tendency to identify what is called “the freerider problem” in the production of collective goods with the prisoner's dilemma. However, in this article I want to challenge that identification by presenting an analysis of what are in fact a variety of collective action problems in the production of collective goods. My strategy is not to consult any intuitions about what the free-rider problem is; rather I will be looking at the problematic game-theoretic structures of various (...) situations associated with the production of different types of collective goods, thereby showing what sorts of difficulties a community concerned with their voluntary production would face. I call all of these dilemmas free-rider problems because in all of them certain individuals find it rational to take advantage of others' willingness to contribute to the good in a way that threatens its production. Some readers may feel that the term ‘free-rider problem’ is so identified with the prisoner's dilemma that my extension of the term in this way “jars”; if so, I invite them to coin another word for the larger phenomenon. My aim is not to engage in linguistic analysis but to attempt at least a partial analysis of the complicated structure of collective good production. (shrink)

The temptation to use prospective observational studies (POS) instead of conducting difficult trials (RCTs) has always existed, but with the advent of powerful computers and large databases, it can become almost irresistible. We examine the potential consequences, were this to occur, by comparing two hypothetical studies of a new treatment: one RCT, and one POS. The POS inevitably submits more patients to inferior research methodology. In RCTs, patients are clearly informed of the research context, and 1:1 randomized allocation between experimental (...) and validated treatment balances risks for each patient. In POS, for each patient, the risks of receiving inferior treatment are impossible to estimate. The research context and the uncertainty are down-played, and patients and clinicians are at risk of becoming passive research subjects in studies performed from an outsider’s view, which potentially has extraneous objectives, and is conducted without their explicit, autonomous, and voluntary involvement and consent. (shrink)

La 4e de couv. porte : "Gilbert Simondon (1924-1989) a été considéré de son vivant comme un philosophe de la technique original mais difficile. Il s'impose aujourd’hui comme l’artisan d’un « nouvel encyclopédisme » qui veut unifier les sciences au sein d’une philosophie de la nature et renouveler l’humanisme. Pour l’« ontologie génétique » de Simondon, toute chose tient sa réalité de la genèse où elle«s’individue ». Celle-ci est un processus ininterrompu auquel l’inerte, le vivant, le technique, le social, mais (...) aussi le savoir et la pensée eux-mêmes appartiennent. On expose ici la question de « l’individuation » dans ses trois dimensions essentielles – la différence entre le physique et le biologique, le « transindividuel », l’objet technique – pour montrer ensuite comment le génétisme de Simondon dépasse les oppositions classiques entre matière et forme ou sujet et objet, mais aussi les antagonismes (par exemple entre technicisme et humanisme) qui se disputent la conception de la nature et de l’homme. On développe enfin l’enjeu politique et social d’une philosophie pour laquelle une véritable « culture technique » pourrait supprimer une des principales causes de l’aliénation humaine et donner aux hommes les moyens de comprendre leur monde.". (shrink)

It is time to challenge the issue of pleasure associated with the core of medical practice. Its importance is made clear through its opposite: unhappiness—something which affects doctors in a rather worrying way. The paper aims to provide a discussion on pleasure on reliable grounds. Plato’s conception of techne is a convenient model that offers insights into the unique practice of medicine, which embraces in a single purposive action several heterogeneous dimensions. In Aristotle’s Ethics, pleasure appears to play a central (...) role for action’s assessment and intensification. Pleasure is also tightly associated with the Kantian faculty of reflective judgment, which operates at the heart of clinical reasoning. Indeed, practicing medicine means to deal with the particular and the manifold, requiring clinical judgment, but also relying on embodied habitus . With Bourdieu’s notion of habitus , pleasure is the mark of a happy practice, which presupposes a deep involvement in one’s field. Throughout our inquiry, the question of pleasure comes to offer a critical reappraisal of real medical practice and leads to consider ethics more as a component of techne than as a separate realm of concern. (shrink)

The End of the Avant-Gardes : May 68 and the Situationists What emerges first and foremost from Debord’s writings in 1968 is that the situationists’ initial reaction to the May “events” was to interpret them as the first example of a spontaneous general strike in the context of what he called “overdeveloped capitalism”. Debord’s position on this question is linked to his questioning of the status of the avant-gardes. At the time, Debord and those close to him sought both to (...) conceptualise and to enact the end of the avant-gardes. And this included the Internationale Situationniste in its status as political, philosophical and artistic avant-garde. e article subsequently sets out to show that if the situationists did have any leverage on the events of May, it was insofar as they practised a maverick Marxism centred on the concept of alienation. is enabled them to conceptualise both the exploitation of the wage-earner and the condition of the consumer. Because they represent a comprehensive critique of capitalism and because, furthermore, they refuse to compromise on the revolutionary and worker dimension of the May-June 1968 moment, Debord’s writings of the period enable us to grasp what, in the strict sense, remains beyond any opportunistic recuperation in these events. (shrink)

Cet article propose l’étude d’un cas (dans deux films de Fassbinder) de ce que je nomme l’ iconologie nostalgique. Celle-ci consiste en une certaine manière de faire retour, par le cinéma comme outil d’expertise, sur quelques chefs-d’œuvre de l’histoire de la peinture, le film officiant comme révélateur iconique d’invention pour les figures peintes et nous permettant de voir et d’interpréter, par rebonds, le tableau pour la première fois, c’est-à-dire d’un regard jamais actualisé avant l’opération filmique.

Parménide n'est-il que le penseur de l'Etre? La présence des multiples déesses n'est-elle que figure poétique de style? Le récit sur le cosmos ne fait-il que décrire la voie de l'illusion, à éviter absolument? En cherchant réponse à ces questions, cet ouvrage met en lumière le rôle incontournable que jouent plusieurs déesses dans la révélation et la compréhension du Vrai. Et, chemin faisant, sont éclairés les liens étroits qui relient ces divinités, l'Etre et le monde du devenir. Ainsi, c'est à (...) partir de l'ontologie fondatrice et d'une théologie inédite que le penseur de l'Etre esquisse une conception non moins originale du cosmos. (shrink)

This volume argues that contemporary narratives resist such influences and evince a great deal of resilience by promoting an ecology of attention based on poetic options that develop an ethics of the particularist type. The contributors draw on critical and theoretical literature hailing from various fields: including psychology and sociology, but more prominently phenomenology, political philosophy, analytical philosophy (essentially Ordinary Language Philosophy), alongside the Ethics of Care and Vulnerability. This volume is designed as an innovative contribution to the nascent field (...) of the study of attention in literary criticism, an area that is full of potential. Its scope is wide, as it embraces a great deal of the Anglophone world, with Britain, Ireland, the USA, but also Australia and even Malta. Its chapters focus on well-established authors, like Kazuo Ishiguro (whose work is revisited here in a completely new light) or more confidential ones like Melissa Harrison or Sarah Moss. (shrink)

This volume argues that contemporary narratives resist such influences and evince a great deal of resilience by promoting an ecology of attention based on poetic options that develop an ethics of the particularist type. The contributors draw on critical and theoretical literature hailing from various fields: including psychology and sociology, but more prominently phenomenology, political philosophy, analytical philosophy (essentially Ordinary Language Philosophy), alongside the Ethics of Care and Vulnerability. This volume is designed as an innovative contribution to the nascent field (...) of the study of attention in literary criticism, an area that is full of potential. Its scope is wide, as it embraces a great deal of the Anglophone world, with Britain, Ireland, the USA, but also Australia and even Malta. Its chapters focus on well-established authors, like Kazuo Ishiguro (whose work is revisited here in a completely new light) or more confidential ones like Melissa Harrison or Sarah Moss. (shrink)

Ischemic stroke involves numerous and complex pathophysiological mechanisms including blood flow reduction, ionic exchanges, spreading depressions and cell death through necrosis or apoptosis. We used a mathematical model based on these phenomena to study the influences of intensity and duration of ischemia on the final size of the infarcted area. This model relies on a set of ordinary and partial differential equations. After a sensibility study, the model was used to carry out in silico experiments in various ischemic conditions. The (...) simulation results show that the proportion of apoptotic cells increases when the intensity of ischemia decreases, which contributes to the model validation. The simulation results also show that the influence of ischemia duration on the infarct size is more complicated. They suggest that reperfusion is beneficial when performed in the early stroke but may be either inefficacious or even deleterious when performed later after the stroke onset. This aggravation could be explained by the depolarisation waves which might continue to spread ischemic damage and by the speeding up of the apoptotic process leading to cell death. The effect of reperfusion on cell death through these two phenomena needs to be further studied in order to develop new therapeutic strategies for stroke patients. (shrink)

The war against terrorism enables the implementation of techniques of exception at all stages of judicial proceedings in criminal cases, front the initiation of a lawsuit to the verdict. It thus puts into question the constitutional mechanisms intended for the protection of privacy. The type of incrimination specific w the accusation of terrorism has created a specifically political crime, i.e., the intention to exert art inappropriate form of pressure on a government or an international organization. It serves as the means (...) for a preventive attack on any process of class recomposition. We thus are witnessing a suspension of the law, which is paradoxically inscribed within the law and belongs to a new legal or juridical order. This amounts to the end of the twofold dimension of the Western legal system as we have known it, namely, the separation between rule of law within and pure violence on the external level. The present imperial organization knowns no externality pure violence has been reinserted at its heart and now belongs to the rule of law. Hence the State of exception as the form of government of the Empire appears above all to be a transitional phase, a tool in the process of installing a more stable form: dictatorship. The end of the formal separation of powers as well as the legal prerogatives appropriated by the executive branch show that this process is well underway. (shrink)