Face à sa finitude, l'homme est désemparé. Il aborde l'existence par la question du " pourquoi ". " Pourquoi m'a-t-on donné la vie si c'est pour la reprendre? " Il est envahi par la colère, la révolte... puis, il cherche un sens à sa mort et pose un au-delà salvateur, un lieu où tout peut continuer autrement... ou encore il envisage une réincarnation; bref, quelque chose qui n'est plus " la fin de la fin ". Mais quand l'homme se fait (...) philosophe, comment appréhende-t-il cette idée qui sera aussi sa réalité ultime? (shrink)

Chaque fois que les hommes parlent du temps, ils le connotent d'une valorisation typiquement humaine : "Prendre du bon temps", "perdre son temps", "la fuite du temps". Cette expérience immédiate, affective et bouleversante favorise un discours quasi simpliste ou nostalgique sur ce temps considéré comme ce qui enferme le tragique ou le pathétique de la condition humaine, vouée à la finitude. Le paradoxe réside donc, en ce fait qu'il paraît complexe de dire l'essence du temps, d'autant que souvent chacun en (...) est réduit à n'en faire qu'une description mesurable, chronologique ou phénoménologique. Toutefois cette conception d'un temps essentiellement linéaire ne semble pas rendre compte de l'aspect cyclique ou rythmé de certaines manifestations (notamment naturelles), ni même des résurgences du passé par l'intermédiaire de la mémoire, ou encore des projets et des anticipations envisagés en prévention d'un "à-venir". L'embarras réside, spécifiquement, dans cette aporie à donner une consistance au temps typiquement humain face à la perfection ontologique d'une éternité : Ontologie qu'il importe de situer en l'homme par opposition à une entité extérieure rendue visible par l'instrument de mesure, mais qui ne peut coïncider avec l'intériorisation du temps intuitionné au coeur de l'être en plein étance. Ontologie à distinguer notamment d'un Etre suprême qui échappe à toute temporalité et présuppose son immuabilité et dont l'homme, dans son statut d'être livré au temps, est coupé. Au regard de cette complexité, nous pouvons réitérer la question : Qu'est-ce que le temps et comment le penser? Comment égrener une philosophie du temps comparable à la saisie de l'écoulement de grains de sable dans un sablier et palper au coeur même de la vie, dans son efflorescence la puissance de l'instant? L'ouvrage de Laurence Vanin fournit un ensemble d'éléments susceptibles d'orienter le lecteur vers des réponses... (shrink)

Johnathan Cohen's book provides a lucid and penetrating treatment of the fundamental issues of contemporary analytical philosophy. This field now spans a greater variety of topics and divergence of opinion than fifty years ago, and Cohen's book addresses the presuppositions implicit to it and the patterns of reasoning on which it relies.

It is fairly standard in accounts of the epistemology of perceptual knowledge to distinguish three main alternative positions: representationalism, phenomenalism, and a third view that is called either naïve realism or direct realism. I have always found the last of these views puzzling and elusive. My aim in this paper is to try to figure out what direct realism amounts to, mainly with an eye to seeing whether it offers a genuine epistemological alternative to the other two views and to (...) representationalism in particular. My main thesis will be that it does not—that what is right in direct realist views turns out to have little bearing on the central epistemological issue concerning perceptual knowledge. (shrink)

THIS PAPER IS A COMMENTARY ON LUDWIK FLECK'S ESSAY ON THE CONNECTION BETWEEN WHAT HE CALLS "THOUGHT-STYLES" AND SCIENTIFIC AND MEDICAL CONCEPTS. THE IDEA OF A "THOUGHT-STYLE" APPLIED TO CONCEPTS OF DISEASE IS THAT THEY ARE NOT ONLY VALUE-LADEN IN THE SENSE OF INCLUDING NORMATIVE DIMENSIONS. THEY ALSO EMBRACE BROAD SOCIAL FACTORS, AS WELL. I ARGUE THAT THOUGHT-STYLES SHOULD BE UNDERSTOOD TO BE "OPEN-TEXTURED," ADMITTING A PLURALITY OF VALUE CONSIDERATIONS TO CONCEPTS OF DISEASE.

A Sceptical Theory of Scientific Inquiry: Problems and Their Progress presents a distinctive re-interpretation of Popper's 'critical rationalism', displaying the kind of spirit found at the L.S.E. before Popper's retirement. It offers an alternative to interpretations of critical rationalism which have emphasised the significance of research programmes or metaphysics (Lakatos; Nicholas Maxwell), and is closer to the approach of Jagdish Hattiangadi. Briskman gives priority to methodological argument rather than logical formalisms, and takes further his own work on creativity. In addition (...) to offering an important contribution to the understanding of critical rationalism, the book contains interesting engagements with Michael Polanyi and the Meno Paradox. This volume also contains an introduction by the editor, which situates Briskman's work in the history of the interpretation of 'critical rationalism'. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Laying Medicine Open: Innovative Interaction Between Medicine and the HumanitiesLaurence B. McCullough and Warren Thomas ReichThe past three decades have witnessed the emergence and remarkable success of the fields of bioethics and medical humanities. The intellectual landscape of medicine and that of the humanities have been remarkably altered in the process. Twenty-five to 30 years ago in the United States there existed but a few courses in what came (...) to be called “bioethics” in departments of philosophy, religious studies, and theology in colleges and universities, a handful of programs of teaching in medical schools such as the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston and Pennsylvania State University School of Medicine at Hershey, and but one independent research center (the Hastings Center) and one university-based research center (the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University). Articles on bioethics began to appear in the peer-reviewed medical, nursing, and humanities literature and some books were published. There was only one journal in bioethics, The Hastings Center Report (which consolidated two previously separate journals from the Hastings Center). Graduate programs in bioethics and medical humanities in colleges and universities and fellowship training in bioethics and medical humanities in medical schools did not exist. Very little existed in colleges, universities, and medical schools in other countries. Now, of course, everything is different.Teachers, scholars, and students of bioethics and medical humanities should not take these remarkable changes for granted, for they represent a sustained and innovative interaction between medicine and the humanities. We have chosen the metaphor of “laying medicine open” to characterize the history of bioethics and medical humanities of the past three decades. This surgical metaphor was used in eighteenth-century Britain by a number of writers who wanted to make medical science and practice more accessible to the sick and to the lay public more generally (Lawrence 1975). We use the metaphor to characterize the efforts of teachers and [End Page 1] scholars over the past three decades and more to make the value-laden dimensions of biomedical science and practice and of health care policy more accessible to patients and to the lay public more generally. The result of this laying open of medicine has gone a long way toward bringing closer together the two cultures of science and the humanities that had, as C. P. Snow famously described, become significantly isolated from each otherAlbert Jonsen (1998) has recently contributed the first book-length history of what he calls the “birth” of bioethics, adding to the work of other scholars such as Warren Reich (1994; 1995) and Robert Baker (1993) and, before them, Corrado Viafora (1990) and David Rothman (1991). The articles in this issue of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal make additional contributions to the developing understanding of the history of the past thirty years of interaction between medicine and the humanities.Laurence McCullough provides an historical context for the three accounts of the recent laying open of medicine that follow. McCullough examines two times in the history of medicine when it has been laid open to accountability (in addition to its being laid open to and by bioethics and medical humanities). The first laying open occurred in the work of the eighteenth-century Scottish physician and philosopher John Gregory, who set out to create a profession of medicine in a true moral sense of a fiduciary profession by making medicine accountable for its scientific and moral quality. The second occurred in the late twentieth century in which the managed practice of medicine in general, and managed care in particular, have begun to lay medicine open to accountability for its scientific and moral quality, as well as its cost and, at least in the public sector, its accessibility. McCullough argues that, just as Gregory responded to the ethical challenges of medicine laid open more than two centuries ago, bioethics should respond to the ethical challenges in the current laying open of medicine.Warren Reich provides an account of André Hellegers, whose premature death left an enormous gap in the field that will never be filled. Reich claims that Hellegers was engaged substantially in much more than the laying open of medicine: he... (shrink)

Lepore and Stone seek to replace the rationality-based Gricean picture of coordination between speaker and hearer with one leaning more strongly on the roles of convention and speaker knowledge while doing away with conversational implicature. Focusing on the phenomena of indirect speech acts, asymmetric conjunction, and scalar inferencing, I argue that the case for abandoning implicature as an analytical tool is not ultimately compelling. I seek further to demonstrate the utility of the classical Gricean distinction between what is said and (...) what is implicated in the construction of an intuitively appealing approach to the perennial question of how to distinguish lying from misleading inside and outside the legal domain. (shrink)

Troisième volet du programme 'Le problème de la réappropriation par la philosophie des discours de savoirs antérieurs,' ce volume entend examiner les citations directes ou indirectes de Platon, non seulement aux poètes archaïques et classiques, mais également aux autres discours de savoir non philosophiques afin de prendre la mesure des ressemblances et des écarts entre la 'source' et l'usage qui en est fait ; de tenir compte du contexte pragmatique d'énonciation et du cadre argumentatif dans lesquels s'insèrent ces 'citations' ; (...) de mesurer ainsi l'intérêt que ces savoirs ont pu susciter, les dangers qu'ils ont pu représenter - notamment en termes de concurrence, les réappropriations et/ou les distorsions dont ils ont été l'objet."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Introduction Dans le prolongement du volume hors-série consacré à la mise en relation par la prédication et les prépositions abordées au prisme de plusieurs approches linguistiques, nous conduisons dans ce volume une réflexion sur deux domaines que nous réunissons pour les nombreuses particularités qu’ils partagent a priori : il s’agit des questions et des exclamations. En effet, questions et exclamations partagent des phénomènes syntaxiques et phonologiques, une v...

This is the first textbook of surgical ethics. It is a practical, clinically comprehenive, well-organized guide to ethical issues in surgical practice, research, and education written by leading figures in surgery and bioethics. The authors cover the surgeon-patient relationship, the full range of surgical patients, surgical education and research, and surgery and managed care. Their chapters are not abstract discussions of ethical principles; rather, they connect directly with the everyday concerns of practicing surgeons.

The French bioethics laws of 1994 contain the principles of the anonymity and non commodification of all donations of body parts and products including gametes in medically assisted reproduction. The two revisions of the law, in 2004 and 2011 have upheld the rule. In view of the latest revision process, the French government organized a large public consultation in 2009. Within the event a “consensus conference” was held in Rennes about different aspects of assisted reproduction. In what follows we shall (...) first describe the anonymity clause for gamete donations in the French law and the debates surrounding it. We shall then analyse the procedure used for the 2009 public consultation and the related consensus conference, as well as its upshot concerning the anonymity doctrine. In this respect we shall compare the citizens’ own recommendations on the gamete anonymity issue and its translation in the consultation’s final report drafted by a philosopher mandated by the organizing committee. Whereas the final report cited some fundamental ethical arguments as reason for upholding the provisions of the law—most notably the refusal of the ‘all biological’ approach to reproductive issues—citizens were more careful and tentative in their position although they also concluded that for pragmatic reasons the anonymity rule should continue to hold. We shall argue that the conservative upshot of the public consultation is due to some main underlying presuppositions concerning the citizens’ role and expertise as well as to the specific design of the consensus conference. Our conclusion will be that public consultations and consensus conferences can only serve as an empirical support for devising suitable bioethics norms by using second-order normative assumptions. (shrink)

Buson, Nardy, Muller & Chevrot (2018) report two experiments ‐ a repetition task and a judgment task ‐ based on the phenomenon of sociolinguistic restoration. When people repeat utterances mixing standard and non‐standard variants, they make them homogeneous. The results suggest that coherent cognitive representation of the sociolinguistic varieties influences the reconstruction of the mixed heard utterance during the repetition. Using the repetition task could help understanding how sociolinguistic cues are organized in memory.

This paper addresses the problem of querying several databases considered as a whole. Assuming that the different databases share a common data description language, the problem that arises is to consistently answer queries even if the database contents are contradictory. The main contribution of this paper is the specification of a query-evaluator for answering closed and open general queries addressed to several databases and for providing explanations about the results. For doing so, we first specify a query-evaluator, in logic, which (...) assumes that the databases are propositional ones and do not contain disjunctions. Then we extend it to first-order databases defined by an extensional part and an intensional part. We also show that the query-evaluator corresponds to a majority merging of the databases. (shrink)

What makes words law? -- How law grows up in a group -- The invention of "because I said so" -- The empty idea of authority -- Ideas that endure -- When should we do what law signals? -- How law works -- Evolution and revolution -- Reading to understand each other -- The life of the law.

Résumé Ce dossier se propose d’analyser les démarches artistiques qui travaillent à l’intérieur de contraintes préétablies, de cerner les modalités et les enjeux de ces contraintes choisies et de montrer comment se construisent avec elles, dans une diversification de ses modèles, de nouvelles approches de la création dans tous les domaines des arts.

Résumé En juin 2010, lors de l’exposition organisée par la galerie Nelson-Freeman à Paris, on pouvait découvrir une série d’œuvres inédites de Mel Bochner : loin de ses travaux des années soixante et soixante-dix proches de l’art conceptuel, ces tableaux de mots, qui ne sacrifient rien à la matérialité de la peinture, marquent un véritable tournant dans l’œuvre de Bochner. Cet article se propose de suivre la ligne des transformations que trace cette exploration de la peinture depuis maintenant plus de (...) deux décennies : comment Bochner a-t-il mis ses stratégies conceptuelles à l’épreuve du médium pictural? (shrink)

Résumé Après les avant-gardes historiques qui ont revendiqué la tabula rasa, nombreux sont les artistes des années soixante qui manifestent un regain d’intérêt pour l’histoire : la réflexion sur l’histoire de l’art est au cœur de leur activité artistique, plastique autant que discursive. Cet article se propose d’analyser comment s’écrit, en marge et à rebours de l’histoire de l’art des historiens, une histoire qui leur conteste le monopole de la discipline et qui revendique un point de vue spécifique. Ancrées dans (...) une pratique artistique, ces histoires de l’art des artistes prennent, en effet, le contre-pied d’une histoire de l’art dominante qu’elles critiquent et déconstruisent. Les enjeux de cette prise en charge de l’histoire de l’art par les artistes sont multiples : esthétiques bien sûr mais aussi épistémologiques et politiques. En réaction à la pensée historiciste, les artistes explorent de nouvelles voies d’analyse, s’intéressent à des champs et des objets inexplorés ou sous-évalués par l’histoire de l’art à laquelle ils donnent aussi une orientation subjective. Cultivant délibérément l’anachronisme, ils s’essayent à la construction de nouveaux récits qui révisent les lectures du passé de l’art. (shrink)

Les thèses défendues ici par l’un des membres du collectif Wu Ming prennent le contrepied des discours habituels tenus sur le populisme. Raconter des histoires, s’armer des pouvoirs propres du storytelling ne revient pas nécessairement à embobiner les masses dans des bobards : sous certaines conditions, cela peut au contraire aider à la circulation de récits émancipants, qui élèvent l’intelligence de ceux qui les racontent comme de ceux qui les écoutent.

Penser par soi-même : dans le chapitre liminaire de la seconde Démocratie en Amérique, Tocqueville s'interroge sur ce mot d'ordre des modernes qui est aussi leur « méthode philosophique ». A travers l'exemple américain, idéal-typique de l'anthropologie démocratique, il en souligne l'ambivalence et s'interroge sur les promesses de la philosophie cartésienne : si la raison individuelle est libérée du carcan de la tradition et des préjugés, chacun trouvera-t-il en lui-même les moyens d'un exercice raisonné du jugement? Il se pourrait qu'à (...) l'inverse se trouve révélé le vide des esprits, que comblent dangereusement les réponses de l'opinion majoritaire, souveraine en démocratie. En montrant comment l'individualisme intellectuel est à la source d'une nouvelle forme d'aliénation, Tocqueville inscrit le doute au cœur de l'optimisme libéral au moment où le libéralisme officiel récupère le cartésianisme et célèbre en lui l' « esprit français ». (shrink)

Heuser, Eller and Byrne provide important descriptive ethics data about how physicians counsel women on the clinical management of pregnancies complicated by severe fetal anomalies. The authors present an account of what such counselling ought to be based on, the ethical concept of the fetus as a patient and the professional responsibility model of obstetric ethics. When there is certainty about the diagnosis and either a very high probability of either death as the outcome of the anomaly or survival with (...) severe and irreversible deficit of cognitive developmental capacity as a result of the anomaly diagnosed, the pregnant woman should be offered the alternatives of aggressive and non-aggressive obstetric management and induced abortion before viability. It is also ethically permissible to offer feticide followed by termination of pregnancy after viability in such cases. This ethically justified approach will reduce the variation in the actual practices of specialists in maternal–fetal medicine described by Heuser, Eller and Byrne. (shrink)

In our ‘The Professional Virtue of Civility and the Responsibilities of Medical Educators and Academic Leaders’,1 we provided an historically based conceptual account of the professional virtue of civility and the role of leaders of academic health centres in creating and sustaining an organisational culture of professionalism that promotes civility among healthcare professionals and between medical educators and learners. We emphasised that any adequate understanding of the virtues, including professional virtues, has cognitive, affective, behavioural and social components. Some of the (...) commentators expand on these components in important ways. Xuhao et al emphasises the importance of role models, especially in the hierarchical context of medical education.2 The hierarchy of faculty in the senior position and junior doctors and other learners below them has characterised medical education for centuries. Xuhao et al rightly call for academic leaders to shape this hierarchy in a morally responsible way, by becoming ‘exemplary role models’.2 Berry, a clinician manager, in critiquing our account, calls for an increased appreciation for the psychological and environmental factors that might explain why uncivil behaviour occurs.3 …. (shrink)

This chapter addresses the question of whether perceptual beliefs can have a foundational status in epistemology. It argues that, although Audi's defense of the foundational status of perceptual beliefs does not succeed, a similar defense might succeed. It first considers a defense based on considerations of intuitive plausibility. The chapter next considers Audi's more extended defense based on a form of “epistemic realism”. According to this chapter, both defenses fail to provide any explanation of why certain experiences are justificatorily relevant (...) to the existence of certain material objects. BonJour then sketches a “best explanation” account of this justificatory relevance, and attempts to show how, despite serious difficulties, such an account can deliver foundational justification. (shrink)

This article explores the speed and form in which the mechanical philosophy was absorbed into the college curriculum in Louis XIV’s France. It argues that in general a mechanist approach to nature only began to be received sympathetically after 1690. It also emphasizes that it was the Cartesian not Gassendist form of the mechanical philosophy that professors espoused. While admitting that at present it is impossible to explain successfully the history of the reception of the mechanical philosophy in the classroom, (...) the article concludes by attempting to throw light on the French preference for Descartes. This, it is suggested, is linked to the relative familiarity of Cartesian mechanism, the way the philosophy was packaged, and the political and religious environment. (shrink)

(2010). Enlightenment Contested. Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man 1670–1752. Intellectual History Review: Vol. 20, No. 2, pp. 285-287. doi: 10.1080/17496971003783864.

This dissertation advances a solution to a problem intrinsic to understanding the dialogues of Plato. How are we to understand Plato's thought when he never speaks in his own name in any of his dialogues? Many writers assume that Plato's characters speak for him. With this assumption, they study the thought articulated by Plato's characters as if it were his own, and elaborate a so-called "doctrinal" interpretation. A variety of subjective readings follows, since what Socrates and other characters say in (...) the dialogues is often inconsistent or contradictory. To resolve these problems the dissertation constructs a method for interpreting Socratic dialogue which is true to the genre. Extending the work of Bakhtin, Clay, and Kahn, it develops a metalanguage for specifying the structure, plot, aim , and effect of a dialogue as well as the thought , character , and pathos of its participants, by applying concepts in Plato's dialogues and in Aristotle's Poetics, Ethics, Politics, Metaphysics, Physics, and other works. The dissertation shows that the Republic represents Glaucon as subject to erotic desire and desires for luxury and honor, and that the aim of Socrates' discourse is to induce a catharsis in Glaucon in order to change these states of character. ;To support this interpretation, the dissertation shows: Aristotle does not apply a doctrinal reading to Plato's dialogues; he does not attribute the remarks of the character Socrates to Plato. Irwin's claims in "Plato's Ethics" are not supported by the texts of Aristotle which he cites. Aristotle's treatment of the Republic in Politics II is consistent with a mimetic interpretation of the dialogue. His treatment of the Republic is peirastic: he refutes Socrates' proposals with premisses and arguments that Socrates himself expresses in the dialogue. The dissertation discusses Aristotle's treatment of Socrates' proposals for unity in the city of the guardians, the sharing of women and children, gender, sacrilegious acts and incest, property, and the minimum necessary elements for a city. Aristotle's concept of catharsis can be derived from Sophist 230 and Republic X. (shrink)

The papers in this book address the broad issues of authority, leadership and organizational culture, whilst concentrating on other issues in-depth, such as inter-group conflict, and gender and race relations in the workplace.