Les conflits de leadership déchirent l'Église en Afrique. Et l'Église protestante méthodiste du Bénin (EPMB) en à subi les affres. Comment est née la crise à la tête de l'EPMB? Comment s'est-elle manifestée? Quelles stratégies ont été mises en œuvre pour la juguler? Cet ouvrage apporte des eœclairages à ces questions et montre coment le dialogue, le pardon et surtout l'eœthique, au-delà de l'expression des egos et de l'intervention de la justice des hommes, ont pu tracer les sillons d'une paix (...) qu'on souhaite éternelle. (shrink)

Some proponents of the Integrated Information Theory of consciousness profess strong views on the Neural Correlates of Consciousness, namely that large swathes of the neocortex, the cerebellum, at least some sensory cortices, and the so-called limbic system are all not essential for any form of conscious experiences. We argue that this connection is not incidental. Conflation between strong and weak versions of the theory has led these researchers to adopt definitions of NCC that are inconsistent with their own previous definitions, (...) inadvertently betraying the promises of an otherwise fruitful empirical endeavour. (shrink)

The history of research on pseudoalleles, closely linked genes that have similar functions, is rich and complex. Because pseudoalleles’ proximity on the chromosome makes their distinction by the complementation tests traditionally used by geneticists difficult, and because they have similar functions, they were initially often considered as allelic forms of the same gene, hence their name. The Hox cluster is an emblematic example of a pseudoallelic gene complex. The first observations of pseudoalleles were made very early but remained puzzling until (...) a simple model explaining their formation and characteristics emerged in the middle of the 1930s. This model suggested that pseudoalleles originated by gene.. (shrink)

This article explains how strong sustainability ethics has emerged and developed as a new field over the last two decades as a critical response to influential conceptions of weak sustainability. It investigates three competing, normative approaches to strong sustainability: the communitarian approach, the Rawlsian approach, and the capabilities approach. Although these approaches converge around the idea that there are critical, non-substitutable natural resources and services, they diverge on how to reconcile human development and environmental protection. The aim of the paper (...) is to provide a critical overview of these three perspectives, but also and mostly to show that when we put them into dialogue with each other, we can clarify the demands of sustainability. The paper concludes that the capabilities approach is the most suitable way to think about sustainability, but only if it goes beyond its dominantly anthropocentric view. (shrink)

This study examines how hunger narratives and performances contribute to a reconsideration of neglected or prohibited domains of thinking which only a full confrontation with the body's heterogeneity and plasticity can reveal. From literary motif or psychosomatic symptom to revolutionary gesture or existential malady, the double crux of hunger and disgust is a powerful force which can define the experience of embodiment. Kafka's fable of the "Hunger Artist" offers a matrix for the fast, while its surprising last-page revelation introduces disgust (...) as a correlative of abstinence, conscious or otherwise. Grounded in Kristeva's theory of abjection, the figure of the fraught body lurking at the heart of the negative grotesque gathers precision throughout this study, where it is employed in a widening series of contexts: suicide through overeating, starvation as self-performance or political resistance, the teratological versus the totalitarian, the anorexic harboring of death. In the process, writers and artists as diverse as Herman Melville, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Christina Rossetti, George Orwell, Knut Hamsun, J.M. Coetzee, Cindy Sherman, Pieter Breughel, Marina Abramovic, David Nebreda, Paul McCarthy, and others are brought into the discussion. By looking at the different acts of visceral, affective, and ideological resistance performed by the starving body, this book intensifies the relationship between hunger and disgust studies while offering insight into the modalities of the "dark grotesque" which inform the aesthetics and politics of hunger. It will be of value to anyone interested in the culture, politics, and subjectivity of embodiment, and scholars working within the fields of disgust studies, food studies, literary studies, cultural theory, and media studies. (shrink)

Quantum Mechanics has imposed strain on traditional (dualist and representationalist) epistemological conceptions. An alternative was offered by Bohr and Heisenberg, according to whom natural science does not describe nature, but rather the interplay between nature and ourselves. But this was only a suggestion. In this paper, a systematic development of the Bohr-Heisenberg conception is outlined, by way of a comparison with the modern self-organizational theories of cognition. It is shown that a perfectly consistent non-representationalist (and/or relational) reading of quantum mechanics (...) can be reached thus. (shrink)

Vers la fin du vie s.apr. J.‑C., le forum de Philippes est devenu une place de village, en fort contraste avec l’intense activité de construction d’églises qu’avait connue le centre de la ville dans la première moitié du siècle. Ce retour à la ruralité s’inscrit dans un courant plus général qui affecte alors les Balkans, mais la présente note étudie l’hypothèse que l’épidémie dite « peste de Justinien » a eu un fort impact à Philippes. Une vague connue à Constantinople (...) en 573‑574 a atteint Thessalonique en juillet 586 et a dû passer par Philippes. Ce facteur qui n’a pas été invoqué jusqu’ici pourrait expliquer les enterrements en masse très mal connus et mal datés observés par Paul Lemerle dans la basilique B, l’abandon de la construction de cette église en raison de la diminution des moyens financiers et surtout humains qui pouvaient lui être consacrés, et le déclin de la forme urbaine de la vie collective qui ne correspondait plus aux besoins d’une population devenue moins nombreuse. (shrink)

A phenomenological view of contemplative disciplines is presented. However, studying mindfulness by phenomenology is at odds with both neurobiological and anthropological approaches. It involves the first-person standpoint, the openness of being-in-the-world, the umwelt of the meditator, instead of assessing her neural processes and behaviors from a neutral, distanced, third-person standpoint. It then turns out that phenomenology cannot produce a discourse about mindfulness. Phenomenology rather induces a cross-fertilization between the state of mindfulness and its own methods of mental cultivation. A comparison (...) between the epochè, the phenomenological reduction, and the practice of mindfulness, is then undertaken. (shrink)

Marx's work is dual, and includes both a philosophical and an economic aspect. The philosophical work was developed with great speed between 1842 and 1846 in a series of extraordinary texts, notably the Critique of the Hegelian State, the third manuscript of 1844, and The German Ideology (1845–6). It is a philosophy unlike anything that had gone before it and is without equal. It was destined to shake the foundations of Western thought. Such is its originality, in fact, that it (...) remains misunderstood even today. (shrink)

In physics, structures are good candidates for the role of transparadigmatic invariants, which entities can no longer play. This is why structural realism looks more credible than standard entity realism. But why should structures be stable, rather than entities? Here, structural realists have no answer ; they content themselves with the mere observation that this is how things stand. By contrast, transcendental structuralism can easily make sense of this fact. Indeed, it shows that when knowledge bears on phenomena, namely on (...) the emergent byproduct of a relation between the explorer and what is to be explored, this knowledge necessarily bears on relations between such phenomena. After a development on the clarifying power of transcendental structuralism, I turn to an early transcendental structuralist interpretation of quantum mechanics proposed by Jean-Louis Destouches. Destouches, an early French philosopher of physics, was a student of Louis de Broglie. He recasted in the 1940 the very concept of physical theory in the light of quantum physics. According to him, whenever phenomena are inextricably relative to the experimental set-up, a physical theory cannot provide anything beyond a list of interconnected predictions for future facts given a relevant class of past facts. In his general mathematical theory of predictions, the Ψ-functions of quantum mechanics do not refer to some “real” waves; they are shown to be nothing but the formal expression of the phenomena’s being relative to incompatible experimental contexts. Since the quantization of variables can itself be derived from a wave-mechanical formalism, it becomes clear that the most prominent features of quantum mechanics are a mere consequence of contextuality. Destouches thus proved that it is easy to make sense of quantum mechanics provided a reflective attitude is adopted. By contrast, too many difficulties arise when one tries at any cost to make quantum mechanics intelligible within a purely ontological framework. (shrink)

Theiler's virus is a picornavirus of mouse which causes an acute encephalomyelitis followed by a persistent infection of the white matter resulting in chronic inflammation and demyelination. This disease has been studied as a model for multiple sclerosis. Inbred strains of mice are either resistant--they clear the infection after the acute encephalomyelitis--or susceptible to persistent infection and demyelination. Susceptibility is a polygenic trait which has been analyzed using methods of association with “candidate” genes, and linkage analysis after a complete genome (...) scan. The H-2Db gene is responsible for an efficient CTL response which makes some strains resistant. Non H-2 genes responsible for the susceptibility of other strains have been mapped by linkage analysis to the Ifng and, possibly, the Mbp loci. The analysis of a set of congenic mice ruled out the possiblity that the relevant gene codes for interferon gamma, and showed that the region around Ifngprobably contains two susceptibility genes. The analysis of mutant mice showed further that the Mbp gene, which codes for the myelin basic protein, has a major effect on viral persistence. BioEssays 20:627–633, 1998. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons Inc. (shrink)

L’étude porte sur νόος (νοεῖν, νόημα), dans les trois genres de la poésie archaïque non épique, iambique (Archiloque, Sémonide), élégiaque (Solon, Théognis), mélique (Alcée, Sappho, Simonide, Bacchylide, Pindare). En insistant sur les enjeux pragmatiques de la performance rituelle (par exemple symposiaque ou épinicique) et les effets de la transmission, reconstruction et interprétation post-classique des énoncés, surtout des fragments, qui peut tirer l’analyse sémantique vers une abstraction dualiste de type étique (vs. émique), on observe la multifonctionnalité du νόος figuré poétiquement, en (...) action, comme une faculté rythmée, à la fois sensorielle, expressive, éthique, décisionnelle, cognitive, logique, fondée sur des jeux d’empathie visuelle et kinesthésique, et de maîtrise, par exemple dans les relations entre hommes et dieux. La poéticité des fragments de Xénophane s’en trouve aussi réévaluée. (shrink)

RÉSUMÉDifférentes méthodes ?identification des systèmes ont été développées par les informaticiens qui consistent à déterminer à partir de ľobservation des grandeurs ?entrée et de sortie de ce système, les relations de cause à effet qu'il établit entre ces grandeurs.Cet exposé rappelle le principe des méthodes ?identification 〈statique〉 et 〈dyna‐mique〉, et conclut que ces méthodes peuvent être considéréd comme un exemple ?applications des approches définies par la philosophic de ľouverture pour ľacqui‐sition de nouvelles connaissances.

It is presumed that the evolution of morphological diversity in animals and plants is driven by changes in the developmental processes that govern morphology, hence basically by changes in the function and/or expression of a defined set of genes that control these processes. A large body of evidence has suggested that changes in developmental gene regulation are the predominant mechanisms that sustain morphological evolution, being much more important than the evolution of the primary sequences and functions of proteins. Recent reports1, (...) 2 challenge this idea by highlighting functional evolution of Hox proteins during the evolutionary history of arthropods. BioEssays 24:775–779, 2002. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

NADOT M. Nursing Inquiry 2010; 17: 118–127The world’s first secular autonomous nursing school against the power of the churchesSecular healthcare practices were standardized well before the churches’ established their influence over the nursing profession. Indeed, such practices, resting on the tripartite axiom of domus, familia, hominem, were already established in hospitals during the middle ages. It was not until the last third of the eighteenth century that the Catholic Church imposed its culture on secular health institutions; the Protestant church followed (...) suit in 1836. In reaction to the encroachment of religious orders on civil society and the amalgam of religious denominations favored, for example, by the devout Florence Nightingale (supported, in 1854, by Sir Sidney Herbert, the influential Puseyite), it is on 20 July 1859 that the great Swiss nineteenth century pedagogue and recipient of the Académie française Gold Medal, Valérie de Gasparin-Boissier (1813–94), proposed a model of secular healthcare training for nurses that would become a counter-model set in opposition to religious health institutions. Forerunner of later schools, the world’s first secular autonomous Nursing School was founded in Lausanne, Switzerland. Its mission was to bring decisive changes to the statutes of nurses’ training, which were then still based on six principles not far removed from those of religious communities at the time: commitment for life, the Rule of St Augustine, obedience, celibacy, the renouncement of salary, and the uniform. (shrink)

Since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, we have been wondering about the "how" of this health crisis. How did the virus pass from animals to humans? How did it arrive in Europe? How can it spread so quickly? But the question that is the subject of this article is "why"? Not about certain aspects, such as its spread in a specific country, but about the fundamental question: why the virus, as we would say "why do birds sing", "why are (...) there thunderstorms" or "why are there drones". While there is no guarantee of an answer to the question posed, the fact remains that it allows us to question our relationship to a disease caused by an elusive agent. (shrink)

L’article apporte le bilan de ce que l’on sait aujourd’hui, en fonction des sources publiées, des relations philosophiques entre John Toland et Leibniz. Il esquisse une revue thématique des arguments, en se plaçant au point de vue de Leibniz.

In 1942-1943, when he was completing his doctoral thesis in medicine, Georges Canguilhem gave at the Faculté des Lettres of Strasbourg relocated to Clermont-Ferrand a lecture on Les normes et le normal. In 1962-1963, he again gave a lecture at the Sorbonne, this time entitled La norme et le normal. The first of these lectures identified the “philosophical demon” that also inspired the medical thesis: the aim was to make philosophy a philosophy of values. The second does not abandon this (...) commitment. Canguilhem draws the conclusion that philosophy, whose task is the critical resolution of conflicts of values, cannot itself have one of these values as its norm. Hence the apparent paradox that “there is no such thing as philosophical truth”. (shrink)

This book is the final outcome of two projects. My first project was to publish a set of texts written by Schrodinger at the beginning of the 1950's for his seminars and lectures at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. These almost completely forgotten texts contained important insights into the interpretation of quantum mechanics, and they provided several ideas which were missing or elusively expressed in SchrOdinger's published papers and books of the same period. However, they were likely to be (...) misinterpreted out of their context. The problem was that current scholarship could not help very much the reader of these writings to figure out their significance. The few available studies about SchrOdinger's interpretation of quantum mechanics are generally excellent, but almost entirely restricted to the initial period 1925-1927. Very little work has been done on Schrodinger's late views on the theory he contributed to create and develop. The generally accepted view is that he never really recovered from his interpretative failure of 1926-1927, and that his late reflections are little more than an expression of his rising nostalgia for the lost ideal of picturing the world, not to say for some favourite traditional picture. But the content and style of Schrodinger's texts of the 1950's do not agree at all with this melancholic appraisal; they rather set the stage for a thorough renewal of accepted representations. In order to elucidate this paradox, I adopted several strategies. (shrink)