" Mai 68, avec ses slogans parfois stupides et son jargon marxisant - déjà kitsch à l'époque -, était une période joyeuse. On s'y levait tard pour gagner moins. On faisait des pieds de nez aux statues des grands hommes. On prenait au sérieux la question du bonheur. Ceux qui haïssent Mai 68, au fond, sont à plaindre : ils avouent que déjà, à vingt ans, ils étaient des petits vieux qui regardaient passer l'avenir dans un rétroviseur. Et pourtant ce (...) sont eux les vrais utopistes. Ils croient qu'une victoire électorale suffira à faire perdre le goût de l'émancipation à celles et à ceux qui en jouissent. Si ce n'était pas si revanchard, ce serait presque émouvant de naïveté. ". (shrink)

This book aims to make the pragmatist intellectual framework accessible to organization and management scholars. It presents some fundamental concepts of Pragmatism, their potential application to the study of organizations and the resulting theoretical, methodological, and practical issues.

Alain Corbin, The Village of Cannibals, trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992. 164 pp.

Institute for Biomedical Ethics, Geneva University Medical School * Corresponding author: Médecins Sans Frontières (OCG), rue de Lausanne 78, CH-1211 Geneva 21, Switzerland. Tel.: +41 (0)22 849 89 29; Fax: +41 (0)22 849 84 88; Email: philippe_calain{at}hotmail.com ' + u + '@' + d + ' '//--> Abstract Outbreaks of filovirus (Ebola and Marburg) hemorrhagic fevers in Africa are typically the theater of rescue activities involving international experts and agencies tasked with reinforcing national authorities in clinical management, biological diagnosis, sanitation, (...) public health surveillance and coordination. These outbreaks can be seen as a paradigm for ethical issues posed by epidemic emergencies, through the convergence of such themes as: isolation and quarantine, privacy and confidentiality and the interpretation of ethical norms across different ethnocultural settings. With an emphasis on the boundaries between public health investigations and research, this article reviews specific challenges, past practices and current normative documents relevant to the application of ethical standards in the course of outbreaks of filovirus hemorrhagic fevers. Aside from commonly identified issues of informed consent and institutional review processes, we argue for more clarity over the specification of which communities are expected to share benefits, and we advocate for the use of collective definitions of duty to care and standard of care. We propose new elaborations around existing normative instruments, and we suggest some pathways toward more comprehensive approaches to the ethics of research in outbreak situations. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

The paper discusses the sense in which the changes undergone by normative economics in the twentieth century can be said to be progressive. A simple criterion is proposed to decide whether a sequence of normative theories is progressive. This criterion is put to use on the historical transition from the new welfare economics to social choice theory. The paper reconstructs this classic case, and eventually concludes that the latter theory was progressive compared with the former. It also briefly comments on (...) the recent developments in normative economics and their connection with the previous two stages. (Published Online April 18 2006) Footnotes1 This paper suspersedes an earlier one entitled “Is There Progress in Normative Economics?” (Mongin 2002). I thank the organizers of the Fourth ESHET Conference (Graz 2000) for the opportunity they gave me to lecture on this topic. Thanks are also due to J. Alexander, K. Arrow, A. Bird, R. Bradley, M. Dascal, W. Gaertner, N. Gravel, D. Hausman, B. Hill, C. Howson, N. McClennen, A. Trannoy, J. Weymark, J. Worrall, two annonymous referees of this journal, and especially the editor M. Fleurbaey, for helpful comments. The editor's suggestions contributed to determine the final orientation of the paper. The author is grateful to the LSE and the Lachmann Foundation for their support at the time when he was writing the initial version. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie Jahrgang: 65 Heft: 6 Seiten: 1134-1140.

The social sciences underwent rapid development in postwar America. Problems once framed in social terms gradually became redefined as individual with regards to scope and remedy, with economics and psychology winning influence over the other social sciences. By the 1970s, both economics and psychology had spread their intellectual remits wide: psychology's concepts suffused everyday language, while economists entered a myriad of policy debates. Psychology and economics contributed to, and benefited from, a conception of society that was increasingly skeptical of social (...) explanations and interventions. Sociology, in particular, lost intellectual and policy ground to its peers, even regarding 'social problems' that the discipline long considered its settled domain. The book's ten chapters explore this shift, each refracted through a single 'problem': the family, crime, urban concerns, education, discrimination, poverty, addiction, war, and mental health, examining the effects an increasingly individualized lens has had on the way we see these problems. (shrink)

Robustness is a pervasive property of living systems, instantiated at all levels of the biological hierarchies. As several other usual concepts in evolutionary biology, such as plasticity or dominance, it has been questioned from the viewpoint of its consequences upon evolution as well as from the side of its causes, on an ultimate or proximate viewpoint. It is therefore equally the explanandum for some enquiries in evolution in ecology, and the explanans for some interesting evolutionary phenomena such as evolvability. This (...) epistemological fact instantiates general property of biological evolution that I call “explanatory reversibility”. In this chapter, I attempt to systematize the explanatory projects regarding robustness by distinguishing a set of epistemological questions. Are they the various expressions of one general project with specific key concepts and methods, or very disparate epistemic projects, unified by the mere homonymy of the term “robustness”? More precisely, are there specific kinds of explanations suited to explain robustness? Finally, how does robustness as an explanandum connect with other explananda in which evolutionists have been massively interested recently such as complexity, modularity or evolvability? After having initially explored various meanings of the concept of robustness and surveyed its instances in biology, I will propose a distinction between mechanical and structural explanations of robustness in evolutionary and functional biology. Then, among the latter, I will highlight the class of “topological explanations,” and the subclass of explanations based on networks, as a major explanatory tool to address robustness. Focusing on evolutionary issues, I will eventually address the “explanatory reversibility” of robustness and consider its relation to key evolutionary concepts that are also explanatorily revertible such as modularity, evolvability and complexity. (shrink)

À Jean-Luc Nancy, un maître qui m’a donné la chiquenaude initiale et dont la salutation m’a introduit à la pensée. Une des clés pour la lecture de cet ouvrage se trouve à la page 23. Nous y lisons qu’il ne s’agit pas de thématiser l’adoration, c’est-à-dire aussi bien d’en faire la théorie, d’en construire un concept ou d’en proposer une analyse méthodique. Même si l’analyse méthodique n’est pas absente, loin s’en faut, du livre de Jean-Luc Nancy! Mais cette analyse ne (...) fait que frayer un chem... (shrink)

Les frontières entre philosophie et théologie sont redessinées pour permettre le dialogue. L'ouvrage est structuré en trois parties : délimitation des frontières, puis analyse de la place de la philosophie au sein de l'institution confessionnelle, et enfin évocation de quelques figures contemporaines qui ont essayé de jeter des ponts entre ces deux pôles.

En Occident le statut du corps est inséparable de l’histoire du dualisme métaphysique. Or dans ce contexte le corps est relégué. Au mieux il est reconnu comme ce qui nous lie à la Nature et ce qui nous contraint à prendre en considération le monde. Dans ces conditions, et même si le dualisme présente une dimension artificielle, il semble que toute tentative de revenir vers le corps comme ce qui nous est le plus propre et le plus essentiel soit voué (...) à l’échec. Penser le corps, n’est-ce pas, en effet, l’insérer dans une démarche qui par avance implique son dépassement? (shrink)

Au monde harmonieux des Anciens, la science moderne a substitué un univers régi par des forces matérielles indifférentes à nos sentiments et nos valeurs. Tandis que certains déplorent ce désenchantement du monde, Spinoza (1632-1677) a voulu montrer que la connaissance rationnelle de la nature pouvait néanmoins conduire au bonheur le plus parfait. Mais comment concilier l'affirmation de l'universalité du déterminisme avec l'idée de liberté humaine? En quoi aborder les sentiments comme des figures géométriques permet-il d'en devenir maître? Cet ouvrage propose (...) d'éclairer les paradoxes de la philosophie de Spinoza et de montrer comment, jusque dans l'abstraction de son mode d'exposition géométrique, elle enrichit notre compréhension de la vie humaine."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Dans L'essence du christianisme, Ludwig Feuerbach jette les bases d'une critique philosophique de la religion chrétienne qui vise pour l'essentiel à mettre en lumière le mode de constitution spécifique de l’illusion religieuse. Celle-ci relève d'un processus complexe d'objectivation aliénante selon lequel l'homme n'accède paradoxalement à la conscience de soi qu'à partir de la fiction projective d'un Autre que soi, Dieu, posé comme sa garantie ontologique et pratique. L'analyse de ce processus « renversant » et de la dialectique du sujet et (...) de l’objet qui le sous-tend revient à mettre en évidence le fondement anthropologique de la conscience religieuse ; mais elle débouche également sur le thème problématique d’une religion de l’Homme où s’alimentent les figures modernes de l’ « humanisme athée » (H. de Lubac). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Heidegger and RhetoricPhilippe-Joseph SalazarHeidegger and Rhetoric. Edited by Daniel M. Gross and Ansgar Kemmann. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. Pp. 195. $21.95, paperback.I have to confess to double ignorance. I have never paid much attention to/Heidegger and Rhetoric/ (let me use forward slashes to indicate a commonplace) because, in spite of all efforts of reconciliation between France and Germany, my knowledge of German is not (...) so adequate that I would ever contemplate reading Heidegger in his native tongue. As a rule I mistrust translations and rely on derivative knowledge only in cases of extreme urgency. This being said, I must add that such ignorance is somewhat informed by some knowing—where would French philosophy and French philosophy of rhetoric be without the long-standing and continuous dialogue between Heidegger and France, from Levinas’s seminal essay to today’s iterative debate on Heidegger’s so-called introduction of Nazism in philosophy? Be that as it may, I read the edited volume by Gross and Kemmann as a naive reader would, undisturbed by and unaware of intra-ecclesial wrangling. As it happened, as I was reading this book, I had advanced knowledge of a stunning little book byValerie Allen and Ares Axiotis (2007), on Heidegger’s plea for exoneration in July 1945. It was a numinous conjunction.Recalling Arendt’s distinction, in politics of course, among aim, end, and meaning, it is clear that Heidegger and Rhetoric has all three—the gesture [End Page 305] is indeed political, at least within our scholarly community. This book has a meaning—its elucidation imposes on readers to move from chapter to chapter, seriatim. It has an aim, the reality of which only comes to the fore as we close the book. It has an end, which, somehow, allows us to pass judgment with regard to the superior life of the discipline, if there is any.Back to the commonplace, which grounds all three. The difficulty with titles like this is that, more often than not, they promise more than they deliver. One asks oneself: Why not Rhetoric and Heidegger? Which leads to: What “rhetoric”? Aristotle’s? Rhetoric as attributed, by a growing population of ignoramuses, to “rhetoriticians”?The function of a commonplace is to evoke common ground, and in this instance, the common ground has a deep fault line. Indeed, as we read Gross’s erudite introductory essay (chapter 1), it is unclear whether the volume is dedicated to Heidegger’s Summer Seminar of 1924 devoted to Aristotle’s Rhetoric or to rhetoric in/around/about Heidegger. To compound it, we learn, in footnote 1 (41) that in one particular but revealing occurrence, Heideggerian scholars differ about the transcription: although the seminar was on the Rhetoric, does Heidegger refer to Rhetorik or to Logik when he defines “concrete function,” a highly operative definition indeed? Much of the volume hinges on how Heidegger defines the political function of rhetoric. Notwithstanding this casualty of scholarship, and Gross’s thoughtful transcription and explanation of key passages from the seminar, readers will wonder: “Where is the Urtext?” Unless one reads German and has at hand both volume 18 of the Collected Works and the rival transcript (pending, of course, the discovery of yet another transcript), one is reduced to rely on the authors’ word and view (an English translation is in preparation at Indiana University Press). This is the surface of the fault line.Below the surface of the text runs a deeper rift. Nonspecialists are left with the impression that Heidegger’s Summer Seminar of 1924 is a text by Heidegger, when, in fact, if I am not mistaken, Heidegger destroyed his notes and what we are left with are students’ notes cobbled together; they probably turned Heidegger’s lectures into their own commonplaces, which is what students usually do, as we all know. (We may as well have one of the famous imitations of the master with which Heidegger’s brother entertained his drinking friends, perched on a beer barrel like a bibulous orator.)Incidentally, I wish specialists would stop using the acronym SS 1924 to refer to the text. It has a sinister... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Nobel Rhetoric; or, Petrarch's PendulumPhilippe-Joseph SalazarVery many authors who have their roots in other countries work in Europe, because it is only here where you can be left alone and write, without being beaten to death. It is dangerous to be an author in big parts of Asia and Africa.1The ceremony of [Petrarch's] coronation was performed on the Capitol, by his friend and patron the supreme magistrate of the (...) republic... and thrice repeating his vows for the prosperity of Rome, he knelt before the throne and received from the senator a laurel crown, with a more precious declaration, "This is the reward of merit."(Gibbon 1952, 2:573)§1.I would like to address a simple question: what is a Nobel laureate's speech?2 With a corollary: how does it provide an opportunity to perform as a public intellectual, a "philosopher" of sorts? And a further corollary: what does it say about intellectual compliance or resistance? There is a play on words in the title of this essay, made to draw attention to the rhetorical construction of a commonplace, mass media-induced belief: that Nobel laureates are, in essence, "noble minds."3 For brevity's sake this essay focuses mainly on the literature prizes and, to a lesser extent, the peace prizes. [End Page 373]§2.At face value, a Nobel Prize is a rhetorical event (from the time the winner is announced to the moment of the Nobel address): over the recent years, rituals attached to the Nordic apotheosis have attracted growing media interest—they belong to "breaking news"—lending laureates a public exposure that, in turn, has led them to perform a public role or to publicly decline this performance, literally to "dispose of " it—"disposure" as the antistrophe of exposure. The public is usually aware of the announcement of the name of the winner, who instantly becomes a global "brand." Publicity and news programs follow suit, and if a recipient's ethical qualities resonate with the ethical preoccupations of the day (gender is one) the better the news value. Arguments are built on the announcement and often recur when, in early December, recipients deliver their Nobel addresses.This rhetorical event may indeed take the shape of a "rhetorical situation" if national pride or state concerns impose an exigency onto laureates—it is interesting to note that the media are complicit in stressing the national value of an award. The exigency resembles the one applied by them to sport performances. However, while the practices of public reward and public performance no longer allow a sportsperson to decline a medal or to express personal views on a podium to the public strains of a national hymn,4 they do still allow Nobel laureates to absent themselves, as André Gide did in 1947 (this strategy gave him the opportunity, in a terse banquet speech read on his behalf, to express his view that Paul Valéry had been overlooked by the Nobel, thus turning the award into a muted invective; see Gide 1947), to say they don't care, that their country of origin did little for them, and even, although rarely, to decline or to express amusement at the award.5 In short, beside "disposure," they can perform "exposure" through acceptance or dismissiveness, thus drawing a merciful line between reward (in sport) and award (the Nobel).A rhetorical situation is indeed created when a Nobel winner is seen as betraying state or nation by accepting the prize. In one reverse case, French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre was berated for not accepting it (in 1964), in spite of the fact that, at that time, his philosophy and political engagement made clear to the French state and the French public that he abhorred them both. In 2003, South Africans learned at their expense how reward and award are borderline and therefore not on the same side: they failed to thank J. M. Coetzee for his temperance, when, having resettled in Australia at the time of his award, he waited for a while before taking Australian citizenship.6 The Nobel Foundation's rightful insistence on disregarding [End Page 374] nationality does not mean nationality... (shrink)

Jusqu’à Blaise Pascal, le hasard désigne ce qui se produit en dehors de tout dessein humain ou divin et de tout ordre stable. Après lui, on cherche à préciser de façon constructive ces trois types d’exclusion, ce qui amène à définir les événements merveilleux, les événements aléatoires et les événements accidentels. Chacune de ces trois démarches a ses avantages et ses inconvénients. La première rend compte de tout ce qui étonne, mais écarte la liberté et le miracle et ne permet (...) ni vérification, ni prévision, ni décision. La seconde permet des prévisions et des vérifications expérimentales, mais son emploi ne peut se généraliser sans entrer en conflit avec le déterminisme, qui la considère comme une illusion. La troisième explique beaucoup de choses par la rencontre de séries causales indépendantes, mais ce faisant elle exclut toute finalité. Il faut faire très attention à ne pas les confondre. Until Blaise Pascal, chance meant what happens outside any human or divine design or any stable order. Attempts are made, ever since, to set down in a constructive fashion those three types of exclusion : what it is that leads to define marvellous events, chance events and accidental events. Each of those three endeavours has its advantages and its drawbacks. The first accounts for everything that amazes, but it sets aside freedom and miracle, and does not allow any verification, prevision, or decision. The second permits previsions and experimental verifications, but its use cannot be generalized without entering into conflict with determinism, which considers it an illusion. The third explains a number of things through the encounter of independent causal series, but, while so doing, it excludes all finality. One must be very cautious not to confuse the three. (shrink)

Luther, comme beaucoup d’autres, a eu une pratique de la prédication et un discours sur la prédication. En héritant du programme barthien d’une « théologie de la Parole de Dieu » (Wort-Gottes-Theologie), la Lutherforschung a semblé creuser l’écart entre cette pratique et ce discours. Aujourd’hui, les attendus dogmatiques de la Wort-Gottes-Theologie (définition de la théologie comme kérygme) comme ses revendications pratiques (la prédication au centre de l’action ecclésiale) déterminent et barrent en partie l’accès à plusieurs opérations de pensée significatives des (...) recherches de Luther dans les décennies 1510-1530. Certaines d’entre elles se heurtent délibérément aux exigences universitaires que la théologie, jusqu’à Luther, avait accepté de se laisser imposer. On en examinera trois : transformations de l’exégèse de Rm 10, 17, fides ex auditu ; mise au point d’un concept du prêchable comme indice du vrai en théologie ; définition d’un scopus generalis de toute prédication. Ces trois opérations furent des tentatives ; elles ne furent pas toutes couronnées de succès. Elles inaugurent cependant le programme d’une recherche à mener sur l’objet de la prédication dans les premières théologies de la Réforme. (shrink)