La relecture des pratiques d’un tel Service, pour le diocèse de Coutances et dans les dix dernières années, révèle l’importance d’une situation sociale et ecclésiale ainsi que des interprétations et réorientations engagées. Reprenant successivement les termes désignant ce Service, l’article évoque plusieurs exigences d’articulation : entre communautés et diocèse, entre requêtes spécifiques selon les ministères et requêtes communes à tous les acteurs pastoraux, enfin entre la diversité des demandes de formation et le souci d’un projet pastoral de formation.

Der Pilot und Priester, Assumptionist und Byzantinist Christopher Walter hat einen neuen unschätzbaren Beitrag zur byzantinischen Geschichte geliefert. Als Schüler von André Grabar und Kollege von Vitalien Laurent verwaltet er die reiche Wissenschaftstradition der Assumptionisten und Bollandisten. Sein grosses Wissen über Theologie, Kirchengeschichte, Patristik und Kunstwissenschaft vermittelt er in einer angenehmen fliessenden Sprache. In dieser Arbeit webt er einen kunstfertigen Gobelin und verbindet die christliche Frühgeschichte mit dem vom antiken Heroenkult übertragenen Märtyrerkult in einem tiefgreifenden Versuch, die Historizität der Kriegerheiligen (...) zu fixieren. Er bringt den kultischen Aspekt der Armee in einer Darstellung zum Leben, die sich oft zu einem spannenden Detektivroman entwickelt. Endlich können wir den beliebtesten Kriegerheiligen in einen festeren Griff bekommen, den Archistrategos, den Erzengel Michael, mit den himmlischen Heerscharen zu seiner Verfügung, zur Verteidigung der ecclesia militans und des irdischen Imperiums neben anderen Kriegerheiligen, die die Standarten der Tagmaeinheiten schmückten. (shrink)

Longtemps oubliées des études consacrées au monachisme féminin, mais également de celles sur les chartreux, les moniales cartusiennes ont fait l’objet, depuis les années 2000, de plusieurs travaux dont ceux d’Augustin Devaux, de Nathalie Nabert ou encore le colloque Moines et moniales dans l’ordre des Chartreux : l’apport de l’archéologie, paru en 2007 sous la direction de Martine Valdher. L’ouvrage de Quentin Rochet est le fruit de la publication d’un master 2, soutenu à l’université Lumière...

La nature est en danger. Notre nature humaine est peut-être en danger. Existerait-il une " loi naturelle " avec laquelle nul être humain ne pourrait transiger, sauf à risquer de se dénaturer? Sur fond de bouleversements planétaires, les philosophes du droit et les moralistes reprennent aujourd'hui cette question qui signe notre noblesse. Mais, sous couvert d'une métaphysique passée au crible du Bas-Empire par les scolastiques de l'islam, du judaïsme et de la chrétienté, des réponses de principe ne font-elles pas régresser (...) la pensée vers des archétypes dont le souffle des Evangiles et les progrès des sciences nous avaient délivrés? Pour enrichir ces débats qui engagent l'avenir du modèle occidental, Elisabeth Dufourcq en explore les origines. Elle replace dans leur temps les évolutions de saint Thomas d'Aquin et des maîtres qu'il cite. Elle les confronte avec les mises en garde d'autres penseurs puissants, tels saint Albert le Grand, saint Bonaventure et Roger Bacon. Novateur et passionnant. (shrink)

The author argues, with reference to a number of Merleau-Ponty’s unpublished manuscripts, that the philosopher’s notion of encroachment (empiétement) has origins in Simone de Beauvoir’s 1945 novel The Blood of Others. He examines how the two philosophers approach the encroachment of freedoms, the political stance of pacifism, and the interpretation of Voltaire’s Candide (Part I). The impact of Élisabeth Lacoin’s death on Beauvoir’s and Merleau-Ponty’s philosophies, as well as their relationships with Jean-Paul Sartre is also considered (Part II).

Encounters in the Arts, Literature, and Philosophy focuses on chance and scripted encounters as sites of tensions and alliances where new forms, ideas, meanings, interpretations, and theories can emerge. By moving beyond the realm of traditional hermeneutics, Jérôme Brillaud and Virginie Greene have compiled a volume that vitally illustrates how reading encounters represented in artefacts, texts, and films is a vibrant and dynamic mode of encountering and interpreting. With contributions from esteemed academics such as Christie McDonald, Pierre Saint-Amand, Susan (...) Suleiman, and Jean-Jacques Nattiez, this book is a multidisciplinary collaboration between scholars from a range of disciplines including philosophy, literature, musicology and film studies. It uses examples chiefly from French culture and covers the Early Modern era to the twentieth century while providing a thorough and representative array of theoretical and hermeneutical approaches. (shrink)

" De quoi demain sera-t-il fait? " interroge Victor Hugo. Un philosophe, une historienne répondent au long d'un dialogue serré, exigeant. Pourquoi ont-ils choisi de faire ce livre ensemble? En raison d'une longue amitié, au nom d'une histoire commune, en vertu de la qualité d'un débat qui n'a jamais cessé entre eux depuis qu'à la fin des années soixante la jeune étudiante découvrit l'importance de ce penseur de quinze ans son aîné qui, avec d'autres, réveillait l'esprit critique de toute une (...) génération. Si les points de vue sont différents, l'héritage intellectuel est commun. Et c'est cet héritage qu'ils s'attachent à inventorier avant de circonscrire des enjeux majeurs de notre temps : comment penser la différence dans l'universel? La famille a-t-elle encore un avenir? La liberté se réduira-t-elle demain pour l'homme à l'intelligibilité des contraintes qui pèsent sur lui, ou le désir et l'imprévisible auront-ils encore leur place? Que nous dit la souffrance des animaux que nous massacrons? La page de la révolution est-elle définitivement tournée après l'échec du communisme? Est-il envisageable d'en finir une fois pour toutes avec la peine de mort? Quelles seront demain les formes nouvelles de l'antisémitisme et comment les combattre? L'échange s'achève sur un éloge de la psychanalyse, référence commune tout au long du dialogue. (shrink)

Présente le parcours philosophique de Merleau-Ponty tant dans sa formation que dans ses objectifs. Ses références : Descartes, Leibniz, Gabriel Marcel. Ses concepts opératoires : le concret, l'incarnation, l'intentionnalité, les chiasmes.

Cognitive enhancement is the use of drugs, biotechnological strategies or other means by healthy individuals aiming at the improvement of cognitive functions such as vigilance, concentration or memory without any medical need. In particular, the use of pharmacological substances has received considerable attention during the last few years. Currently, however, little is known concerning the use of cognitive enhancers, their effects in healthy individuals and the place and function of cognitive enhancement in everyday life. The purpose of the book is (...) to give an overview of the current research on cognitive enhancement and to provide in-depth insights into the interdisciplinary debate on cognitive enhancement. (shrink)

According to the predictive coding theory of psychosis, hallucinations and delusions are explained by an overweighing of high-level prior expectations relative to sensory information that leads to false perceptions of meaningful signals. However, it is currently unclear whether the hypothesized overweighing of priors (1) represents a pervasive alteration that extends to the visual modality and (2) takes already effect at early automatic processing stages. Here, we addressed these questions by studying visual perception of socially meaningful stimuli in healthy individuals with (...) varying degrees of psychosis proneness (n= 39). In a first task, we quantified participants’ prior for detecting faces in visual noise using a Bayesian decision model. In a second task, we measured participants’ prior for detecting direct gaze stimuli that were rendered invisible by continuous flash suppression. We found that the prior for detecting faces in noise correlated with hallucination proneness (r= 0.50,p= 0.001, Bayes factor 1/20.1) as well as delusion proneness (r= 0.46,p= 0.003, BF 1/9.4). The prior for detecting invisible direct gaze was significantly associated with hallucination proneness (r= 0.43,p= 0.009, BF 1/3.8) but not conclusively with delusion proneness (r= 0.30,p= 0.079, BF 1.7). Our results provide evidence for the idea that overly strong high-level priors for automatically detecting socially meaningful stimuli might constitute a processing alteration in psychosis. (shrink)

Sexual violence during war varies in extent and takes distinct forms. In some conflicts, sexual violence is widespread, yet in other conflicts—including some cases of ethnic conflict—it is quite limited. In some conflicts, sexual violence takes the form of sexual slavery; in others, torture in detention. I document this variation, particularly its absence in some conflicts and on the part of some groups. In the conclusion, I explore the relationship between strategic choices on the part of armed group leadership, the (...) norms of combatants, dynamics within small units, and the effectiveness of military discipline. (shrink)

Mind and the Body Politic is a collection of Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's essays and lectures on political theory, psychoanalysis, feminism, and the theory of biography.

This article examines the declining prestige and utility of one of the mainstays of pre-Enlightenment peacemaking: treaties uniting once belligerent dynasties through marriage. By the late Middle Ages, interdynastic marriages had become such a common feature of the diplomatic landscape that the practice seemed almost transhistorical, something that was done always and everywhere. By the reign of Louis XIII, however, statesmen began stressing the limits of interdynastic marriage as a diplomatic strategy. This transformation of French affairs of state coincided with (...) the appearance of prose romances that scholars identify retrospectively as the first French novels. This essay focuses on two of the most popular and influential of these novels, César Vichard de Saint-Réal's Dom Carlos and the Countess of La Fayette's La Princesse de Clèves, as responses to the devaluation of the marriage diplomacy that had established dynastic networks between France and the Mediterranean world for centuries. Both works center on the 1559 Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis between France and Spain, which married Henri II's daughter Elisabeth de Valois to King Philip II. While Saint-Réal does not condemn such arrangements wholesale, he suggests that their success is highly subject to fortune. La Princesse de Clèves owes much to Saint-Réal's portrayal of the personal costs of marriages of state, as well as to Madame de La Fayette's own observations of the French and Savoyard courts. Although her focus on the interior life of her heroine limits explicit political commentary, her allusions to miserably unhappy queens-consort cast marriage diplomacy in an overwhelmingly negative light. (shrink)

While pharmaceutical industry involvement in producing, interpreting, and regulating medical knowledge and practice is widely accepted and believed to promote medical innovation, industry-favouring biases may result in prioritizing corporate profit above public health. Using diabetes as our example, we review successive changes over forty years in screening, diagnosis, and treatment guidelines for type 2 diabetes and prediabetes, which have dramatically expanded the population prescribed diabetes drugs, generating a billion-dollar market. We argue that these guideline recommendations have emerged under pervasive industry (...) influence and persisted, despite weak evidence for their health benefits and indications of serious adverse effects associated with many of the drugs they recommend. We consider pharmaceutical industry conflicts of interest in some of the research and publications supporting these revisions, and in related standard-setting committees and oversight panels. We raise concern over the long-term impact of these multifaceted involvements. Rather than accept industry conflicts of interest as normal, needing only to be monitored and managed, we suggest challenging that normalcy, and ask: what are the real costs of tolerating such industry participation? We urge the development of a broader focus to fully understand and curtail the systemic nature of industry’s influence over medical knowledge and practice. (shrink)

This article explores a particular pattern of wartime violence, the relative absence of sexual violence on the part of many armed groups. This neglected fact has important policy implications: If some groups do not engage in sexual violence, then rape is not inevitable in war as is sometimes claimed, and there are stronger grounds for holding responsible those groups that do engage in sexual violence. After developing a theoretical framework for understanding the observed variation in wartime sexual violence, the article (...) analyzes the puzzling absence of sexual violence on the part of the secessionist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam of Sri Lanka. (shrink)

As a founding father of Existentialism, Karl Jaspers has been seen as a twentieth-century successor to Nietzsche and Kierkegaard; as an exponent of reason, he has been seen as an heir of Kant. But studies tracing influences upon his thought or placing him in the context of Existentialism have not dealt with Jaspers's concern with the political realm and how we think in it and about it. In this study Elisabeth Young-Bruehl explicates Jaspers's practical philosophizing, his search for ways (...) in which we can orient ourselves toward our world and its political questions. (shrink)

For several centuries prior to the founding of the Theosophical Society in 1875, individual 'theosophers' in Britain and Europe were quietly in touch with one another all seekers of the inward way. Theosophic Correspondence (1792 1797) is a series of inspiring letters, personal and philosophic, exchanged during the climactic days of the French Revolution between Kirchberger, member of the Sovereign Council at Berne, Switzerland, and Saint-Martin, whom Kirchberger regarded as 'the most eminent writer . . . and most profound (...) of his age'. (shrink)

The term ‘sustainability’ is vague and open to interpretation. In this paper we analyze how firms use the term in an effort to make the concept their own, and how it becomes a premise for further decisions, by applying a bottom-up approach focusing on the interpretation of ‘sustainability’ in the Norwegian salmon-farming industry. The study is based on a strategic selection of informants from the industry and the study design rests on: 1) identification of the main drivers of sustainability, and (...) 2) the application of five different discursive strategies to analyze how the firms maneuver to legitimize ‘sustainability’ in their conduct. We employ the Critical Discourse Analysis framework, which emphasizes how discourses provide different concepts of meaning. The sustainability concept is assessed based on how sustainability is brought into action by social actors in a legitimate way, and how this action results in sustainable practices. The empirical case of the study is the verbal justification of sustainability practices among representatives of the Norwegian salmon-farming industry. We aim to find out how these representatives translate the rather vague directives of the sustainability concept into legitimate choices that resonate with the firms’ contextual environment, hence, how the salmon farmers perceive, explore, interpret, explain, enact, and defend the diverse landscape of sustainability when implementing professional decisions. We found a trend of passive adaptation to external requirements, such as public regulations and regulative requirements from certification bodies. At the same time, there are progressive forces that attempt to improve the sustainability of the farming practices by involvement in research and innovation projects or cooperation with other firms, e.g. the contribution from offshore engineers in developing high seas farms. The strategies outlined and discussed cannot be seen as a typology to categorize the firms. More than one discursive strategy may be involved in one firm’s choice, and the strategies may work on different levels. (shrink)

This book examines education and the aim of life through the ages; how the conception of progress is the primary driving force in the modern world; and how this limited understanding of progress has failed to satisfy the deepest aspirations of humanity, bringing modern civilisation to its present crisis and highlighting the limitations of today's education to meet this crisis. The author presents the free progress system at the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education and explains how the views of (...) Sri Aurobindo and the Mother on integral education can prepare the children of today to consciously and luminously participate in the evolutionary destiny of the future. (shrink)