On a souvent dit que la bioéthique émergea au confluent des sciences de la santé, de la théologie, de la philosophie et du droit. Or, pour poursuivre son évolution, la bioéthique se doit d’adopter une position critique vis-à-vis de cet héritage, notamment en ce qui concerne le droit.

Ce texte offre quelques réflexions épistémologiques et méthodologiques en réponse au texte d’Antoine Boudreau LeBlanc qui plaide pour une bioéthique renouvelée, capable de faire le lien entre science et politique afin de relever les défis majeurs auxquels l’humanité est actuellement confrontée. Cette proposition apparait nécessaire, compte tenu du paradoxe qui émerge du fait que l’expertise et la spécialisation grandissante ne se traduisent pas toujours par des solutions aux problèmes complexes qui affligent l’humanité. Il apparaît nécessaire de réfléchir à la nature (...) même de ces problèmes et de reconnaitre qu’ils se situent à une échelle qui dépasse l’individu. De même, il apparait nécessaire de considérer la dimension pratique de mise en oeuvre des solutions proposées. L’ouverture épistémique de la bioéthique semble être un atout important à cet égard. Toutefois, on peut se demander si le potentiel d’hybridation entre les savoirs défendu par Boudreau LeBlanc risque d’être atténué par la professionnalisation et la centralisation de la médiation entre ceux-ci. De même, il importe de préserver le caractère distinctif de la bioéthique. (shrink)

The notion of transparency regularly comes up in discussions about the secondary uses of health data. Few studies, however, examine the impact of the presence or absence of transparency on members of the public. This literature review responds to this gap in the scientific literature. It is the result of a secondary analysis of 124 texts from an exploratory review on transparency, following the PRISMAS-ScR guidelines. The results help to identify negative or positive impacts and associate these with certain communication (...) components relating to secondary uses of health data. They also make it possible to identify the components associated with communication deemed transparent or opaque by stakeholders. Transparency, and more specifically continuity of communication, is strongly associated with increased trust and social acceptability, whereas members of the public generally perceive a lack of transparency negatively. This literature review also deepens our understanding of the potential negative impacts of transparent communication. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reflections on Object Life in Monique David-MénardJudith ButlerThe three papers published here were originally given as part of a colloquium, “Objects, Phantasms, Life, and Death” on the work of Monique David-Ménard at Columbia University in April 2014. Monique David-Ménard is a psychoanalyst and philosopher who has been teaching at the Université de Paris VII-Diderot and has been engaged in private psychoanalytic practice for many years. Her work (...) is distinguished in part because of the way she brings clinical experience to philosophical inquiry, and how she understands the unconscious to support and disrupt various philosophical systems. Trained in the Lacanian school, but returning time and again to Freud with her own questions, she has written extensively on the problem of drives, the role of biology in psychoanalysis, all along staging a way of thinking about philosophy and psychoanalysis as mutually illuminating. Engaged by feminist philosophy, she has offered a way of thinking about sexual alterity, social embodiment, [End Page 80] and gender, to offer a different “French feminist” trajectory than those usually canonized in English.David-Ménard completed a master’s degree in philosophy with Paul Ricoeur (Université de Nanterre, 1968), a doctorate in psychopathology and psychoanalysis with Pierre Fédida (Université Paris-VII, 1978), and a doctorate in philosophy with Jean-Marie Beysade (Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris-III, 1990). She was a professor of philosophy in Reims, Sceaux, and Paris-VII, and received her psychoanalytic training at the École Freudienne de Paris (EFP) then led by Jacques Lacan; she was a member of that school in 1979–80. Between 1982 and 1994 she was a member of the Centre de formation et de recherches psychanalytiques (CFRP) and then became a member of the Société de psychanalyse Freudienne in 1994. She was Directrice of the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris from 1992 to 1995, and served as its vice president from 1995 to 1998. In 1999 she was appointed professor of psychopathology and psychoanalysis at the Université de Paris-VII, Denis Diderot, where she has served as Directrice of the Centre des études du vivant. In addition she is a co-founder of the Société Internationale de Philosophie et Psychoanalyse.Her publications include works on the relation of psychoanalysis to biological and philosophical discourses, hysterical conversion in Freud and Lacan, the Freudian account of drives as a “threshold” phenomenon; bodies and language, constructions of the universal, exemplified most dramatically by a consideration of “madness” in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason; and gender and melancholia.1 The range of her work is relentless and impressive: it includes an early work on Kant’s reading of Swedenborg that initiates a critique of universality through the study of how sexuality and madness inform the text; a study of hysteria “between” Freud and Lacan that establishes her own way of negotiating between the two; several essays on drives and their various vicissitudes; theories of embodiment; feminism and philosophy; the difference between the sexes, the process of sexuation, desire, narcissism, what to do with an organless body following from an impressive, if disconcerting, study on the convergence of Deleuze with psychoanalysis. She has also written on the status of contingency in chaos theory. Although historically trained in Kant, Spinoza, and Husserlian phenomenology, she has also engaged Lacanian thought in a selective and critical way, working with its productive potentials and refusing some of its more rigid formulations. She draws from science, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and anthropology to weave together a set of theoretical reflections prompted by an event, an occasion, or a challenge. Penelope Deutscher’s contribution to this volume shows how this cross-theoretical inquiry works. David-Ménard, for instance, makes use of a Foucaultian form of inquiry to establish a certain problematic within psychoanalysis and philosophy, posing questions about how the initial impetus for [End Page 81] a theoretical system both conditions, orients, and disrupts any effort at full systematicity. As Deutscher explains, the task is neither to psychoanalyze Foucault nor to apply Foucault to psychoanalysis, but to formulate and pursue an inquiry in which the driving impetus informs and precludes the systematic closure of the theory itself.And... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:ContingenciesElizabeth RottenbergAnalysis does precious little, but the little it does is precious.—Therese BenedekI’d like to begin with an anecdote of a slightly confessional nature. If I mention this anecdote, it’s because it came to me by chance as an association to what French analyst and philosopher Monique David-Ménard, in her introduction to Éloge des hasards dans la vie sexuelle, calls “positive contingency” or the “positive aspect of chance” (...) (David-Ménard 2011, 19–20), what in colloquial English we call a “happy accident.”So here’s the association. For reasons I cannot fully explain, the therapist I was seeing in graduate school encouraged me to take the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory test (the MMPI, as it’s called), a widely used and researched psychometric test of adult personality and psychopathology. The test involved hundreds of simple, inoffensive questions, questions such as, “Do you read all the editorials in the newspaper every day?”1 and it took me hours to complete. A week or so after taking the test, I met with my therapist and we went over the results together. According to the test (which, interestingly, takes into account the performative aspects of test taking), I had answered all the questions in such a way as to appear neither excessively good nor excessively bad, that is, I had answered all the questions honestly and consistently. And as far as psychopathology was concerned, my answers showed few signs of hypochondriasis, hysteria, psychopathy, schizophrenia, or hypomania. On the other hand, when it came to depression, paranoia, psychasthenia, and social introversion, my scores were a little higher, and a shockingly high percentage of my answers [End Page 128] reflected “stereotypical masculine interests/behaviors.” None of this seemed to worry my therapist in the least. The only thing she pointed to were my “odd answers” (the MMPI also has a special category for odd answers—presumably the answers of academics). She wondered about my answer to this question in particular: “Do you see people or animals or things that other people don’t see?” “You answered ‘true’ to that question,” she said. “I don’t understand. Why would you answer ‘true’? You’re not psychotic.” I explained that I had read the “or”—do you see people OR animals OR things that other people don’t see—as a disjunctive rather than a conjunctive OR. “So, yes, it’s true, when I read texts, sometimes I see things that other people don’t see.” At the time, of course, I wasn’t thinking of Deleuze’s “contingent reason” or of Monique’s discussion of the inventive power of disjunctive synthesis in her Deleuze et la psychanalyse (2005). And I certainly wasn’t thinking that my figurative reading of seeing, my misreading of seeing, was indicative of the essential and indeterminable contingencies of reading. No, I was only giving what I took to be a perfectly accurate description of the déformation professionnelle that is ours and that belongs to anyone who is a stickler for grammar... a positive déformation, I might add.But this association immediately leads me to another (contingent) association, this time one that is intimately related to Monique’s discussion of Torricelli’s law and to Claude Bernard’s discovery of the exocrine function of the pancreas. My association is to Freud and to Freud’s astonishment before the transformative power of Jean-Martin Charcot’s dazzling, clinical insight. In Freud’s description of his teacher, Charcot is someone who sees things that other people don’t see:[Charcot]... had the nature of an artist—he was, as he himself said, a “visuel,” a seer. Here is what he himself told us about his method of working. He used to look again and again at the things he did not understand, to deepen his impression of them day by day, till suddenly [plötzlich] an understanding of them dawned on him.... He might be heard to say that the greatest satisfaction a [person] could have was to see something new—that is, to recognize it as new; and he remarked again and again on the difficulty and value of this kind of... (shrink)

The debate between Ursin (2019) and Wilkinson and colleagues (2019) in this issue of The American Journal of Bioethics underscores the long-standing theoretical controversy about the equivalence of...

Brown, Jean Review(s) of: Indexer please enter the following minimum information (where available): TITLE, AUTHOR(S) and ISBN for each book reviewed.Supernatural selection: How religion Evolved, by Matt J. Rossano Oxford Press. 2010.

A 62-year-old female with Huntington’s disease presented after a suicide attempt. Her advance directive stated that she did not want intubation or resuscitation, which her family acknowledged and supported. Despite these directives, she was resuscitated in the emergency department and continued to state that she would attempt suicide again. Her suicidality in the face of a chronic and advancing illness, and her prolonged consistency in her desire to take her own life, left careproviders wondering how to provide ethical, respectful care (...) to this patient. Tension between the ethical principles of autonomy and beneficence is central in this case. The patient’s narrative demonstrated that her suicide was an autonomous decision, free from coercion or disordered thinking from mental illness. Beneficence then would seem to necessitate care aligned with the patient’s desire to end her life, which created ethical uneasiness for her family and careproviders. The case highlights several end-of-life ethical considerations that have received much recent attention. With ongoing discussions about the legalization of aid in dying across the country, caregivers are challenged to understand what beneficence means in people with terminal illnesses who want a say in their death. This case also highlights the profound moral distress of families and careproviders that arises in such ethically challenging scenarios. (shrink)

La fameuse « Préface-annexe » de La Religieuse reprend le texte de la « confession » que, dix ans plus tôt, Grimm avait publié dans son périodique pour confesser son rôle dans la mystification qui avait été jouée au marquis de Croismare. La « reprise » de Diderot accompagne la résurrection du roman que Grimm avait enterré, sans se soucier des affirmations contradictoires qui en résultent. La polygraphie de Diderot est polyphonie ; elle participe de la représentation des pouvoirs de (...) l’écriture, que conquiert Suzanne, l’héroïne du roman. (shrink)

En prenant l’initiative de ce volume de Corpus, nous avions choisi de procéder à un appel assez large, afin de faire le point sur des tendances actuelles des travaux sur corpus ancrés dans la textualité des faits de discours. En nous associant, nous pensions attirer des chercheurs d’horizons différents et notre attente n’a pas été déçue. Les propositions furent très nombreuses et de sélection en sélection, en regrettant quelques contributions abandonnées pour des raisons de délais de rédactio...

Résumé La linguistique du texte a pour tâche la théorisation et la description des opérations de segmentation qui délimitent des unités de rang et de longueur différentes, et la théorisation et la description des différents effets de continuité créés par les opérations de liage de ces unités. À la structuration phrastique-périodique par la morpho-syntaxe et la prosodie à l’oral, la ponctuation à l’écrit, le palier micro-textuel ajoute six facteurs de texture transphrastique : les liages référentiels et isotopiques, les liages du (...) signifiant, l’ensemble des phénomènes de connexion, les relations d’implicitation, la cohésion énonciative et la cohésion illocutoire. À partir de trois textes, cet article illustre systématiquement et détaille ces six formes de liage transphrastique des unités textuelles de base. (shrink)

Il est […] illusoire de vouloir affronter seul des problèmes qui appellent le dépassement des limites liées aux spécialisations disciplinaires et aux enjeux institutionnels. Après avoir lu l’ensemble des contributions au présent volume de Corela et m’être plongé dans un certain nombre de travaux cités dans ces articles, profitant du fait qu’Ingrid Mayeur et Marie-Anne Paveau ont eu l’élégance de me convier à un dialogue critique, je répondrai brièvement à cert...

Esta obra, conocida también como Segundo discurso, se publicó en Francia en 1755 y responde a una pregunta planteada por la Academia de Dijon: “¿Cuál es el origen de la desigualdad entre los hombres, está respaldada por la ley natural?”. Rousseau se opone principalmente a la tesis de Hobbes, que consideraba al hombre malo por naturaleza, y critica que este no retrocede lo suficiente en el tiempo para comprender al hombre natural. Así, el autor francés busca un conocimiento más profundo (...) y llega a la conclusión de que el hombre natural es “un buen salvaje que vive disperso entre los animales” y que no está condicionado por el miedo a la muerte porque no puede concebir ese final. Rousseau analiza dos tipos de desigualdad: la natural o física y la ética o política y argumenta que la segunda se establece por convención en sociedades civiles que son una trampa perpetuada por los poderosos sobre los débiles para mantener sus privilegios. (shrink)

4e de couv.: Les écrits de Michel Foucault sont stratifiés, hiérarchisés, entre les livres, les entretiens et les cours au Collège de France, mais ils sont surtout disséminés dans leurs usages. Désormais, et en plus de l'histoire des sciences et de la philosophie, les "effets" Foucault sont palpables sur la théorie de la littérature et du cinéma, l'histoire culturelle et sociale, les théories du genre, la pensée politique, les sciences de gestion, etc. C'est dans ce chantier ouvert que se situe (...) cet ouvrage. Il s'agit pour Jérôme Lamy, Jean-François Bert et leur équipe de spécialistes de resituer et d'analyser une pensée empruntant des questionnements à d'autres champs, de la psychologie à l'économie, de la science politique à la géographie, tout en ne se réclamant pas de ces sciences humaines et sociales. Pour comprendre la position de Foucault, les grands axes méthodologiques qu'il a parcourus sont retracés, telle l'archéologie, l'épistémè, la problématisation. Les concepts, des ouvrages maintenant classiques aux cours et à l'histoire de la sexualité, sont également revisités. Cette lecture critique des écrits et des usages de Foucault permet de le confronter aux analyses les plus récentes en sciences sociales, comme les postcolonial studies, ou de suivre les dialogues engagés (parfois à distance) avec des auteurs comme Norbert Elias, Michel de Certeau et Pierre Bourdieu. Un inventaire aussi rigoureux qu'éclairant. (shrink)

Jean-Marc Ferry est titulaire de la Chaire de Philosophie de l'Europe de l'Université de Nantes, professeur honoraire en Science politique et Philosophie morale à l'Université libre de Bruxelles, auteur notamment des Puissances de l'expérience (1991), l'une des oeuvres les plus importantes récemment publiées dans le champ de la philosophie sociale et politique, de la philosophie tout court (Paul Ricoeur), La Question de l'État européen (2001), Les Grammaires de l'intelligence (2004), La Raison et la Foi (2016).

Kierkegaard is an exegetical interpretation of Søren Kierkegaard's Philosophical Fragments and Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Vivaldi Jean-Marie elaborates on the philosophical and religious arguments of the pseudonym Johannes Climacus to demonstrate that history is propatory toward the achievement of eternal happiness. The author emphasizes Kierkegaard's heritage in the Post-Kantian tradition by discussing his critique of the Romantics and German Idealists. The exposition of Philosophical Fragments and Concluding Unscientific Postscript is carried out on the basis of the ongoing conversation between Climacus (...) and the Post-Kantian tradition to argue that Climacus wishes to show the limitation of history and philosophy and the necessity of subjective appropriation to transcend the shortcoming of history and philosophy. Climacus's assessment of the prevailing Christian attitudes of the 19th century maps out the possibility of subjective religious experience in freedom. (shrink)

The obsession is pursued of a word, a sign, a thought that is identical with the thing it signifies, where there is no space between the two. And the nightmare is entertained that, if such an identity is not attained, then intellectual work in general is worth nothing and should be destroyed.

Deeper still than that of the _differend_, we find in Lyotard the concept of _discrepancy_, which underlines the welcome alterity in the encounter with others. We propose an understanding of Ricœurian anthropology based on this idea, when it is associated with another concept, that of _ergodicity_, which makes it possible to think the same in the discrepancy. We illustrate it with the trial and the act of judging. We then show that the Ricœurian process of putting rival thoughts into dialogue (...) stems from this anthropology, and that Ricœur presents full coherence. For this, another concept is introduced which describes the mechanism of understanding always restarted, in the sense that each new thought must be able to be encompassed in the gaze cast on the world. _Encompassing_ is a concept in modelling disciplines, which is difficult to translate into French. To illustrate this, we take as an example Ricœur’s “debate” with Jakobson in _The Rule of Metaphor_. (shrink)

In February 2020, as covid-19 infections spread to more than fifty countries, public health officials needed to recommend how the public could protect themselves, balancing safety and urgency. But there was very little data since this novel virus had only been identified three months prior. How could public health officials decide with insufficient data? The multi-armed bandit problem of computer science offers adaptive decision-making procedures that can achieve both safety and urgency. These adaptive methods balance learning information (exploring) with using (...) information (exploiting), adjusting the balance toward learning when uncertainty is high (March 1991; Kaelbling et al. 1996). Related methods are already used in adaptive clinical trials for pharmaceuticals (Pallmann et al. 2018). But we still need to develop these methods for non-pharmaceutical interventions, as I will illustrate with a case study of public mask-wearing to reduce the spread of covid-19. Public health pronouncements impact future learning. (shrink)

From an outsider's perspective, today's Popular China might appear as a self-confident and triumphant country. However, a large-scale examination of the country's recent moral controversies reveals a very different picture, one that has much to do with the widespread local public perception of an ongoing “moral crisis”, whose examination requires careful attention placed on the ethical and affective aspects of the everyday lives of today's Chinese people. In this article, I propose to examine the anguish that Chinese bachelor youths and (...) their concerned parents undergo and express, as they are confronted with the difficult process of finding a suitable mate for marriage. I examine the fears their celibacy generates, the mutual distrust that participants taking part in bachelors’ parents gatherings demonstrate, and the disputes these encounters engage. I analyze the moral world of today's urban China from the perspective of the very feelings and affects that pervade it. Highlighting the ways in which my interlocutors shared their emotions with me along the course of my fieldwork, carried out in the cities of Beijing and Chengdu, I will insist on the importance of these affects within an anthropological approach. The moral sensitivities contained in the maintenance of the economic and social situations of one's family reveal themselves as an exceptional resource for knowledge. By examining the political economy of sentiments within which parents and their children find themselves entrapped, I argue that we can gain a deeper understanding of the concrete consequences of today's societal transformations. (shrink)

Petit essai sur quelques éléments fondamentaux de l'éducation.

Qu'y a-t-il de commun entre les philosophes français subversifs des années 60-70 (Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard) et le mouvement austère de la philosophie analytique, engagé par Frege, Russell et Carnap? En première apparence, rien, mais ce livre choisit pourtant de voir les deux comme des entreprises à certains égards parallèles de cassure avec la philosophie classique. Cherchant les convergences et les dissemblances entre philosophie française et philosophie analytique, une lecture de ce qui s'est passé en France au XXe siècle est (...) alors proposée. Au final, on esquisse une sorte de "programme" : continuer la philosophie française avec ce qui fait son charme non technique, mais en jouant la carte des mathématiques plutôt que de la logique, en acceptant les leçons de la jeune tradition analytique, et en se donnant, de plus, l'ouverture lévinassienne. (shrink)

Equity between Ideal, Ethics and Law. The purpose of this text is to show that equity is now a need for our post-modernity. However, it can only become a reality only if it is applied by an elite that regains the support of the people and of the intellectual sphere. Without this support and reality, the legal philosophy seeks to build it without being able to convince completely. Indeed, equity cannot be only an idea - it must be a concrete (...) reality and at work. Otherwise, it vanishes. (shrink)