Cet ouvrage dédié à trois pionnières américaines de l’histoire de la médecine et de l’histoire des femmes, Caroline Walker Bynum, Joan Cadden et Nancy G. Siraisi, est la traduction française du dernier ouvrage, paru à New York en 2006, de Katharine Park, professeur d’histoire des sciences et de women’s studies à Harvard. K. Park est célèbre entre autres pour son ouvrage sur les médecins et la médecine à Florence au début de la Renaissance. Tout en continuant de privilégier l’étude de (...) la prati... (shrink)

Les trente et un articles composant ce volume dédié à Paulette L’Hermite-Leclercq sont regroupés sous cinq rubriques, et il faut saluer d’emblée le travail de P. Henriet et A.‑M. Legras, qui ont proposé ici un découpage aussi fidèle au parcours intellectuel de celle qu’ils voulaient ainsi honorer, qu’exempt de tout parfum d’artifice. La première partie réunit des études analysant différents « Regards masculins sur la femme », observés d’après des lieux attendus comme l’exégèse ou la pensée sc...

Un petit nombre de femmes-auteurs du Moyen Age se sont montrées particulièrement intéressées par l'Histoire, notamment locale, et, dans l'aire germanique, trois d'entre elles se distinguent par l'originalité de leur apport en ce domaine : Hrotsvita de Gandersheim au Xe siècle, et Hildegarde de Bingen et Herrade de Hohenbourg au XIIe. Toutes trois religieuses, elles ont livré à la postérité le récit de la fondation de leur monastère, l'une par le biais de la poésie métrique, la seconde via l'hagiographie et (...) la dernière au moyen de l'image. (shrink)

Fondée en 1982 par un groupe d'étudiants de littérature française autour de Bernard Cerquiglini et publiée par les Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, Médiévales est aujourd'hui la seule revue généraliste d'histoire du Moyen Âge en France. Mais si elle a connu maints changements depuis sa création, elle est restée fidèle au choix de numéros thématiques : chaque numéro de cette revue semestrielle est consacré à un thème, qui n'exclut pas d'autres articles, longtemps qualifiés de « Hors-thème...

Incivility among physicians, between physicians and learners, and between physicians and nurses or other healthcare professionals has become commonplace. If allowed to continue unchecked by academic leaders and medical educators, incivility can cause personal psychological injury and seriously damage organisational culture. As such, incivility is a potent threat to professionalism. This paper uniquely draws on the history of professional ethics in medicine to provide a historically based, philosophical account of the professional virtue of civility. We use a two-step method of (...) ethical reasoning, namely ethical analysis informed by pertinent prior work, followed by identifying the implications of clearly articulated ethical concepts, to meet these goals. The professional virtue of civility and the related concept of professional etiquette was first described by the English physician-ethicist Thomas Percival (1740–1804). Based on a historically informed philosophical account, we propose that the professional virtue of civility has cognitive, affective, behavioural and social components based on a commitment to excellence in scientific and clinical reasoning. Its practice prevents a dysfunctional organisational culture of incivility and sustains a civility-based organisational culture of professionalism. Medical educators and academic leaders are in a pivotal and powerful position to role model, promote and inculcate the professional virtue of civility as essential to an organisational culture of professionalism. Academic leaders should hold medical educators accountable for discharge of this indispensable professional responsibility. (shrink)

Bioethics has a founding story in which medical paternalism, the interference with the autonomy of patients for their own clinical benefit, was an accepted ethical norm in the history of Western medical ethics and was widespread in clinical practice until bioethics changed the ethical norms and practice of medicine. In this paper I show that the founding story of bioethics misreads major texts in the history of Western medical ethics. I also show that a major source for empirical claims about (...) the widespread practice of medical paternalism has been misread. I then show that that bioethics based on its founding story deprofessionalizes medical ethics. The result leaves the sick exposed to the predatory power of medical practitioners and healthcare organizations with only their autonomy-based rights to non-interference, expressed in contracts, to protect them. The sick are stripped of the protection afforded by a professional, fiduciary relationship of physicians to their patients. Bioethics based on its founding story reverts to the older model of a contractual relationship between the sick and medical practitioners not worthy of intellectual or moral trust (because such trust cannot be generated by what I call ‘deprofessionalizing bioethics’). On closer examination, bioethics based on its founding story, ironically, eliminates paternalism as a moral category in bioethics, thus causing bioethics to collapse on itself because it denies one of the necessary conditions for medical paternalism. Bioethics based on its founding story should be abandoned. (shrink)

This book is the second of a three-volume set on the subject of innateness. The book is highly interdisciplinary, and addresses such question as: to what extent are mature cognitive capacities a reflection of particular cultures and to what extent are they a product of innate elements? How do innate elements interact with culture to achieve mature cognitive capacities? How do minds generate and shape cultures? How are cultures processed by minds?

Rosamond Rhodes makes a persuasive case for the view that medical ethics does not derive from common morality.1 Rhodes identifies the challenge that immediately arises and its corollary: Whence the origin of medical ethics? And, should we understand medical ethics as autonomous? From the perspective of professional ethics in medicine, the first question can now be restated: Whence the origin of the ethical concept of medicine as a profession, the basis of the ethical obligations of physicians in patient care, research, (...) medical education, and in advocacy and healthcare policy? The history of Western philosophy offers us two pathways to address this question. The first is the quest for certainty,2 a quest fulfilled by using methods designed to discover concepts that are independent of human thought and judgement and thus intellectually and morally authoritative for everyone. Such concepts are timeless and therefore transcultural, transreligious and transnational. Examples include Plato’s Forms,3 PF Stawson’s (1919–2006) ‘our conceptual structure’,4 Edmund Pellegrino’s (1920–2003) ‘fact of illness’ and the ‘act of profession’ in response to the vulnerability that illness creates,5 and common morality.6 Thought experiments, using what Rhodes characterises as ‘the hypethetico-deductive method’,1 aim to discover timeless concepts. Discovering timeless concepts must address their ontological and epistemological status. Plato’s ontology of Forms,2 for example, is not clear, as …. (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.

(2001). The History of Medical Ethics Is Crucial for a Critical Perspective in the Continuing Development of Ethics Consultation. The American Journal of Bioethics: Vol. 1, No. 4, pp. 55-57.

Some problems that arise in the account given by Thomasma and Pellegrino [6] of the foundations of medical ethics in a philosophy of medicine are addressed, in particular questions of a conceptual character about treating therelatum of medicine as health. Which concept of health is appropriate and which will bear the burden of the position thomasma and Pellegrino advance? It is argued that the proper relationship of medicine is one between a healer and developing embodied minds. As a consequence, the (...) project of providing a univocal account of the nature of medicine fails. Instead, pluralism infects philosophy and medicine, resulting in different philosophies of medicine. From these philosophies of medicine will follow not a single medical ethics but a variety. (shrink)

Nancy Jecker (2013) mounts a sustained and formidable critique of Norman Daniels's prudential lifespan account (PLA) as a reliable basis for justice between age groups in the responsible allocation...

Over recent years, various semantics have been proposed for dealing with updates in the setting of logic programs. The availability of different semantics naturally raises the question of which are most adequate to model updates. A systematic approach to face this question is to identify general principles against which such semantics could be evaluated. In this paper we motivate and introduce a new such principle the refined extension principle. Such principle is complied with by the stable model semantics for (single) (...) logic programs. It turns out that none of the existing semantics for logic program updates, even though generalisations of the stable model semantics, comply with this principle. For this reason, we define a refinement of the dynamic stable model semantics for Dynamic Logic Programs that complies with the principle. (shrink)

Taking the critical turn is one of the main tools of the humanities and inculcates an intellectual discipline that prevents ossification of thinking about issues and of organizational policies in clinical ethics. The articles in this "Clinical Ethics" number of the Journal take the critical turn with respect to cherished ways of thinking in Western clinical ethics, life extension, the clinical determination of death, physicians' duty to treat even at personal risk, clinical ethics at the interface of research ethics, and (...) the pertinence of the Hippocratic Oath to clinical ethics. These articles challenge clinical ethicists to inculcate the intellectual discipline of the critical turn into everyday practice and continuous quality enhancement of clinical ethics. (shrink)

The daily work of the clinical ethics teacher and clinical ethics consultant falls into the routine of classifying clinical cases by ethical type and proposing ethically justified alternatives for the professionally responsible management of a specific type of case. Settling too far into this routine creates the risk of philosophical inertia, which is not good either for the clinical ethicist or for the field of clinical ethics. The antidote to this philosophical inertia and resultant blinkered vision of clinical ethics is (...) sustained, willing exposure to philosophical provocation. The papers in this clinical ethics issue of the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy provide just such philosophical provocation related to core topics in clinical ethics: the distinction between clinical practice and clinical research; telemedicine, or medicine at a distance; illness narratives; the concept of the placebo effect; and sex reassignment. (shrink)

Bioethics as a field began some years before it was finally named in the early 1970s. In many ways, bioethics originated in response to urgent matters of the moment, including the controversy over disconnecting Karen Quinlan's respirator, the egregious paternalism of Donald Cowart's doctors in the famous “Dax” case, the abuse of research subjects in the notorious Tuskegee Syphilis Study, and the need to devise an intellectual framework for the development of federal regulations to protect human subjects of research. The (...) phrase “new and unprecedented” became a common description of the topics and issues to which people who later came to be called “bioethicists” responded. It should come as no surprise that bioethics and its practitioners soon came to the self-understanding that their work was new and unprecedented, much as the innovations of biomedical science and their clinical applications were thought to be. (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)

The papers in this number of the Journal originated in a session sponsored by the American Philosophical Association's Committee on Philosophy and Medicine in 1999. The four papers and two commentaries identify and address philosophical challenges of how we should understand and teach bioethics in the liberal arts and health professions settings. In the course of introducing the six papers, this article explores themes these papers raise, especially the relationship among professional medical ethics, the "long history" of medical ethics, and (...) bioethics. The tendency of bioethics to deprofessionalize medical ethics is rejected, in favor of an historically informed professional medical ethics. It is suggested that bioethics should be critically reconsidered from the perspective of medical ethics as professional ethics. (shrink)

The gathering of power unto themselves by physicians, a process supported by evidence-based practice, clinical guidelines, licensure, organizational culture, and other social factors, makes the ethics of power—the legitimation of physicians’ power—a core concept of clinical ethics. In the absence of legitimation, the physician’s power over patients becomes problematic, even predatory. As has occurred in previous issues of the Journal, the papers in the 2016 clinical ethics issue bear on the professionally responsible deployment of power by physicians. This introduction explores (...) themes of physicians’ power in papers from an international group of authors who address autonomy and trust, the virtues of perinatal hospice, conjoined twins in ethics and law, addiction and autonomy in clinical research on addicting substances, euthanasia of patients with dementia in Belgium, and a pragmatic approach to clinical futility. (shrink)

An orthodoxy has arisen which claims that there is a crisis in the United States health care system such that the system needs to be reformed. This essay challenges that orthodoxy by showing that we do not have a health care system in the United States. We have a non-system of health care, just as we do for virtually all basic social institutions. Challenging the current orthodoxy surfaces two ethical issues that have been ignored: creating a health care system will (...) (a) cause resurgent paternalism and (b) pose a threat to moral pluralism. Keywords: Health care policy, managed care, paternalism, moral pluralism, institutional integrity, total quality management, continuous quality improvement CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

Although the work of clinical ethics is intensely practical, it employs and presumes philosophical concepts from the central branches of philosophy, including metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and political philosophy. This essay introduces this issue in the Journal on clinical ethics by considering how the papers and book reviews included in it illuminate four such concepts: trust, moral responsibility, the self and well-ordered societies.

The nature and limits of the physician's professional responsibilities constitute core topics in clinical ethics. These responsibilities originate in the physician's professional role, which was first examined in the modern English-language literature of medical ethics by two eighteenth-century British physician-ethicists, John Gregory and Thomas Percival. The papers in this annual clinical ethics number of the Journal explore the physician's professional responsibilities in the areas of surgical ethics, matters of conscience, and managed care.

When healthcare resources become overwhelmed in medical disasters, as they inevitably will, we have to ask, in an unflinching fashion, the question: “What then?” or more precisely, “What should we do when we run out of resources?” In a mass casualty event worthy of the designation, we will indeed run out of resources, perhaps quite quickly. This article provides an ethical framework for the responsible management of medical disasters in which the “What then?” question must be asked. The framework begins (...) with a critique of existing guidance from professional associations of physicians and then argues for an alternative approach that qualifies the obligation to preserve life, takes seriously the ethical challenges of overwhelmed healthcare resources, and countenances physician-assisted suicide as a last resort. (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.

Two new philosophical problems surrounding the gradation of certainty began to emerge in the 17th century and are still very much alive today. One is concerned with the evaluation of inductive reasoning, whether in science, jurisprudence, or elsewhere; the other with the interpretation of the mathematical calculus of change. This book, aimed at non-specialists, investigates both problems and the extent to which they are connected. Cohen demonstrates the diversity of logical structures that are available for judgements of probability, and explores (...) the rationale for their appropriateness in different contexts of application. Thus his study deals with the complexity of the underlying philosophical issues without simply cataloging alternative conceptions or espousing a particular "favorite" theory. (shrink)

Two profound atrocities in the history of Western culture form the subject of this moving philosophical exploration: American Slavery and the Holocaust. An African American and a Jew, Laurence Mordekhai Thomas denounces efforts to place the suffering of one group above the other. Rather, he pronounces these two defining historical experiences as profoundly evil in radically different ways and points to their logically incompatible aims. The author begins with a discussion of the nature of evil, exploring the fragility of (...) human beings and the phenomena of compartmentalizing, unquestioning obedience to authority, and moral drift. Citing compelling examples from history and contemporary life, he characterizes evil acts in terms of moral agency, magnitude, and intent. With moving testimony, Thomas depicts the moral pain of African Americans and Jews during their ordeals and describes how their past as victims has affected their future. Without invidious comparison, he distinguishes between extermination and domination, death and natal alienation, physical and mental cruelty, and between being viewed as irredeemable evil and as a moral simpleton. Thomas also considers the role of blacks and Jews in the Christian narrative. _In Vessels of Evil_, Thomas also considers the ways Jews and blacks have gone on to survive. He analyzes the relative flourishing of Jews and the languishing of blacks in this country and examines the implications of their dissimilar tragedies on any future relationship between these two minorities. (shrink)

I. Critique du Principe de philosophie suffisante -- II. Pour une pensée (vraiment) non religieuse -- III. Études laruelliennes.