Among his own posthumously released drafts, one, at least, is incontestably neither mistake nor out-take: the text of his lecture course on Machiavelli, ...

Louis Dupré analyzes Romanticism as a unique cultural phenomenon and a spiritual revolution. This study completes his trilogy on European culture during the modern epoch.

The author comments on the article “The neurobiology of addiction: Implications for voluntary control of behavior,‘ by S. E. Hyman. Hyman suggests that addicted individuals have substantial impairments in cognitive control of behavior. The author states that brain and neurochemical systems are involved in addiction. He also suggests that neuroscience can link the diseased brain processes in addiction to the moral struggles of the addicts.

Purpose of review This review considers the literature on ethical and conceptual issues in eating disorders from the last 18 months. Some reference to earlier work is necessary in order to provide context for the recent findings from research that is ongoing. -/- Recent findings Empirical ethics research on anorexia nervosa includes novel ethical and conceptual findings on the role of authenticity and personal identity in individuals’ reports of their experience, as well as new evidence on the role of affective (...) states and values in decision making at later stages of the illness. Evidence points to the hypothesis that anorexia nervosa may be a distinct affective syndrome that organizes feelings and emotions in accordance with a fixed idea. -/- Summary There has been impressive progress in empirical ethics research on anorexia nervosa, with important implications for ethical and conceptual issues that surround decision-making capacity and our understanding of the illness. (shrink)

The fact that Greek ζ = Indo-European j in the words ζειαί, ζέω, ζxs22EFλος, ζόρξ, ζυγόν, S0009838800022941_inline1, and ζωρός may be regarded as fairly well established , despite the counter-arguments of Sommer.

The York Retreat is famous in the histor y of nineteenth-centur y psychiatr y because of its association with moral treatment. Although there exists a substantial historical literature on the evolution of moral treatment at the Retreat, several interpretive problems continue to obscure its unique therapeutic legacy. The nature of moral treatment as practised at the Retreat will be clarified and discussed in a historical perspective. It will be argued that moral treatment at the Retreat was pr imar ily a (...) matter of affective conditioning guided by `benevolent theory'. (shrink)

A modified version of the mere exposure effect paradigm was utilized in an implicit artificial grammar learning task in an attempt to develop a procedure that would be more sensitive in assesing nonconscious learning processes than the methods currently utilized within the field of implicit learning. Subjects were presented with stimuli generated from a finite-state artificial grammar and then had to either decide if novel items conformed to the rule structure of the grammar or rate the degree to which they (...) liked novel items. Because the latter of the task was more indirect of the two procedures, subjects′ availability to discriminate between well-formed and ill-formed items on this liking task was taken as a more sensitive piece of evidence of implicit learning, compared to performance on the rule conformity task. A subsequent test of subjects′ explicit knowledge of the rules of the grammar showed that subjects do have some conscious knowledge of the artificial grammar, but subjects making liking decisions exhibited significantly less conscious rule knowledge than subjects initially making rule-conformity judgements. The findings are discussed in relation to synergistic relationships among implicit perception, implicit memory, and implicit learning proceses. (shrink)

Cet article étudie l’étendue de la convergence réelle entre les nanotechnologies et la biologie de synthèse, symbole des technosciences biologiques. Pour traiter la question de la dichotomie entre le niveau des objets auquel on observe un processus de pluralisation plutôt qu’une convergence, et le niveau des discours, où le scénario de la convergence semble rester l’explication dominante, nous développons une analyse des disciplines comme dispositifs au sens de Foucault. Cela permet de décrire précisément les différentes strates composant les dispositifs et (...) leurs dynamiques. La convergence des Nanotechnologies, des Biotechnologies, des technologies de l’Information et des sciences Cognitives (convergence NBIC) apparaît alors comme l’interprétation réductrice d’un contexte scientifique et technologique complexe. (shrink)

L'auteur part du postulat d'objectivité de la méthode scientifique dans son affirmation d'une distinction radicale entre le sujet qui observe et l'objet observé. Il montre en quoi ce dualisme du sujet et de l'objet a été remis en question dans la physique quantique de Heisenberg et dans la psychologie behavioriste de Watson. Cependant, l'auteur soutient que le dépassement de ce dualisme cartésien par le monisme objectiviste ou par le monisme subjectiviste est impossible pour la raison très simple que le monisme (...) est impensable. De fait, le monisme a été pensé, mais dans un langage dualiste.The author begins with the postulate of the objectivity of the scientific method in its affirmation of a radical distinction between the subject who observes and the object which is observed. It is shown how this dualism of subject and object was put into question in Heisenberg's quantum physics and in Watson's be-haviorist psychology. Nevertheless, the author holds that the overcoming of cartesian dualism by objectivist monism or by subjectivist monism is impossible. The very simple reason for this claim is that monism is unthinkable. Actually, monism has been thought, but it has been thought in a dualist language. (shrink)

V.1. livres I-IV V.2. livres V-VII. V.3 livres VIII-X.

Paradoxically, the profession whose primary mandate is to instruct and comment on matters of ethics spends inordinately little time reflecting on its own ethical practices. Consider the fact that while professional ethicists of all stripes crusade to expose and denounce conflicts of interests in all other branches of the health care system, they typically fail to pay much attention to their own potential ‘ethical’ conflicts of interest. Admittedly, there have been some efforts to address the problem. However, despite laudable intentions, (...) they are highly unsatisfactory. Unenforceable ‘model’ draft codes of ethics on professional websites,1 and obscure addenda to technical reports that are only available at a cost,2 do not constitute acceptable responses to this predicament. Th is is a problem of profound social importance, a matter that threatens the very foundation, integrity and accountability of one of the most powerful forces in the modern health care system. (shrink)