Leibniz dit souvent que toutes les substances individuelles et seulement les substances individuelles peuvent être agents moraux authentiques. Mais, dans un passage fascinant des "Nouveaux essais", Leibniz semble concéder à John Locke que si les machines pensantes existaient, elles pourraient être des agents moraux authentiques. Ce serait une concession très significative considérant le fait que pour Leibniz les machines ne sont pas du tout des substances authentiques, mais de simple agrégats de matière. En général, les érudits ont interprété ce passage (...) comme un moyen pour Leibniz d'affirmer que l'identité métaphysique à long terme n'est pas une condition nécessaire pour l'identité morale à long terme. Mais, dans cette étude, je vais soutenir que Leibniz ne concède réellement pas à Locke que les machines pensantes pourraient être des agents moraux. (shrink)

Leibniz defends concurrentism, the view that both God and created substances are causally responsible for changes in the states of created substances. Interpretive problems, however, arise in determining just what causal role each plays. Some recent work has been revisionist, greatly downplaying the causal role played by created substances—arguing instead that according to Leibniz only God has productive causal power. Though bearing some causal responsibility for changes in their perceptual states, created substances are not efficient causes of such changes. This (...) paper argues against such revisionism; not only was Leibniz a consistent advocate of concurrentism (at least in his “mature” years), but also his account of concurrentism involves both God and created substances asefficient causes of the changes in the states of created substances. (shrink)

The abilities to attribute an action to its proper agent and to understand its meaning when it is produced by someone else are basic aspects of human social communication. Several psychiatric syndromes, such as schizophrenia, seem to lead to a dysfunction of the awareness of one’s own action as well as of recognition of actions performed by other. Such syndromes offer a framework for studying the determinants of agency, the ability to correctly attribute actions to their veridical source. Thirty normal (...) subjects and 30 schizophrenic patients with and without hallucinations and/or delusional experiences were required to execute simple finger and wrist movements, without direct visual control of their hand. The image of either their own hand or an alien hand executing the same or a different movement was presented on a TV-screen in real time. The task for the subjects was to discriminate whether the hand presented on the screen was their own or not. Hallucinating and deluded schizophrenic patients were more impaired in discriminating their own hand from the alien one than the non-hallucinating ones, and tended to misattribute the alien hand to themselves. Results are discussed according to a model of action control. A tentative description of the mechanisms leading to action consciousness is proposed. (shrink)

This article explores the prevailing assumption of instrumentalism in negotiation and argues that contrary to the popular conception in negotiation scholarship, negotiators need not be assumed to be ontologically individualistic or purely self-interested in their motivation and action. We show the contribution that can be made to the field by an approach to negotiation that does not presume a strong and inevitable self-interest as the fundamental starting point of any account of negotiation behavior and we offer ideas for an alternative (...) starting point, which we call the agentic-relational model. (shrink)

Experiential evidence shows that pain is associated with common meanings. These include a meaning of threat or danger, which is experienced as immediately distressing or unpleasant; cognitive meanings, which are focused on the long-term consequences of having chronic pain; and existential meanings such as hopelessness, which are more about the person with chronic pain than the pain itself. This interdisciplinary book - the second in the three-volume Meanings of Pain series edited by Dr Simon van Rysewyk - aims to better (...) understand pain by describing experiences of pain and the meanings these experiences hold for the people living through them. The lived experiences of pain described here involve various types of chronic pain, including spinal pain, labour pain, rheumatic pain, diabetic peripheral neuropathic pain, fibromyalgia, complex regional pain syndrome, endometriosis-associated pain, and cancer-related pain. Two chapters provide narrative descriptions of pain, recounted and interpreted by people with pain. Language is important to understanding the meaning of pain since it is the primary tool human beings use to manipulate meaning. As discussed in the book, linguistic meaning may hold clues to understanding some pain-related experiences, including the stigmatisation of people with pain, the dynamics of patient-clinician communication, and other issues, such as relationships between pain, public policy and the law, and attempts to develop a taxonomy of pain that is meaningful for patients. Clinical implications are described in each chapter. This book is intended for people with pain, their family members or caregivers, clinicians, researchers, advocates, and policy makers. (shrink)

Existe-t-il une chose de tel qu'une conception herméneutique du langage? C'est à cette question que cet ouvrage se propose de répondre, de façon positive, en opérant une mise en dialogue des herméneutiques de Hans-Georg Gadamer et Paul Ricoeur. Malgré les différences indéniables entre les oeuvres de ces deux philosophes, l'auteur montre qu'elles ont en commun de penser le langage comme étant un principe fondamental de notre expérience du monde et de tout événement de compréhension. Une articulation entre les deux oeuvres, (...) qui mise sur une dialectique entre les notions d'appartenance et de distanciation, est possible à partir de cet accord de fond sur notre appartenance essentielle au langage. De ce point de vue, tout effort pour mettre à distance le langage afin d'en faire un objet d'étude doit tenir compte du caractère premier et irréductible de cette appartenance, s'il veut éviter de n'offrir qu'une vision réductrice du langage. Comme le révèlent les analyses de ce livre, les recherches de Gadamer et Ricoeur se caractérisent par la prise en compte de ce fait dans leurs réflexions sur le dialogue, le texte et la traduction, ainsi que dans leurs travaux sur la puissance créatrice du langage qui se manifeste dans la métaphore, le dire poétique et le récit. Cependant, le plus important pour l'herméneutique est que cette appartenance fondamentale ne soit pas synonyme d'un enfermement dans le langage, mais que le langage offre au contraire une ouverture sur l'être et permette à ce qui est de se dire et de se penser. (shrink)

Musical life became disrupted in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Many musicians and venues turned to online alternatives, such as livestreaming. In this study, three livestreamed concerts were organized to examine separate, yet interconnected concepts—agency, presence, and social context—to ascertain which components of livestreamed concerts facilitate social connectedness. Hierarchical Bayesian modeling was conducted on 83 complete responses to examine the effects of the manipulations on feelings of social connectedness with the artist and the audience. Results showed that in concert (...) 1, where half of the participants were allowed to vote for the final song to be played, this option did not result in the experience of more agency. Instead, if their preferred song was played (regardless of voting ability) participants experienced greater connectedness to the artist. In concert 2, participants who attended the concert with virtual reality headsets experienced greater feelings of physical presence, as well as greater feelings of connectedness with the artist, than those that viewed a normal YouTube livestream. In concert 3, attendance through Zoom led to greater experience of social presence, but predicted less connectedness with the artist, compared to a normal YouTube livestream. Crucially, a greater negative impact of COVID-19 (e.g., loneliness) predicted feelings of connectedness with the artist, possibly because participants fulfilled their social needs with this parasocial interaction. Examining data from all concerts suggested that physical presence was a predictor of connectedness with both the artist and the audience, while social presence only predicted connectedness with the audience. Correlational analyses revealed that reductions in loneliness and isolation were associated with feelings of shared agency, physical and social presence, and connectedness to the audience. Overall, the findings suggest that in order to reduce feelings of loneliness and increase connectedness, concert organizers and musicians could tune elements of their livestreams to facilitate feelings of physical and social presence. (shrink)

How educators and students process and respond to emotions can either enhance or impede the development of the whole child. Social and emotional learning (SEL) refers to the processes of developing social and emotional competencies, which depend on individuals’ capacity to recognize, understand, and manage emotions (i.e., emotional intelligence or EI). Consensus across disciplines about the importance of EI highlights the need to advance the science of how to teach SEL. RULER, an evidence-based approach to teaching EI, provides an educational (...) framework that encompasses a set of practices for comprehensive SEL integration across a school or district. In this article, we describe RULER, explain how it teaches EI, and summarize evidence of its effectiveness. (shrink)

Le cinema nous regarde, il en sait souvent plus sur nous et notre epoque que ce que nous croyons savoir sur lui. Il nous livre un instantane photographique du temps qui passe et ouvre la possibilite de la critique au coeur du divertissement. Cet art des masses est un art du monde, des peuples, du peuple, du depeuple, du populaire, et parfois du populiste. Le cinema, ce n'est pas exactement le film, c'est ce qui, dans le film, ne releve pas (...) du sens, en quelque sorte la part folle et non theologique du film. Ce art excede son esthetique, en rendant sensible en lui la trace des spectres, de l'oublie, du sans-voix et du laisse-pour-compte. Des qu'il eut franchi le pont, les fantomes vinrent a sa rencontre, entend-on dans Nosferatu de Murnau. Ces traces ou ces apparitions de fantomes sont inseparables du reve et de la rememoration qui a lieu au cinema. La pensee est cinematographique, depuis des temps immemoriaux, elle reve et pense en cinema. Depuis que le cinema existe par ses films, depuis que proliferent ces singulieres temporalisations des images par le mouvement, le cinema suscite, invente et innerve la pensee. (shrink)

The lymphatic vasculature plays a critical role in the regulation of body fluid volume and immune function. Extensive research into the molecular mechanisms that control blood vessel growth has led to identification of molecules that also regulate development and growth of the lymphatic vessels. This is generating a great deal of interest in the molecular control of the lymphatics in the context of embryogenesis, lymphatic disorders and tumor metastasis. Studies in animal models carried out over the past three years have (...) shown that the soluble protein growth factors, vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF)‐C and VEGF‐D, and their cognate receptor tyrosine kinase, VEGF receptor‐3 (VEGFR‐3), are critical regulators of lymphangiogenesis. Furthermore, disfunction of VEGFR‐3 has recently been shown to cause lymphedema. The capacity to induce lymphangiogenesis by manipulation of the VEGF‐C/VEGF‐D/VEGFR‐3 signaling pathway offers new opportunities to understand the function of the lymphatic system and to develop novel treatments for lymphatic disorders. BioEssays 24:1030–1040, 2002. © 2002 Wiley‐Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

About one third of patients with epilepsy have seizures refractory to the medical treatment. Electrical stimulation mapping is the gold standard for the identification of “eloquent” areas prior to resection of epileptogenic tissue. However, it is time-consuming and may cause undesired side effects. Broadband gamma activity recorded with extraoperative electrocorticography during cognitive tasks may be an alternative to ESM but until now has not proven of definitive clinical value. Considering their role in cognition, the alpha and beta bands could further (...) improve the identification of eloquent cortex. We compared gamma, alpha and beta activity, and their combinations for the identification of eloquent cortical areas defined by ESM. Ten patients with intractable focal epilepsy participated in a delayed-match-to-sample task, where syllable sounds were compared to visually presented letters. We used a generalized linear model approach to find the optimal weighting of each band for predicting ESM-defined categories and estimated the diagnostic ability by calculating the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve. Gamma activity increased more in eloquent than in non-eloquent areas, whereas alpha and beta power decreased more in eloquent areas. Diagnostic ability of each band was close to 0.7 for all bands but depended on multiple factors including the time period of the cognitive task, the location of the electrodes and the patient’s degree of attention to the stimulus. We show that diagnostic ability can be increased by 3–5% by combining gamma and alpha and by 7.5–11% when gamma and beta were combined. We then show how ECoG power modulation from cognitive testing can be used to map the probability of eloquence in individual patients and how this probability map can be used in clinical settings to optimize ESM planning. We conclude that the combination of gamma and beta power modulation during cognitive testing can contribute to the identification of eloquent areas prior to ESM in patients with refractory focal epilepsy. (shrink)

This essay examines the impact of linguistic choices on the perception and regulation of assisted dying, particularly in Canada. It argues that euphemistic terms like “medical assistance in dying” and its acronym, “MAID,” serve to normalize the practice, potentially obscuring its moral gravity. This contrasts with what is seen in Belgium and the Netherlands, where terms like “euthanasia” are used, as well as in France and the United Kingdom, where terminology remains divisive and contested. By tracing the evolution of these (...) terms and what they reveal about different cultural and legal approaches, this essay sheds light on the politics of language in end-of-life discourses. It suggests that the shift toward euphemistic language reflects a broader discomfort with death that can shape public attitudes and legal frameworks. It calls for a more transparent, philosophically grounded approach to terminology and suggests that continued debate about semantics is necessary to capture the complexities and ethical significance of assisted dying. (shrink)