Advances at the interface between the biological sciences and engineering are giving rise to emerging research fields such as synthetic biology. Harnessing the potential of synthetic biology requires timely and adequate translation into clinical practice. However, the translational research enterprise is currently facing fundamental obstacles that slow down the transition of scientific discoveries from the laboratory to the patient bedside. These obstacles including scarce financial resources and deficiency of organizational and logistic settings are widely discussed as primary impediments to translational (...) research. In addition, a number of socio-ethical considerations inherent in translational research need to be addressed. As the translational capacity of synthetic biology is tightly linked to its social acceptance and ethical approval, ethical limitations may—together with financial and organizational problems—be co-determinants of suboptimal translation. Therefore, an early assessment of such limitations will contribute to proactively favor successful translation and prevent the promising potential of synthetic biology from remaining under-expressed. Through the discussion of two case-specific inventions in synthetic biology and their associated ethical implications, we illustrate the socio-ethical challenges ahead in the process of implementing synthetic biology into clinical practice. Since reducing the translational lag is essential for delivering the benefits of basic biomedical research to society at large and promoting global health, we advocate a moral obligation to accelerating translational research: the “translational imperative.”. (shrink)

The author group of above-mentioned review paper was incorrectly published in the online article.

English summary: The idea of a negative dialectics encapsulates the critical theory of Theodor W. Adorno in its entirety. In a critical engagement with Hegel's philosophy, Adorno develops a dialectic that is no longer tied to the idealistic concept of a speculative identity of subject and object, yet nevertheless aims at a concept of the absolute. So far neither the scope nor the argumentative consistency of this model of dialectics has been taken into account. Marc Nicolas Sommer reconstructs negative (...) dialectics through its engagement with Hegelian dialectics and defends its central claim: that negative dialectics liberates dialectics from its idealistic shackles and in doing so develops a viable concept of the absolute after Auschwitz. German description: Die kritische Theorie Theodor W. Adornos findet ihre vollstandige Artikulation im Konzept einer negativen Dialektik. In kritischer Auseinandersetzung mit der hegelschen Philosophie entwickelt Adorno die Idee einer Dialektik, die nicht mehr an das idealistische Konzept einer spekulativen Identitat von Subjekt und Objekt gebunden ist, deren gedankliche Bewegung dennoch auf einen Begriff des Absoluten ausgerichtet ist. Konzeptueller Anspruch, begrifflicher Umfang und argumentative Konsistenz dieses zweiten grossen Modells dialektischen Denkens sind bis heute nicht geklart.Marc Nicolas Sommer rekonstruiert negative Dialektik aus der Auseinandersetzung mit Hegel und verteidigt ihren Anspruch, den eigentlichen Gehalt der hegelschen Dialektik von seinen idealistischen Schlacken befreit zu haben und aus dieser Denkbewegung einen nach Auschwitz tragfahigen Begriff des Absoluten zu entwickeln. (shrink)

Historians of science have long believed that Abraham Trembley’s celebrity and impact were attributable chiefly to the incredible regenerative phenomena demonstrated by the polyp, which he discovered in 1744, and to the new experimental method he devised to investigate them. This essay shows that experimental method alone cannot account for Trembley’s success and influence; nor are the marvels of the polyp sufficient to explain its scientific and cultural impact. Experimental method was but one element in a new conception of the (...) laboratory that called for both experimental and para‐experimental skills whose public availability depended on a new style of communication. The strategy of generosity that led Trembley to dispatch polyps everywhere enabled experimental naturalist laboratories to spread throughout Europe, and the free circulation of living objects for scientific research led practitioners to establish an experimental field distinct from mechanical physics. Scholars reacted to the marvels of the polyp by strengthening the boundaries between the public and academic spheres and, in consequence, opened a space for new standards in both scientific work and the production of celebrity.… comme l’Auteur de l’Histoire des Polypes, il a passé de plein vol à l’immortalité.—Julien Offrey de La Mettrie … comme l’Auteur de l’Histoire des Polypes, il a passé de plein vol à l’immortalité.—Julien Offrey de La Mettrie. (shrink)

John Rawls's work (1971) has greatly contributed to rehabilitating equality as a basic social value, after decades of utilitarian hegemony,particularly in normative economics, but Rawls also emphasized that full equality of welfare is not an adequate goal either. This thesis was echoed in Dworkin's famous twin papers on equality (Dworkin 1981a,b), and it is now widely accepted that egalitarianism must be selective. The bulk of the debate on ‘Equality of What?’ thus deals with what variables ought to be submitted for (...) selection and how this selection ought to be carried out. (shrink)

In wildlife conservation work, rewilding - to make wild once again - refers to the creation of corridors between preserved lands that allow declining populations to rebound. Marc Bekoff, one of our most engaging animal experts and activists, here applies the concept to human attitudes. He argues that unless we rewild ourselves, becoming profoundly reconnected to nature and fundamentally shifting our consciousness, our conservation efforts will have but limited impact. Bekoff shows that when we make the effort to not (...) just see, but to empathetically become "the seen," our perspective on animals and their habitats changes in profound ways. As we shift to acting from the inside out, our efforts move beyond simply reacting to current crises and become powerfully proactive. Ultimately, Rewilding Our Hearts invites readers to become re-enchanted with our world, and by dissolving false boundaries, to truly connect with both nature and ourselves. (shrink)

L’ouvrage qu’on va lire se veut être une fondation transcendantale des logiques développementales (essentiellement celle de Lesniewski). Une telle démarche n’a jamais été tentée. Pour ce faire, il a fallu remonter aux sources immanentes de la Critique de la Raison Pure et de son architectonique. L’auteur a ainsi produit une apparence ontologique correspondant à l’ontologie du logicien polonais. Pour saisir la portée des définitions de la vérité et de l’objet, Marc Peeters convoque quatre concepts : la discrépance, le simulacre, (...) la reprise et l’historicité transcendantale. Ces concepts et les principes qui les régissent servent à repenser la logique chez Kant et à poser la question renouvelée, historique et logique, de la métaphysique. (shrink)

Although the topic has been extensively studied, many issues about understanding of indirect requests in children are still unsolved. Our contribution is to distinguish genuine and ironic hints, focusing on the latter. We examined the understanding of ironic hints and ironic imperatives in 5- to 9-year-old children and in adults, in various situational contexts. The main result of this study was that ironic hints were more difficult to understand than ironic imperatives only when the context was neutral. When the context (...) was ironic, there was no significant difference. Discussion highlights how context enables young children to understand very indirect requests like ironic hints. (shrink)

Using the Western tradition of metaphysical and political thought as a backdrop, Critique of Sovereignty (a work in 4 volumes) re-examines the concept of sovereignty in order to better understand why our ethical values and technical capacities often seem so divorced from our lived realities. On the one hand, ostensibly self-enclosed entities like the nation-state and the person are rhetorically bolstered as sites of technical agency and/or moral responsibility. On the other hand, these same entities appear fragile -- if not (...) purely fictional -- in relation to ever ongoing tidal processes such as the migration, diffusion, and conglomeration of bodies, capital, ideas, etc. While some of our institutions might work some of the time, they always seem to work differently than we like to think they do. Accordingly, the forging of more humane institutions might very well entail if not require ways of thinking that strive to undo the self-imagined binds, exceptions, and sureties of thought for the sake of embracing a continuity with all that withers, decays, and falls away. Book I, "Contemporary Theories of Sovereignty," compares the varied interpretations of sovereignty given by a range of 20th-century political theorists (Maritain, Foucault, Derrida, Schmitt, Agamben, Hardt, and Negri) with Jean Bodin's initial outline of the concept, rendered at the outset of modern political thought in the 16th century. The analytic framework of sovereignty encountered in these comparative readings provides an initial point of departure for unfolding a method of critique appropriate to the concept of sovereignty. Sovereignty is an ideal starting point for a critique of the deadlocks between thought and reality for a simple reason: it doesn't actually exist. When it serves as a guide to action, sovereignty may be regarded as a particularly captivating fantasy. The closer it appears, the further it recedes, and, too often, the more vigorously it is pursued. (shrink)

This thesis studies collider phenomenology of physics beyond the Standard Model at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). It also explores in detail advanced topics related to Higgs boson and supersymmetry - one of the most exciting and well-motivated streams in particle physics. In particular, it finds a very large enhancement of multiple Higgs boson production in vector-boson scattering when Higgs couplings to gauge bosons differ from those predicted by the Standard Model. The thesis demonstrates that due to the loss of (...) unitarity, the very large enhancement for triple Higgs boson production takes place. This is a truly novel finding. The thesis also studies the effects of supersymmetric partners of top and bottom quarks on the Higgs production and decay at the LHC, pointing for the first time to non-universal alterations for two main production processes of the Higgs boson at the LHC-vector boson fusion and gluon-gluon fusion. Continuing the exploration of Higgs boson and supersymmetry at the LHC, the thesis extends existing experimental analysis and shows that for a single decay channel the mass of the top quark superpartner below 175 GeV can be completely excluded, which in turn excludes electroweak baryogenesis in the Minimal Supersymmetric Model. This is a major new finding for the HEP community. This thesis is very clearly written and the introduction and conclusions are accessible to a wide spectrum of readers. (shrink)

This thought-provoking collection sheds light on the plight of our nonhuman primate cousins--and what we can do to help.

Whilst Bayesian epistemology is widely regarded nowadays as our best theory of knowledge, there are still a relatively large number of incompatible and competing approaches falling under that umbrella. Very recently, Wallmann and Williamson wrote an interesting article that aims at showing that a subjective Bayesian who accepts the principal principle and uses a known physical chance as her degree of belief for an event A could end up having incoherent or very implausible beliefs if she subjectively chooses the probability (...) of an event F for which she has much poorer evidence. They also argued that their own version of objective Bayesianism is completely immune to that challenge. In this article, after having presented the strongest version of Wallmann’s and Williamson’s argument, I will show that if successful, it has far-reaching consequences and would not only invalidate moderate subjective Bayesianism and imprecise probalism but also a form of objective Bayesianism that relies on conditionalisation, the principal principle, reference classes, and the principle of indifference applied to the most basic partitions. I then argue that their argument can be defeated by adding the rule that it is always irrational to choose a probability that can be computed from the known probabilities associated to one’s other beliefs. I finally argue that the authors’ main intuition that probabilities have different degrees of reliability favours imprecise Bayesianism over precise Bayesianism. (shrink)

Der Mensch als „homo viator“ ist ein Topos, der sich in der Literatur und Philosophie, aber auch in diversen religiösen Traditionen unterschiedlicher Epochen finden lässt. Der vorliegende Sammelband konzentriert sich auf die Thematisierung dieses Bildes vom Menschen, der auf dem Wege ist, durch das moderne Existenzdenken.

Ainslie’s contribution offers a useful refinement of his powerful model of intertemporal bargaining. However, he focuses mostly on the cognitive mechanisms of choice. I suggest that these interact with emotional, personality, and developmental dynamics that cannot be ignored, either psychologically or neurally.

Although I reject neuronormativity -- an idea central to the Brain Disease Model of Addiction -- Henden and Gjelsvik argue that the disease definition might refer to normativity in nonneural domains. They profess that a cognitive dysfunction, or a mismatch of evolutionary intentions, could also qualify as norm violations, thus legitimizing the disease label. The need for dividing lines is questioned as well. I rebut these criticisms in turn, but I must admit they are thought provoking.

The utilitarian economist and Nobel Laureate John Harsanyi and the liberal egalitarian philosopher John Rawls were two of the most eminent scholars writing on problems of social justice in the last century. This volume pays tribute to Harsanyi and Rawls by investigating themes that figure prominently in their work. In some cases, the contributors explore issues considered by Harsanyi and Rawls in more depth and from novel perspectives. In others, the contributors use the work of Harsanyi and Rawls as points (...) of departure for pursuing the construction of theories for the evaluation of social justice. The introductory essay by the editors provides background information on the relevant economics, game theory, philosophy, and social choice theory, as well as readers' guides to the individual contributions, to make this volume widely accessible to scholars in a wide range of disciplines. (shrink)

This paper distinguishes an index ordering and a social ordering function as a simple way to formalize the indexing problem in the social choice framework. Two main conclusions are derived. First, the alleged dilemma between welfarism and perfectionism is shown to involve a third possibility, exemplified by the fairness approach to social choice. Second, the idea that an individual is better off than another whenever he has more (goods, functionings, etc.) in all dimensions, which is known to enter in conflict (...) with the Pareto principle, can be partly salvaged by adopting the fairness approach. (shrink)

The French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze, is emerging as one of the most important and influential philosophers of the 20th century, having published widely on philosophy, literature, language, psychoanalysis, art, politics, and cinema. However, because of the ‘experimental’ nature of certain works, combined with the manner in which he draws upon a variety of sources from various disciplines, his work can seem difficult, obscure, and even ‘willfully obstructive’. In an attempt to resist such impressions, this paper will seek to provide an (...) accessible introduction to Deleuze's work, and to begin to discuss how it can be employed to provide a significant critique and reconceptualization of the theoretical foundations and therapeutic practices of psychiatry, psychotherapy, and mental health nursing. In order to do this, the paper will focus upon Deleuze's masterwork, and the cornerstone to his philosophy as a whole, Difference and Repetition; in particular, it will discuss how his innovative and challenging account of time can be employed to provide a conception of human life as a ‘continuity’, rather than as a series of distinct ‘moments’ or ‘events’. As well as discussing the manner in which his work can provide us with an understanding of how life is different and significant for each human being, this paper will also highlight the potential importance of Deleuze's work for logotherapy, for the recent ‘turn’ to ‘narrative’ as a psychotherapeutic approach and for contemporary mental health care's growing interest in ‘social constructionism’. As such, this paper also seeks to stimulate further discussion and research into the importance and the relevance of Deleuze's work for the theory and practice of psychiatry, psychotherapy, and mental health nursing. (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).

Dans Les Nuées, Aristophane adresse des critiques à Socrate auxquelles Platon répond philosophiquement dans l’Apologie. Or le Socrate des Nuées porte des traits de Protagoras, et certains reproches attribués à l’un valent pour l’autre. Comme pour Socrate, Platon a composé pour Protagoras une apologie, dans le Théétète. Si nous comparons les accusations de la pièce à ce que Platon prête à Protagoras, nous constatons qu’il se fait son défenseur. Mais pour quelle raison et à quel point de vue? Par une (...) analyse des concepts de geloion et de mimèsis comique, on montre comment Platon déploie une stratégie de réappropriation de la pensée de Protagoras – pour lui donner un tour philosophique qui constitue en même temps une réflexion critique sur le statut de l’objet comique.In the Apology, Plato gives a philosophical answer to critics contained in Aristophanes’ Clouds. However, through Socrates, The Clouds target Protagoras too. As a matter of fact, Plato composed an apology for him, as well in the Theaetetus, that answers the charges in the comedy against Protagoras, becoming in a certain way his « lawyer ». But why and what for? Analysing the concepts of geloion and comic mimesis, we show how Plato undertakes to give a philosophical reading of Protagoras’ thought, which, in the same time, constitutes a critical thinking about the object of comedy. (shrink)

La critique platonicienne de la démocratie est résolument philosophique, contestant le modèle anthropologique et épistémologique sous-jacent au nom des aberrations historiques auxquelles il est condamné. Cet article examine les deux principaux moteurs de l’analyse platonicienne : 1) l’absence d’unité, qui se traduit par une oligarchie de fait et par une dispersion des citoyens, plus soucieux de leur liberté individuelle que de l’intérêt de la cité ; 2) une théorie de la connaissance qui, aussi implicite soit-elle, dissocie savoir et pouvoir. Il (...) en résulte une prise de distance à l’égard d’un modèle où l’homme démocratique serait jugé compétent par nature à exercer des responsabilités. (shrink)