Summary In about 1735, Emilie Du Châtelet began to translate Mandeville's Fable of the Bees. Her work, which is largely ignored by scholars, did, as this article demonstrates, turn out to be one of transformation rather than of translation and came at a crucial moment in the emerging French luxury debate. So far commercial society and luxury had been defended in purely economic terms, for instance in Melon's Essai politique, or as an aspect of divine providence for fallen man, by (...) Pierre Nicole amongst others. There was as yet no coherent defence on the level of secular ethics. As this article shows, Du Châtelet set out to remedy this. In co-operation with Voltaire, with whose recent praise of English society in the Lettres philosophiques she strongly identified, she rewrote the Fable to offer a defence of modern commercial society as both natural and moral. The article argues that she was able to do so by taking recourse to classic Epicureanism in the guise of Lucretius' De rerum natura, as an alternative to the Neo-Epicureanism, with its Augustinian overtones, as espoused by Mandeville. Voltaire in turn used her translation to lay the foundations for his defence of commercial society and progress in his Traité de métaphysique in which he uses the precise passages she had inserted into Mandeville's original. This article analyses the further aspects Voltaire adds to her arguments. Taken together, Du Châtelet's ?translation? and Voltaire's Traité offer a coherent defence of bourgeois society that would underlie Voltaire's later historiographical and philosophical works and which were crucial to his concept of ?Enlightenment? and ?progress? (shrink)

This article reviews the history of medical and research abuses experienced by American Indians since European colonization. This article examines the unethical research of American Indians/Alaska Natives in light of the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male. Literature citations indicate that significant unethical research and medical care incidents occurred both before and after the Tuskegee Syphilis Study among American Indians/Alaska Natives. The majority of these unethical abuses were committed by the federal government and within the historical context (...) of a long-term contentious relationship between American Indians and the federal government. Although President Clinton issued a highly visible public apology to the African American survivors of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment in 1997, American Indians have yet to experience such visible federal acknowledgment. To ensure ethical research in which benefits outweigh risks and findings are not value-laden or misrepresented, tribes have instituted their own Institutional Review Boards coupled with community-participatory activities. (shrink)

A common contention of literary criticism is that literary forms can express, reflect, shape, represent or otherwise give form to human life. Literature can seem to offer the same idea as a promise of life’s meaningfulness; where expressive form is powerful, life need not be empty. Can literary forms give form to human life? I will argue for one sense in which this is true. As will become clear, at stake in this inquiry is not simply an idea about the (...) meaningfulness of literature’s poetry, but a way of answering the question of what it means to be human. (shrink)

There is a global shortage of nurses that affects healthcare delivery, which will be exacerbated with the increasing demand for healthcare professionals by the aging population. The growing shortage requires an ethical exploration on the issue of nurse migration. In this article, we discuss how migration respects the autonomy of nurses, increases cultural diversity, and leads to improved patient satisfaction and health outcomes. We also discuss the potential for negative impacts on public health infrastructures, lack of respect for cultural diversity, (...) and ethical concerns related to autonomy and justice, including coercion and discrimination. This analysis is written from a rights-based ethics approach by referring to rights held by nurses and patient populations. Nurse migration highlights conflicts between nurses and between nurses and healthcare systems. Increased awareness of ethical challenges surrounding nurse migration must be addressed to enhance the well-being of nurses and patient populations. (shrink)

In this issue, Ellen Fox and colleagues report on their national study on ethics consultation in U.S. hospitals, following up on the previous 1999–2000 landmark study. Th...

Nurses have traditionally been regarded as clinicians that deliver compassionate, safe, and empathetic health care (Nurses again outpace other professions for honesty & ethics, 2018). Caring is a fundamental characteristic, expectation, and moral obligation of the nursing and caregiving professions (Nursing: Scope and standards of practice, American Nurses Association, Silver Spring, MD, 2015). Along with caring, nurses are expected to undertake ever‐expanding duties and complex tasks. In part because of the growing physical, intellectual and emotional demandingness, of nursing as well (...) as technological advances, artificial intelligence (AI) and AI care robots are rapidly changing the healthcare landscape. As technology becomes more advanced, efficient, and economical, opportunities and pressure to introduce AI into nursing care will only increase. In the first part of the article, we review recent and existing applications of AI in nursing and speculate on future use. Second, situate our project within the recent literature on the ethics of nursing and AI. Third, we explore three dominant theories of caring and the two paradigmatic expressions of caring (touch and presence) and conclude that AI—at least for the foreseeable future—is incapable of caring in the sense central to nursing and caregiving ethics. We conclude that for AI to be implemented ethically, it cannot transgress the core values of nursing, usurp aspects of caring that can only meaningfully be carried out by human beings, and it must support, open, or improve opportunities for nurses to provide the uniquely human aspects of care. (shrink)

What does it mean to know who you are? Is it a matter of knowing your name? The things that you’ve done? The people you love? Such indispensible knowledge is somehow not enough; I can know all of these things, and still feel puzzled about who I am. “I am not the person I once was,” “I am not myself today,” and “I am learning who I am,” are all commonplace poems of a kind: expressive sentences completely at home both (...) in literature and ordinary life. Such a poem is the sentence “I know who I am.” This last is one of the many grand and emblematic boasts of Miguel de Cervantes’s hilariously self-fashioned knight, Don Quixote de la Mancha, a boast that can seem both impossible and yet utterly sensible, part quixotic and... (shrink)

En danse comme dans les autres arts – même en science – écrit Hélène Marquié, le premier pas pour les études de genre est de donner de la visibilité aux femmes dans l’archive historique afin de reconstruire une histoire « mixte » (p. 218). L’auteure explique que c’est seulement avec les rapports de 2006 et de 2009 sur « l’accès égal » des hommes et des femmes aux performances et aux structures chorégraphiques que le féminisme à tonalité politique a commencé (...) à s’implanter dans la danse françai... (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 3, March 2020, Page 1-5.

Number terms and quantifiers share a range of linguistic (syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic) properties. On the basis of these similarities, one might expect these 2 classes of linguistic expression to pose similar problems to children acquiring language. We report here the results of an experiment that explicitly compared the acquisition of numerical expressions (two, four) and quantificational (some, all) expressions in younger and older 3-year-olds. Each group showed adult-like preferences for “exact” interpretations when evaluating number terms; however they did not (...) use the corresponding upper bounded interpretation when evaluating the quantifier some. Apparently, children follow different procedures for learning and evaluating numerals and quantifiers. These findings have implications for theories of number representation in child and adult grammars. (shrink)

Depuis sa fondation comme discipline indépendante, la psychologie semble contourner les questions épistémologiques constitutives d’une science de l’esprit. Cet article s’attache à présenter brièvement quelques-unes de ces questions, à travers la psychologie historique d’Ignace Meyerson.

This article suggests that ?evolutionary vision,? the unifying paradigm of physical, biological, and sociocultural evolution, needs to be fully embodied and deeply experienced in the human being, and that this can be effected by the experience at the heart of the ?perennial wisdom tradition,? 1 that is, that of ?non-dual perception.? The article suggests an ?action-based? experiment paralleling the method of a ?thought experiment,? based on the assumption that one way that one can experience this embodiment is by ?trying on? (...) the lens of non-dual perception, as practiced by the many traditions of perennial wisdom. (shrink)

This article explores insights of physicist David Bohm on the source of thought and the creative intelligence that emerges from this source. It highlights a link that Bohm sees between this creativ...

Of the stories describing the adventures full of deep significances of the various rabbis from the glorious Talmudic era, the most famous but also the most exploited is undoubtedly that of the “four sages who entered the Pardes”. If in the Talmudic-Midrashic literature it was used to point out the dangers and achievements that were related to speculations, rather than experiences, and in the mystical literature it was used to point out the dangers that could befall the mystic on his (...) way to God, to the kabbalists, Pardes was an unexplained parable for an unrevealed secret, a generalized metaphor for the danger zones of religious experience, seen as something which was good for the few, but pernicious for others. This article traces the manner in which Moshe Idel analyzes, in his books and lectures, the meanings of this legend, taking the reader on a fascinating journey in time and space, throughout various types of kabbalistic thinking and even maimonidean philosophy. (shrink)

To construct their first lexicon, infants must determine the relationship between native phonological variation and the meanings of words. This process is arguably more complex for bilingual learners who are often confronted with phonological conflict: phonological variation that is lexically relevant in one language may be lexically irrelevant in the other. In a series of four experiments, the present study investigated English–Mandarin bilingual infants’ abilities to negotiate phonological conflict introduced by learning both a tone and a non-tone language. In a (...) novel word learning task, bilingual children were tested on their sensitivity to tone variation in English and Mandarin contexts. Their abilities to interpret tone variation in a language-dependent manner were compared to those of monolingual Mandarin learning infants. Results demonstrated that at 12–13 months, bilingual infants demonstrated the ability to bind tone to word meanings in Mandarin, but to disregard tone variation when learning new words in English. In contrast, monolingual learners of Mandarin did not show evidence of integrating tones into word meanings in Mandarin at the same age even though they were learning a tone language. However, a tone discrimination paradigm confirmed that monolingual Mandarin learning infants were able to tell these tones apart at 12–13 months under a different set of conditions. Later, at 17–18 months, monolingual Mandarin learners were able to bind tone variation to word meanings when learning new words. Our findings are discussed in terms of cognitive adaptations associated with bilingualism that may ease the negotiation of phonological conflict and facilitate precocious uptake of certain properties of each language. (shrink)

Tout comme dans la confession catholique, le vin connaît dans l’orthodoxie une symbolique très riche qui engendre – en l’étayant – une fonctionnalité liturgique assez complexe. Nous avons essayé de la surprendre à quatre niveaux contextuels: les liturgies eucharistiques et la litie; le sacrement du mariage; le rituel de la consécration des églises; les offices et rituels pour les morts. Nous avons étudié les fonctions liturgiques de sanctification, de guérison, de bénédiction et de purification du vin, qui peuvent être regroupées, (...) selon leur symbolique sous-jacente, en trois catégories principales: l’obtention d’une efficacité rituelle extraordinaire; l’actualisation de la communication symbolique caractéristique du mimodrame liturgique; l’alimentation du sentiment religieux chez les fidèles. L’actualisation de ces fonctions liturgiques dépend strictement de la mise en oeuvre de quelques conditions essentielles, propres à l’anthropologie religieuse: l’espace sacré, le temps sacré et le contexte rituel créé par la communication de type symbolique. (shrink)

Imagine a single musical tone—for instance, the A above middle C that the oboe plays to tune an orchestra. Now imagine this tone, with no variation in dynamics, pitch, or timbre, extended over the course of “an hour or a day,” existing, as Peirce describes in “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” (W3:262),1 “as perfectly in each second of that time as in the whole taken together; so that, as long as it is sounding, it might be present to a (...) sense from which everything in the past was as completely absent as the future itself” (W3:262). Imagine a world consisting of nothing but the sensation of this single oboe A, and having never consisted of anything but it. In such a world, Peirce indicates, there would be no .. (shrink)

: In his landmark book, Peirce's Theory of Signs, T. L. Short argues that music signifies as a pure icon. A pure icon, according to Peirce, is not a likeness. It "does not draw any distinction between itself and its object" (EP2:163), and it "serves as a sign solely and simply by exhibiting the quality it serves to signify" (EP2:306). In music, this quality consists of the specifically musical feelings or ideas contained in the piece in question, and such musical (...) feelings are properly interpreted by means of an emotional interpretant rather than an energetic or logical one. Short, following Peirce, is correct in maintaining that music primarily signifies feeling-content whose proper means of expression is musical and whose proper interpretation by the listener involves the generation of a corresponding feeling. Nonetheless, musical signification is not purely iconic. Responding to the musical feelings presented in a work requires previous acquaintance with its style tradition, and this acquaintance involves logical interpretants. In addition, the integral temporality of music calls into question the possibility of its being purely iconic. (shrink)

Consider these three positions about physician-assisted suicide:Physician-assisted suicide should be illegal for everyone.Physician-assisted suicide should be legal for only the terminally ill.Physician-assisted suicide should be legal for all competent adults.So far, the debate in America has been primarily between positions 1 and 2. I think it should be between positions 1 and 3. Both those positions embody reasonable viewpoints, and I will not try to decide between them in this chapter. But I will argue that the double standard embodied in (...) position 2 is morally untenable. (shrink)

The word ‘dignity’ is a staple of contemporary American medical ethics, where it often follows the words ‘death with’. People unfamiliar with this usage might expect it to apply to one’s manner of dying—for example, a stately exit involving ceremonial farewells. Instead, conventional usage generally holds that “death with dignity” ends or prevents life without dignity, by which is meant life marked not by buffoonery, but by illness and disability. Popular examples of dignity-depleters include dementia, incontinence, and being “dependent on (...) machines”—provided the machines are respirators rather than furnaces, refrigerators, and computers. (shrink)

While a vast body of research has been dedicated to understanding social problems and psychological disorders, we know remarkably little about the positive aspects of life, the things that make life worth living. This volume brings together the latest findings on the causes and consequences of human happiness and well-being. The book covers a wide variety of disciplines, encompassing evolutionary biology, positive psychology, economics and social science, neuroscience and peace studies. Contributors to the volume include some of the most distinguished (...) scholars in the field: social scientist Robert Putnam, evolutionary psychiatrist Randolph Nesse, psychologist Howard Gardner, economist Robert Frank, the founder of the Positive Psychology movement Martin Seligman, and the economic psychologist and Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman. (shrink)

At the beginning of "The Law of Mind," Charles S. Peirce makes this striking admission (W8:135):I may mention, for the benefit of those who are curious in studying mental biographies, that I was born and reared in the neighborhood of Concord—I mean in Cambridge—at the time when Emerson, Hedge, and their friends were disseminating the ideas that they had caught from Schelling, and Schelling from Plotinus, from Boehm, or from God knows what minds struck with the monstrous mysticism of the (...) East. But the atmosphere of Cambridge held many an antiseptic against Concord transcendentalism; and I am not conscious of having contracted any of that virus. Nevertheless, it is probable that some cultured bacilli, some benignant .. (shrink)