Review of Nicu Gavriluţă’s The Fools’ Mother is Always Pregnant. A Sociology of Everyday Pathologies. (Mama proştilor e mereu gravidă. Sociologia patologiilor cotidiene.) Foreword by Ştefan Afloroaei (Iaşi: European Institute, 2010).

Deleuze and Foucault had a long, complicated and productive relationship, in which each was at various times a significant influence on the other. This collection combines 3 original essays by Deleuze and Foucault, in which they respond to each other's work, with 16 critical essays by key contemporary scholars working in the field. The result is a sustained discussion and analysis of the various dimensions of this fascinating relationship, which clarifies the implications of their philosophical encounter.

Over the past 20 years, along with official endeavors directed towards the accession of Romania into the European structures, political parties tried to integrate themselves into wider European families. Approaching the European People’s Party (the most prominent group in the European Parliament) - dominated by Christian democrats whose existence was largely influenced by the Catholic social teaching - seemed to be one of the most difficult tasks. For their first European elections held in 2007 several Romanian political parties - apart (...) from the National Christian Democrat Peasant Party (a member of the European Christian Democratic Union since 1987) - changed their orientation and claimed themselves as Christian Democratic. This article intends to explore the extent to which Romanian political parties who assert themselves as Christian-democratic can be considered to belong to this political family or whether their claim has a rather administrative motivation. (shrink)

The research on stem cell-based therapies has greatly expanded in recent years. Our text attempts to seek those religious and ethical challenges that stem cell therapy and research bring into debate. Our thesis is that bioethics can defend its principle without a religious background. We will develop our argumentation on three major points: firstly, a comparison between secular ethics and religious views will clarify why stem cell therapy and research are important from a scientific point of view, addressing the very (...) center of the human being; in our view, being based on secular society, bioethics can answer the challenges of stem cell therapy and research; secondly, following Hans Jonas' perspective on experimenting on humans, we seek to understand the philosophical guidance that sciences dealing with stem cell need; thirdly, we will map the ethical guidelines for clinical translational research that have been adopted by the International Society for Stem Cell Research. . (shrink)

Lucian Blaga (1895-1961), the famous Romanian philosopher who started as a poet and took his PhD in Philosophy and Biology in Vienna is our contemporary, illustrating the spiritual changes at the borders between modernism and postmodernism; he is meant to be studied from the perspective of the postmodernist philosophy of religion. Lucian Blaga was a writer, playwright, journalist, professor and librarian who had a vaste writing; as a philosopher he is a unique author of philosophical system, in the Romanian philosophy (...) where his “deconstructionism” is the fact that Blaga “deconstructs” Rigveda by the analysis of the word brahman, specifying that because of the mentality about the sacrificer as a being and God at the same time, the vedic believer “takes courage” towards the deities, loses humility, gaining in return “boldness towards gods”. (shrink)

Discussions about brain data and privacy, particularly those advocating for human rights frameworks, at times, have embodied problematic undercurrents of, if not overt appeals to, neuro-exceptional...

The view we defend is that in virtue of its nature, disgust is not fit to do any moral or social work whatsoever, and that there are no defensible uses for disgust in legal or political institutions. We first describe our favoured empirical theory of the nature of disgust. Turning from descriptive to normative issues, we address the best arguments in favour of granting disgust the power to justify certain judgements, and to serve as a social tool, respectively. Daniel Kahan (...) advances a pair of theses that suggest disgust is indispensable (Moral Indispensability Thesis), and so has an important part to play in the functioning of a just, well-ordered society (Conservation Thesis). We develop responses and show how they rebut the arguments given in support of each thesis. We conclude that any society free of social disgust would be more just, reasonable and compassionate. (shrink)

A quarter of a century ago, a group of scientists and conservationists introduced ‘biodiversity’ as a media buzzword with the explicit intent of galvanizing public and political support for environ...

Michel Foucault’s notion of “biopower” has been a highly fertile concept in recent theory, influencing thinkers worldwide across a variety of disciplines and concerns. In The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Foucault famously employed the term to describe “a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them, rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them.” With this volume, Vernon W. Cisney and Nicolae Morar bring together leading contemporary scholars to explore the (...) many theoretical possibilities that the concept of biopower has enabled while at the same time pinpointing their most important shared resonances. Situating biopower as a radical alternative to traditional conceptions of power—what Foucault called “sovereign power”—the contributors examine a host of matters centered on life, the body, and the subject as a living citizen. Altogether, they pay testament to the lasting relevance of biopower in some of our most important contemporary debates on issues ranging from health care rights to immigration laws, HIV prevention discourse, genomics medicine, and many other topics. (shrink)

Starting in 2005, general logical metatheorems have been developed that guarantee the extractability of uniform effective bounds from large classes of proofs of theorems that involve abstract metric structures X. In this paper we adapt this to the class of CAT\)-spaces X for \ and establish a new metatheorem that explains specific bound extractions that recently have been achieved in this context as instances of a general logical phenomenon.

The nature and role of the patient in biomedicine comprise issues central to bioethical inquiry. Given its developmental history grounded firmly in a backlash against 20th-century cases of egregious human subjects abuse, contemporary medical bioethics has come to rely on a fundamental assumption: the unit of care is the autonomous self-directing patient. In this article we examine first the structure of the feminist social critique of autonomy. Then we show that a parallel argument can be made against relational autonomy as (...) well, demonstrating how this second concept of autonomy fails to take sufficiently into account an array of biological determinants, particularly those from microbial biology. Finally, in light of this biological critique, we question whether or to what extent any relevant and meaningful view of autonomy can be recovered in the contemporary landscape of bioethics. (shrink)

The rapid development of large language models (LLM’s) and of their associated interfaces such as ChatGPT has brought forth a wave of epistemic and moral concerns in a variety of domains of inquiry...

It has become increasingly clear that there is a vast array of microorganisms on and in the human body, known collectively as the human microbiome. Our microbiomes are extraordinarily complex, and this complexity has been linked to human health and well-being. Given the complexity and importance of our microbiomes, we struggle with how to think about them. There is a long list of competing metaphors that we use to refer to our microbiomes, including as an “organ” containing our “second genome,” (...) as a “symbiont” in the human “holobiont,” and as an ecological “community” in the human “ecosystem,” among others. Each of these makes different assumptions about the fundamental biology of the human-microbe system, with important implications for how we choose to study microbiomes, and the therapies we envision for correcting microbiome-linked disorders. We believe that it is time to move beyond metaphors, and we propose a scientifically pluralist approach that focuses on characterizing fundamental biological properties of microbiomes such as heritability, transmission mode, rates of dispersal rates, and strength of local selection. Such an approach will allow us to break out of the confines of narrow conceptual frameworks, and to guide the exploration of our complexity as chimeric beings. (shrink)

The rapid expansion of computational tools and of data science methods in healthcare has, undoubtedly, raised a whole new set of bioethical challenges. As Laacke and colleagues rightly note,...

Fichte’s essay about Machiavelli was published in 1807 in Vesta journal with the declared aim to contribute to the »defence of a formidable man’s honour«. A year later some fragments from this essay were republished at the beginning of Fichte’s celebre writing: Addresses to the German Nation. Fichte’s declared admiration for Machiavelli as political thinker is difficult to understand, as the two men had very different political conceptions. The present study demonstrates that there is no difference between Fichte’s eulogy for (...) the man who discovered the demonic nature of power and his own political theory, which contains exactly an attempt to de-demonize this power. For Fichte The Prince contains a perfect political theory useful for the past of the humanity, but his theory, based on a new form of education, addresses the problems of the future. That is why he considered Machiavelli a good specialist of the human nature who, as a real physician of culture, made a very precise diagnosis of humanity’s moral maladies. Fichtes Essai über Machiavelli wurde 1807 in der Zeitschrift Vesta veröffentlicht, um zur »Ehrenrettung eines braves Mannes« beizutragen. Ein Jahr später wurden einige Passagen am Anfang seiner Reden an die deutsche Nation neu aufgelegt. Fichtes Bewunderung für Machiavelli als politischen Denker scheint schwer erklären zu sein, weil es um zwei entgegengesetzte politische Konzeptionen geht. Es gibt jedoch keinen Widerspruch zwischen Fichtes Lobrede auf Machiavelli als politischen Denker, der die Dämonie der Macht entdeckt hat, und seiner eigenen entgegengesetzten Lehre von der Entdämonisierung der Macht. Für Fichte enthält das Buch Vom Fürsten eine politische Theorie, die für die Vergangenheit der Menschheit vollkommen gültig ist, während er durch seine Lehre von der Entdämonisierung der Macht durch eine neue Art der Erziehung die Zukunft im Auge hat. Für ihn ist Machiavelli ein tiefgründiger Kenner des Menschen und der Gesellschaft, der wie ein Arzt der Kultur alle moralischen Krankheiten der Menscheit sehr genau diagnostiziert hat. (shrink)

This paper argues that the practical reach and ethical impact of the One Health paradigm is conditional on satisfactorily distinguishing between interconnected and interdependent factors among human, non-human, and environmental health. Interconnection does not entail interdependence. Offering examples of interconnections and interdependence in the context of existing One Health literature, we demonstrate that the conversations about One Health do not yet sufficiently differentiate between those concepts. They tend to either ignore such distinctions or embrace bioethically untenable positions. We conclude that (...) careful conceptual differentiation can prevent One Health stakeholders either from overreaching or under-reaching the practical and ethical boundaries of this developing paradigm. (shrink)

This paper investigates how the distribution of negative polarity items can inform our understanding of the underlying semantic representation of constituent questions. It argues that the distribution of NPIs in questions is governed by the same logical properties that govern their distribution in declarative constructions. Building on an observation due to Guerzoni and Sharvit that strength of exhaustivity in questions correlates with the acceptability of NPIs, I propose a revision of the semantics of questions that can explain this link in (...) terms already familiar from the literature of negative polarity, namely the availability of a local downward entailing environment. I argue for a new theory of questions that takes strength of exhaustivity to be encoded internal to the question nucleus rather than in different answer-hood operators. This switch, while conceptually a simple move, has far-reaching consequences in the domain of questions. I also show how this new analysis can account for a host of issues related to NPIs, such as the subject–object asymmetry noted by Han and Siegel, the interaction between NPIs and high versus low wh-adjuncts, the varying acceptability of NPIs in the restrictor of which-phrases, and the contrast between weak and strong NPIs. (shrink)

Biodiversity has become one of the most important conservation values that drive our ecological management and directly inform our environmental policy. This paper highlights the dangers of strategically appropriating concepts from ecological sciences and also of uncritically inserting them into conservation debates as unqualified normative landmarks. Here, I marshal evidence from a cutting-edge research program in microbial ecology, which shows that if species richness is our major normative target, then we are faced with extraordinary ethical implications. This example challenges our (...) well-received beliefs about biodiversity and it invites us to critically rethink the nature of this concept so that a more robust understanding of biodiversity and of its role in conservation policy could emerge. (shrink)

This article takes the following two assumptions for granted: first, that gifts influence physicians and, second, that the influences gifts have on physicians may be harmful for patients. These assumptions are common in the applied ethics literature, and they prompt an obvious practical question, namely, what is the best way to mitigate the negative effects? We examine the negative effects of gift giving in depth, considering how the influence occurs, and we assert that the ethical debate surrounding gift-giving practices must (...) be reoriented. Our main claim is that the failure of recent policies addressing gift giving can be traced to a misunderstanding of what psychological mechanisms are most likely to underpin physicians’ biased behavior as a result of interaction with the medical industry. The problem with gift giving is largely not a matter of malicious or consciously self-interested behavior, but of well-intentioned actions on the part of physicians that are nonetheless perniciously infected by the presence of the medical industry. Substantiating this claim will involve elaboration on two points. First, we will retrace the history of policies regarding gift giving between the medical profession and the medical industry and highlight how most policies assume a rationalistic view of moral agency. Reliance on this view of agency is best illustrated by past attempts to address gift giving in terms of conflicts of interest. Second, we will introduce and motivate an alternate view of moral agency emerging from recent literature in social psychology on implicit social cognition. We will show that proper consideration of implicit social cognition paints a picture of human psychology at odds with the rationalistic model assumed in discussions of COIs. With these two pieces on the table we will be able to show that, without fully appreciating the social-psychological mechanisms of implicit cognition, policy-makers are likely to overlook significant aspects of how gifts influence doctors. (shrink)

Regarded from a different perspective, the same values appear somewhat reversed. This phenomenon was explained by the authors who, following Oswald Spengler, associated culture with space more strongly by resorting to the terminology of optics and, also, by analogies with certain optical phenomena. This essay goes on the same path. The reversed image of the values regarded through a certain "Lebensgefühl" represents an iconostrophia of the spirit.

Power demonism - or the demonic nature of power - is a phenomenon found everywhere one can identify a political power center. Niccolo Machiavelli is the person who revealed clearly for the first time the nature of power demonism. Paradoxically, far from being himself a demonic being-- a description which Goethe ascribed to the meaning of this term - the author of The Prince was just a realistic theoretician of his time. Power demonism is the ability of the politician to (...) create the general conditions to achieve political power from the dark side of the individual. This phenomenon evidently has a destructive potential. (shrink)

Theoreticians of civilization have defined a series of anomalies of the European culture as cultural maladies. But this notion was used from author to author with very different meanings, being vaguely defined or used as a simple metaphor. In the ideological discourse of the Third Reich the references to the maladies of the European culture are frequently correlated to the references to the savior Reich. The present study suggests the concept of axiological malady in order to designate more precisely a (...) series of unhealthy phenomenon of the European culture, for instance the puerilism. (shrink)

Axioclasm, or the tendency to destroy all values in the name of only one that eventually wins the heart of a certain person, like a demon, is the central idea contained in this essay. Unlike all other axiological illnesses, axiological blindness and tyranny of the values transform the affected person by turning them into an axioclast or, in other words, a destroyer of values on behalf of the one that suddenly becomes a simulacrum of divinity.

This paper is about Cervante's hero, Don Quijote, who is not, axiological speaking, a comical character, as he was usually viewed, but a profound and tragicfigure. He is the idealist who believes sincerely in the high values and ideals and fights for their accomplishment. Don Quijote is like a mirror in which is reflected the moral pettiness of the others, and this is the reason for his hard punishment. The reputation of the nicest crazy man on earth represents such punishment.

Apart from what this word is usually known to mean (besides the known meanings of the term), the CLAQUE was in the history of the theatre a form of manipulation of the evaluation judgements and a way of corrupting the public’s taste. Infiltrated in the theatre hall, in the middle of the „innocent” audience, the CLAQUERS applauded when their chief told them to, in order to give the impression that the play was a huge succes. They did it for the (...) money. Taking into account this phenomenon, we can say that in the whole history of culture and, of course, on the „stage” of the world as well, the CLAQUE was always present. The CLAQUE as a cultural phenomenon is, almost each time, the price of succes. (shrink)

During the Nazi regime, Immanuel Kant was the most studied German philosopher. The most important in this context is the theory of the genius and of thecreation of the genius that is developed especially in the Critique of Judgement. Kant defines the genius as the natural capacity of the personality to impose its own rules to the art. The Nazi ideologists had invoked this fact to justify philosophically the right of the Führer to impose its own rules to the art (...) of politics. This is the reason of the attempt of the Nazi propaganda to project in the public conscience the image of one genius leader who, like the genius artist, imposes his own rules to the politics. (shrink)

The presentation of nihilism as a phenomenon integrated in the category of illnesses is very common in the scientific literature. This paper is centered on the fact that nihilism is a major disease of the axiological conscience, an illness that can be diagnosed and treated by the philosopher like a ‘physician of culture’.

Although it is been more than a century since the appearance of Max Weber’s famous essay about the objective character of knowledge in the field of social and political sciences, it still continues to attract the interest of researchers in the various cultural sciences. There is a whole secondary literature dedicated to concepts that Weber has not defined clearly enough, such as Idealtypus [ideal type], historisches Individuum [historical individual], Wertbeziehung [value-relation] or Werturteilsfreiheit [the freedom from value- judgement] ( Oakes, 1990 (...) ). Our contribution falls into this category; since the phrase ‘axiological memory’ appears nowhere in Weber’s work, the concept itself is present, especially in his essays dedicated to methodology in the social and political sciences. As Guy Oakes noted, Weber did not always endeavour to argue his thesis rigorously, thus leaving ample room for the interpretation and development of his ideas. (shrink)

Goethe's philosophy of creativity revolves around what he called das Dämonische. This essay is not meant as a definition or an explanation of demonic creation, but instead presents a demonic work par excellence, as the term "demonic" is defined by Goethe in the Elegy from Marienbad. The process of the creation of this work, as it is described by Goethe, also represents a strange exorcism, as the entire daemonic creative force of the author is transposed in this lyrical masterpiece of (...) German and universal literature. After writing the Elegy Goethe, it is no longer demonic. (shrink)

Theoreticians of civilization have defined a series of anomalies of the European culture as cultural maladies. But this notion was used from author to author with very different meanings, being vaguely defined or used as a simple metaphor. In the ideological discourse of the Third Reich the references to the maladies of the European culture are frequently correlated to the references to the savior Reich. The present study suggests the concept of axiological malady in order to designate more precisely a (...) series of unhealthy phenomenon of the European culture, for instance the puerilism. (shrink)

Dominant views about the nature of health and disease in bioethics and the philosophy of medicine have presumed the existence of a fixed, stable, individual organism as the bearer of health and disease states, and as such, the appropriate target of medical therapy and ethical concern. However, recent developments in microbial biology, neuroscience, the philosophy of cognitive science, and social and personality psychology (Ickes...

This paper addresses the topic of bioethics in reproductive medicine from the perspective of the religious implications for the field. The assumption underlying the approach is that religion remains a factor that influences the field of bioethics even in a secularized postmodern society. The first part of the paper analyses the main bioethical issues which mark obstetrics and gynecology, uttering that the four basic principles of bioethics are available both in obstetrics and gynecology and must be applied in association with (...) the practitioner’s virtues. The second part of the paper focuses on the main directions that guide the debate on the presence of religion in the field of bioethics, with a special interest in their relevance for reproductive medicine. Despite the difficulties implied by the task of advocating for the place of religion at the secular table of deliberation in medical ethics, the relevance of religion for bioethics cannot be ignored. (shrink)

The advent of CRISPR has drastically moved the possibility of genetically modifying human genomes from the space of science fiction into nearby reality. Whether one considers the positive results f...