Computers are increasingly interactive. They are no more transformational systems producing a final output after a finite execution. Instead, they continuously react in time to external events that modify the course of computing execution. While philosophers have been interested in conceptualizing computers for a long time, they seem to have paid little attention to the specificities of interactive computing. We propose to tackle this issue by surveying the literature in theoretical computer science, where one can find explicit proposals for a (...) model of interactive computing. In that field, the formal modelling of interactive computing systems has been brought down to whether the new interaction models are reducible to Turing Machines. There are three areas where interaction models are framed. The comparison between TMs and interactive system models is at stake in all of them. These areas are namely some works on concurrency by Milner, on Reactive Turing Machines, and on interaction as a new computing paradigm. For each of the three identified models, we present its motivation, sum up its account for interaction and its legacy, and point out issues regarding the understanding of computers. The survey shows difficulties for epistemologists. The reason is that these analyses focus on the formal equivalence between interactive models of computation and classic ones. Such a project is different from addressing how a computing machine can be interactive: in other words, which mechanisms allow it. (shrink)

In this paper, we address the question of what current computers are from the point of view of human-computer interaction. In the early days of computing, the Turing machine (TM) has been the cornerstone of the understanding of computers. The TM defines what can be computed and how computation can be carried out. However, in the last decades, computers have evolved and increasingly become interactive systems, reacting in real-time to external events in an ongoing loop. We argue that the TM (...) does not provide a mechanistic explanation for interactive computing. The reason is that the fundamental phenomena relevant to interactive computing are out of the scope of classical computability theory. Part of the explanatory power of the TM relies on what we propose to call an execution model. An execution model belongs to a level of abstraction where it is possible to describe both the functional architecture and the execution in mechanistic terms. An updated execution model is warranted to provide the minimal mechanistic description for interactive computation as a counterpart of what the TM could explain regarding Church-Turing computation. It would support an explanation of the ubiquitous computing devices we know - those interacting with humans, e.g., through digital interfaces. We show that such a model is not available within interactive models of computation and that relevant abstractions and concerns are available in computer engineering but need to be identified and gathered. To fill this void, we propose to reflect on the level of abstraction required to support the mechanistic description of an interactive execution and propose some preliminary requirements. (shrink)

This paper presents the hypothesis that concept possession is sufficient and necessary for self-consciousness. If this is true it provides a yardstick for gauging the validity of different research paradigms in which claims for self-consciousness in animals or human infants are made: a convincing demonstration of concept possession in a research subject, such as a display of inferential reasoning, may be taken as conclusive evidence of self-consciousness. Intuitively, there appears to be a correlation between intelligence in animals and the existence (...) of self-consciousness. I present three discussions to support the hypothesis: an analogy between perception and conception, where both are self-specifying; an argument that any web of concepts will always include the self-concept; and a fresh interpretation of Bermũdez showing how his theory of non-conceptual content provides strong support for the concept possession hypothesis. (shrink)

Local sustainable food systems have captured the popular imagination as a progressive, if not radical, pillar of a sustainable food future. Yet these grassroots innovations are embedded in a dominant food regime that reflects productivist, industrial, and neoliberal policies and institutions. Understanding the relationship between these emerging grassroots efforts and the dominant food regime is of central importance in any transition to a more sustainable food system. In this study, we examine the encounters of direct farm marketers with food safety (...) regulations and other government policies and the role of this interface in shaping the potential of local food in a wider transition to sustainable agri-food systems. This mixed methods research involved interview and survey data with farmers and ranchers in both the USA and Canada and an in-depth case study in the province of Manitoba. We identified four distinct types of interactions between government and farmers: containing, coopting, contesting, and collaborating. The inconsistent enforcement of food safety regulations is found to contain progressive efforts to change food systems. While government support programs for local food were helpful in some regards, they were often considered to be inadequate or inappropriate and thus served to coopt discourse and practice by primarily supporting initiatives that conform to more mainstream approaches. Farmers and other grassroots actors contested these food safety regulations and inadequate government support programs through both individual and collective action. Finally, farmers found ways to collaborate with governments to work towards mutually defined solutions. While containing and coopting reflect technologies of governmentality that reinforce the status quo, both collaborating and contesting reflect opportunities to affect or even transform the dominant regime by engaging in alternative economic activities as part of the ‘politics of possibility’. Developing a better understanding of the nature of these interactions will help grassroots movements to create effective strategies for achieving more sustainable and just food systems. (shrink)

La Déclaration des droits de l'homme nous est familière. Mais de quel homme parle-t-on? L'homme/esprit des Lumières ou l'homme/matière des sciences? En discutant ces deux approches, l'objectif de cet ouvrage est de réfléchir sur la particularité ontologique de chaque existence humaine. À partir d'exemples tirés de l'actualité juridique et politique, ce livre insiste sur la quête de sens inhérente à toute entreprise humaine. Être humain est un effort pour chacun, ce n'est pas un acquis. " Devenir humain " signifie lutter (...) pour trouver les valeurs de l'existence humaine. Le but de l'auteur est de montrer que l'être humain est constitué par le devenir. Sa vision du vivant redonne alors une place au finalisme : la vie n'est pas due au hasard. (shrink)

This article renders a close reading of those passages in Walter Benjamin's work where he uses the term “unscheinbar.” Arguing that this concept cannot be reduced to its privative prefix “un-,” the article explores how moments in time, objects or images that are not meaningful in themselves can nevertheless trigger an experience that is to be called such. The article analyzes Benjamin's ideas on friendliness, commemoration, melancholy, mémoire involontaire and photography with the purpose of understanding how a detail or fragment (...) strikes us as significant, despite the fact that it cannot become visible as a unity or whole in its own right. (shrink)

Since at least the mid-1980s claims have been made for rationality in rats. For example, that rats are capable of inferential reasoning (Blaisdell, Sawa, Leising, & Waldmann, 2006; Bunsey & Eichenbaum, 1996), or that they can make adaptive decisions about future behavior (Foote & Crystal, 2007), or that they are capable of knowledge in propositional-like form (Dickinson, 1985). The stakes are rather high, because these capacities imply concept possession and on some views (e.g., Rödl, 2007; Savanah, 2012) rationality indicates self-consciousness. (...) I evaluate the case for rat rationality by analyzing 5 key research paradigms: spatial navigation, metacognition, transitive inference, causal reasoning, and goal orientation. I conclude that the observed behaviors need not imply rationality by the subjects. Rather, the behavior can be accounted for by noncognitive processes such as hard-wired species typical predispositions or associative learning or (nonconceptual) affordance detection. These mechanisms do not necessarily require or implicate the capacity for rationality. As such there is as yet insufficient evidence that rats can reason. I end by proposing the ‘Staircase Test,’ an experiment designed to provide convincing evidence of rationality in rats. (shrink)

We argue that the economic evaluation of health care (cost–benefit analysis) should respect individual preferences and should incorporate distributional considerations. Relying on individual preferences does not imply subjective welfarism. We propose a particular non-welfarist approach, based on the concept of equivalent income, and show how it helps to define distributional weights. We illustrate the feasibility of our approach with empirical results from a pilot survey.

La question des instincts est une voie d’entrée privilégiée pour le rapport du pragmatisme au naturalisme. Le problème que soulève la théorie des instincts de William James et John Dewey vient du maintien, à première vue surprenant, de l’idée d’une « nature humaine ». Je soutiens que c’est au sein même de la théorie pragmatiste des instincts que l’on trouve des arguments pour montrer que la nature humaine ne détermine pas univoquement la conduite. Bien comprendre la naturalité de l’être humain (...) suffit à défaire toute tentative pour l’ériger en source d’autorité des principes de la conduite. (shrink)

La raison d'État de la Renaissance émerge à partir de la transformation de l'ordre juridique médiéval. Sur les ruines du droit naturel, s'affirme une première raison d'État qui se revendique comme un droit fondé dans la nécessité. À l'opposé, le traité Della Ragione di Stato de Giovanni Botero refonde l'ordre juridique pour maîtriser cette nécessité. La raison d'État botérienne se rattache ainsi à un mouvement général de reconstruction de l'ordre juridique, auquel participent Machiavel ou Bodin.

D'abord, la " Nature ", avec ses composantes bigarrées, ses lois inexorables et ses principes aveugles ; et puis, au-dessus d'elle, la supplantant, l'écrasant, la " Société ", recueil des expressions de l'ingéniosité humaine, somme des arrangements plus ou moins fiables dont nous avons convenu entre nous. Ce schéma dualiste, dans lequel se concentre une partie de l'héritage idéaliste de la pensée philosophique occidentale, a joué un rôle central dans l'autocompréhension historique de la modernité. Certains hommes seraient devenus, justement, modernes, (...) et ils auraient conféré cette qualité éminente à leurs idées, en particulier aux savoirs qu'ils se proposaient de développer, en séparant de façon tranchante Nature et Société. Ce faisant, ils les auraient rendues, dit-on, pensables l'une et l'autre. Le présent ouvrage prend le contre-pied de cette conception en développant deux motifs. Premièrement : la " modernité " s'est aussi construite autour de positions qui insistaient sur l'appartenance des êtres humains à l'ordre englobant de la Nature, qui, par exemple, illustraient la continuité entre les savoirs visant le corps organique et le corps social. Deuxièmement : cette modernité-là ne rompt nullement avec l'Antiquité. Car les Grecs et les latins n'ont pas seulement institué ce partage ; ils se sont aussi inquiétés de sa valeur et de ses limites - ils l'ont discuté, déplacé, dissout, refonde, à mesure qu'ils entendaient justifier de nouveaux savoirs, les séparer d'autres ou les unir en de nouvelles continuités. Ainsi se substitue à la césure moderne le temps long d'une histoire où la multiplicité des façons de faire et de défaire cette frontière accompagne depuis l'Antiquité la production des savoirs. Nous héritons dès lors d'une autre histoire que celle que nous nous sommes racontée. Faudra-t-il renoncer à trier les êtres ou les processus selon qu'ils paraissent relever plutôt de l'existence naturelle ou de l'artificialité sociale ? Il suffira de désinvestir ce geste : lui rendre sa juste mesure, celle de n'être qu'un moyen, tout aussi utile que le geste opposé, lorsque l'on veut faire paraître des objets de pratique ou de connaissance, selon leurs discontinuités plutôt que leurs continuités. Aucune thèse dogmatique ne sort donc du travail de déprise auquel incite cet ouvrage. Peut-être une conviction : l'avenir de notre interprétation philosophique du " social " tiendra probablement beaucoup à notre capacité à le rapprocher du " naturel ", c'est-à-dire à dévoiler la masse des liens d'appartenance, de dépendance, de continuité, d'analogie, d'entrelacement, qui le rattachent à ce que l'on avait pris à tort pour son autre absolu. (shrink)

Entre les abstractions de l'anthropologie et les approximations de l'humanitarisme, il n'est qu'un seul chemin pour retrouver l'humanité qui s'éloigne: l'exactitude philosophique. La Renaissance italienne guide ces recherches, qui tentent d'imposer une clarté historique à des principes vagues et d'opposer des principes clairs à la fuite des idées.

Alors que la figure de l’intellectuel chrétien semble aujourd’hui en difficulté de légitimité dans les débats publics en France, il y a un intérêt à s’intéresser à André Dumas (1918-1996), aujourd’hui relativement oublié, qui fut un des intellectuels protestants les plus connus en France de son vivant. Les gestes de son éthique dans le débat public montrent comment il passe d’une figure intellectuelle à une autre : intellectuel universel, officiel, organique, traditionnel, spécifique... Étudier cette mobilité est une manière de reprendre (...) les débats sur la place et le rôle de l’intellectuel, au-delà, de la seule figure de l’intellectuel chrétien. (shrink)

Foucault’s Forgotten Marxism. This article tries to point out several methodological issues concerning Foucault’s Surveiller et punir, such as the equivocal status of some of Foucault’s main concepts, or the assumed homogeneity of the various disciplinary institutions analyzed in this book. And it aims at suggesting that such issues might find a solution, should one consider the Marxist background on which, as the Lectures at the Collège de France of the year 1973 clearly show, Foucault’s theories were dependant. In the (...) opinion of the author, only in as much as this heritage is accepted and seriously taken into account, shall Foucault’s concepts and theses regain their political and critical pertinence. (shrink)

Why is there a specific problem with biological individuality? Because the living realm contains a wide range of exotic particular concrete entities that do not easily match our ordinary concept of an individual. Slime moulds, dandelions, siphonophores are among the Odd Entities that excite the ontological zeal of the philosophers of biology. Most of these philosophers, however, seem to believe that these Odd Cases oblige us to refine or revise our common concept of an individual. They think, explicitly or tacitly, (...) that to be a living, evolutionary entity is to be a living individual. In this paper, we explore an alternative proposal: the variety and oddity of the forms of the living realm might be ontologically regimented through an increase in the categorial complexity of the living realm, by admitting, beside living individuals, living non-individuals or by acknowledging, more generally, that the evolutionary development of the living forms is not necessarily a process of building individuals, that life is not necessarily individuals-oriented. We claim that, from an ontological point of view, the spectacle of the living realm obliges us to take aggregativity seriously. (shrink)

ArgumentThis paper aims to understand the emergence of comparative anatomy in the eighteenth century in the Parisian Académie Royale des Sciences. As early as the 1670s, a program centered on animal anatomy was conceived, which was a first attempt to give some autonomy to studies on animals and to link anatomy with natural history, but it declined after 1690. However, a variety of studies on animals was published in theMémoiresof the Académie during the eighteenth century. We propose a descriptive typology (...) of them in order to explore the status of animals and the significance of anatomy in each type, and to determine, in particular, which elements of Perrault's program were passed on at the Académie throughout the century. We discuss the influence of this legacy on the development of comparative anatomy after 1750, especially in Daubenton's work. (shrink)

Marsilio Ficino, fonti, testi, fortuna, convegno svoltosi à Firenze nell'ottobre del 1999, viene a chiudere la serie degli incontri internazionali coordinati dal Comitato Internazionale Marsilio Ficino e ora pubblicati a Londra e a Parigi. Il volume offre le versioni aggiornate delle conferenze pubbliche tenute all'Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento in quella occasione sull'opera ed il pensiero di Ficino, dal Quattrocento al Seicento. Il suo taglio prevalentemente filologico costituisce un imprescindibile complemento alle pubblicazioni del 1984-86, sempre in onore del Ficino, (...) di cui arrichisce le conclusioni con nuove prospettive di ricerca e nuove scoperte sul maggior filosofo del Quattrocento italiano. Un indice dei nomi agevola la consultazione del lettore, che troverà in questo libro uno strumento di ricerca fondamentale. (shrink)

We provide a simple translation of the satisfiability problem for regular grammar logics with converse into GF2, which is the intersection of the guarded fragment and the 2-variable fragment of first-order logic. The translation is theoretically interesting because it translates modal logics with certain frame conditions into first-order logic, without explicitly expressing the frame conditions. It is practically relevant because it makes it possible to use a decision procedure for the guarded fragment in order to decide regular grammar logics with (...) converse. The class of regular grammar logics includes numerous logics from various application domains. A consequence of the translation is that the general satisfiability problem for every regular grammar logics with converse is in EXPTIME. This extends a previous result of the first author for grammar logics without converse. Other logics that can be translated into GF2 include nominal tense logics and intuitionistic logic. In our view, the results in this paper show that the natural first-order fragment corresponding to regular grammar logics is simply GF2 without extra machinery such as fixed-point operators. (shrink)

In this short piece I defend my position on self-consciousness against the objections raised by Dow and Musholt to a paper in the same issue. These are that (1) Bermudez’s (1998) The Paradox of Self-Consciousness broadly supports the CP Hypothesis; (2) the self-concept requires no further complexity than knowledge of one’s own existence and capacity to take deliberate action; (3) understanding the idea of a perceiver requires understanding the concept of an agent that performs the action of perception; (4) Dow (...) dismisses the possibility of scrub jay self-consciousness too readil. (shrink)

Lacepède was a key figure in the French intellectual world from the Old Regime to the Restoration, sinc e he was not only a scientist, but also a musician, a writer, and a politician. His brilliant career is a good example of the progress of the social status of scientists in France around 1800. In the life sciences, he was considered the heir to Buffon and continued the latter’s Histoire naturelle, but he also borrowed ideas from anti-Buffonian scientists. He broached (...) many important subjects such as the nature of man, the classification of animals, the concept of species, and the history of the Earth. All these topics led to tensions in the French sciences, but Lacepède dealt with them in a consensual, indeed even ambiguous way. For example, he held transformist views, but his concept of evolution was far less precise and daring than Lamarck’s contemporaneous attempts. His somewhat confused eclecticism allowed him to be accepted by opposing camps of the French scientific community at that time and makes his case interesting for historians, since the opinions of such an opportunistic figure can illuminate the figure of the French intellectual better than more original works could do. In turn, Lacepède’s important social and scientific position gave his views a significant visibility. In this sense, his contributions probably exerted an influence, in particular with regard to the emergence of transformist theories. (shrink)

The article aims at assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the objections to Habermas’s epistemic conception of democracy raised by Thomas McCarthy in some of his essays. The author defends two ideas. First, he contends that McCarthy is mistaken in believing that democratic debates would not be a matter of consensus. In this regard, two arguments are raised, showing that the search for agreement and consensus by citizens in public forums can hardly be dismissed and that consensus can be invested (...) with many meanings in democratic life. Secondly, however, the author approves McCarthy when challenging Habermas’s epistemic claims regarding his theory of democracy. Not all democratic deliberations can be analysed in epistemic terms, in particular, debates on values. The pitfalls of any epistemic account of this form of deliberation are pointed out in the end of the essay. (shrink)

In this paper, I propose a reductive account of intentions which I call a gate-based reductive account. In contrast with other reductive accounts, however, the reductive basis of this account is not limited to desires, beliefs and judgments. I suggest that an intention is a complex state in which a predominant desire toward a plan is not inhibited by a gate mechanism whose function is to assess the comparison of our desires given the stakes at hand. To vindicate this account, (...) I rely on several considerations: the similarity between epistemic feelings and the feeling of being decided that tells us that we have an intention, the necessity of postulating a gate mechanism to explain our hesitating behavior, and the tight link that exists between the realization of our actions and our desires. In agreement with non-reductivists, I nevertheless acknowledge that intentions encompass plans, although I emphasize that the planning capacity must also be dependent on our motivational life and the general evaluative mechanisms that explains our emotions. (shrink)

While the self-representation of our bodies is a key element in our belief that we are autonomous individuals with a “first-person perspective,” the term body image covers and has covered a variety of meanings. In neurology, this term currently designates the verbal representation of the body parts. Psychoanalysis considers body image as intertwining the imaginary and symbolic aspects of identity, and insists on its dependence on the Other’s regard; this link to regard appears in the term specular image. This paper (...) first presents a history of the modern psychiatrical, psychological and neurological conceptions of own-body representation. Next, it considers applications of the Lacanian notion of specular image in neurological disorders of body image. (shrink)

It is often suggested that emotions are intrinsically normative or that they have conditions of correctness that are intrinsic. In order to assess this thesis, I consider whether the main argument in favor of the normativity of belief can be transposed to emotions. In the case of belief, the argument is that when we wonder whether to believe that p, we acknowledge that we must abide by some norms. This is understood as showing that these norms are intrinsic to the (...) concept of belief. In contrast, it appears that no similar constraint applies when we deliberate about emotions. Indeed, I argue that extrinsic norms are suf ficient to understand thoroughly the normativity of emotions. Therefore, the postulation of intrinsic norms or correctness conditions seems unmotivated. Worse, if emotions had intrinsic norms or correctness conditions, they would manifest themselves when we wonder whether an emotion is appropriate in this or that context. But they don’t. (shrink)

L'aptitude a dire Je est une des remarques distinctives de la subjectivite: si un caillou se mettait a nous parler de lui-meme, nous pourrions difficilement, l'etonnement dissipe, ne pas le tenir pour une personne. Toutefois, pour beaucoup de philosophes, cette aptitude a dire je n'est que l'une des manifestations d'une aptitude plus profonde et plus generale de la conscience de soi. Une creature ne pourrait parler de soi que parce qu'elle serait consciente de soi et c'est cette aptitude a la (...) conscience de soi qui constiturait l'essence de la subjectivite. On se propose de renverser ici cet order de preseance et de montrer que la subjectivite est identique a l'aptitude a dire je. L'egologie n'est pas le signe ou la manifestation de la subjectivite, mais son essence meme et la conscience de soi n'est rien d'autre que la pensee egologique. Il en resulte qu'une conscience, dont le langage ne contriendrait nul marqueur de la premiere personne, ne serait pas un sujet. Mais un langage pourrait-il ne pas contenir de marquer de la premiere personne? Etait-il possible que nous ne fussion pas des sujets? Une exsitence impersonnelle est-elle possible? (shrink)

Il ne subsiste aucun vestige de la charpente du temple d’Apollon construit à Delphes durant le ive s. av. J.‑C., ni de bloc comportant des réservations pour l’appui des poutres. En revanche, de nombreux passages des comptes de construction mentionnent des pièces en bois et font état de travaux sur les parties hautes du monument. Nous présentons ici un commentaire de ces inscriptions qui s’articule autour de trois objectifs principaux : déterminer la destination et la fonction des pièces de bois (...) ; analyser le vocabulaire technique ; établir la chronologie des travaux dans les parties hautes du temple. Au‑delà d’une étude centrée sur l’architecture delphique, le corpus mobilisé contribue à la caractérisation des techniques de charpente et à la connaissance du déroulement des chantiers d’architecture monumentale en Grèce ancienne. (shrink)

Smallholder farmers in Rattanakmondol District, Battambang Province, Cambodia face challenges related to soil erosion, declining yields, climate change, and unsustainable tillage-based farming practices in their efforts to increase food production within maize-based systems. In 2010, research for development programs began introducing agricultural production systems based on conservation agriculture to smallholder farmers located in four communities within Rattanakmondol District as a pathway for addressing these issues. Understanding gendered practices and perspectives is integral to adapting CA technologies to the needs of local (...) communities. This research identifies how gender differences regarding farmers’ access to assets, practices, and engagement in intra-household negotiations could constrain or facilitate the dissemination of CA. Our mixed-methods approach includes focus group discussions, semi-structured interviews, famer field visits, and a household survey. Gender differences in access to key productive assets may affect men’s and women’s individual ability to adapt CA. Farmers perceive the practices and technologies of CA as labor-saving, with the potential to reduce men’s and women’s labor burden in land-preparation activities. However, when considered in relation to the full array of productive and reproductive livelihood activities, CA can disproportionately affect men’s and women’s labor. Decisions about agricultural livelihoods were not always made jointly, with socio-cultural norms and responsibilities structuring an individual’s ability to participate in intra-household negotiations. While gender differences in power relations affect intra-household decision-making, men and women household members collectively negotiate the transition to CA-based production systems. (shrink)

Two features are often assumed about emotions: they are intentional states and they are experiences. However, there are important reasons to consider some affective responses that are not experienced or only partly experienced as emotions. But the existence of these affective responses does not sit well with the intentionality of conscious emotions which are somehow geared towards their object. We therefore face a trilemma: either these latter affective responses do not have intentional objects and we should renounce intentionality as a (...) defining feature of emotions; or we have to explain how they actually have intentional, though unconscious, objects; or after all we must deny that they are really emotions. I suggest that the second option is the correct one: we can provide an account of the intentionality of unconscious emotions and its relation to the intentionality of conscious emotions. To do this, I rely on neuropsychological studies that distinguish two kinds of attention: salience as enriched treatment, and focus as a way of turning our attention. Then, given that only salience is always present in unconscious emotional phenomena, I suggest that emotions are intentional because they involve an object being made salient. I further argue that this feature of emotions explains why unconscious and conscious emotions can be taken as organized around their object. Finally, I defend this account against several objections, showing that the account can be applied whatever the cognitive base of the emotions may be and is not falsified by the fact that attentional aspects of emotions may vary in other dimensions. (shrink)

Following Meinong, many philosophers have been attracted by the view that emotions have intrinsically evaluative correctness conditions. On one version of this view, emotions have evaluative contents. On another version, emotions are evaluative attitudes; they are evaluative at the level of intentional mode rather than content. We raise objections against the latter version, showing that the only two ways of implementing it are hopeless. Either emotions are manifestly evaluative or they are not. In the former case, the Attitudinal View threatens (...) to collapse into the Perception View or any other view according to which emotions are evaluative at the level of content. In the latter case, the Attitudinal View does not stand up to an obvious alternative, namely that emotions can only be assessed with respect to extrinsic norms or conditions of correctness. (shrink)

The basic premise of the host‐defense theory is that genomic imprinting, the parent‐of‐origin expression of a subset of mammalian genes, derives from mechanisms originally dedicated to silencing repeated and retroviral‐like sequences that deeply colonized mammalian genomes. We propose that large clusters of tandemly‐repeated C/D‐box small nucleolar RNAs (snoRNAs) or microRNAs represent a novel category of sequences recognized as “genomic parasites”, contributing to the emergence of genomic imprinting in a subset of chromosomal regions that contain them. Such a view is supported (...) by evidence derived from studies of the imprinted snoRNA‐ and/or miRNA‐encoding Dlk1‐Dio3, Snurf‐Snrpn, Sfbmt2, and C19MC domains. While adding a new piece to the challenging puzzle of mammalian genome history, this hypothesis also reinforces the notion that dissecting the features and molecular mechanisms that discriminate between “foreign” and “endogenous” sequences is of crucial importance in the field of mammalian epigenetics. (shrink)

The state subvention and distribution of health care not only jeopardize the financial sustainability of the state, but also restrict without a conclusive rational basis the freedom of patients to decide how much health care and of what quality is worth what price. The dominant biopolitics of European health care supports a healthcare monopoly in the hands of the state and the medical profession, which health care should be opened to the patient’s authority to deal directly for better basic health (...) care. In a world where it is impossible for all to receive equal access to the best of basic health care, one must critically examine the plausible scope of the authority of the state to limit access to better basic health care. Classical distributive justice affords a basis for re-examining the current European ideology of equality, human dignity, and solidarity that supports healthcare systems with unsustainable egalitarian concerns. (shrink)

In this paper, I explain the processes undergone by the producer of an awoval. The conditions of its possibility and its effects on the subjet itself through the effects on those to whom the avowal is addressed. I finally wonder to what extent it may be considered a moral transformation.

Les récents débats autour du délit de manipulation mentale amènent à s'interroger sur la notion d'influence et sur l'impact des recherches faites dans ce domaine. Ce délit repose sur l'idée que des techniques de manipulation efficaces existent et que par leur utilisation, on pourrait manipuler autrui. Suivant cette conception asymétrique de l'influence, la cible devient l'instrument du désir de la source et dans ce cas, il est nécessaire de se protéger de ces influences qui peuvent être néfastes. Si des travaux (...) expérimentaux de psychologie sociale montrent l'efficacité de certaines techniques d'influence et de manipulation, ils doivent cependant être mis en perspective. Nombre d'expériences et de théories montrent que l'influence n'est fondamentalement pas un rapport asymétrique. Mais hélas, ces travaux sont négligés tant ils ne cadrent pas avec ce prototype de l'influence qui domine à la fois en psychologie sociale et dans le sens commun.Recent debate on the abuse of mental manipulation has raised questions about the concept of influence and the impact of the research in this field. This abuse is based on the idea that with effective techniques of manipulation can be used to mentally control others. According to this asymmetrical model of influence, the target becomes the instrument of the desire of the source and therefore must be protected from such dangerous and negative influences. If certain experiments in social psychology show the effectiveness of certain techniques of influence and manipulation, such effects must be analyzed with due care. Many experiments and theories show that influence is not essentially asymmetrical. Unfortunately, such studies tend to be ignored because they differ from the accepted model of influence which dominates both in social psychology and in common sense. (shrink)

Que l’idéologie raciste nazie ait pu engendrer la Shoah relève de l’évidence, la plus effrayante sans aucun doute de toute l’histoire du XXe siècle. Que des juristes catholiques et patriotes aient pu se montrer les complices actifs de la persécution des Juifs ne s’explique que dans le contexte d’une IIIe République déchirée et agonisante, accouchant du régime de Vichy. Mais..

Résumé — Au début du traité Della ragione di Stato, Boreto déclare son opposition résolue au machiavélisme. Il récuse en effet une conception de la raison d’État fondée sur l’immoralisme, sur la transgression répétée des commandements divins. Mais Botero ne prône pas un simple retour à une fondation théologique du politique. Il reprend plutôt à son compte, sous le nom de raison d’État, une conception du politique délivrée de toute relation à la moralité transcendante venue de Dieu, une conception amorale (...) telle que Machiavel l’envisageait déjà. Et dans cette perspective il introduit la distinction entre raison d’État ordinaire et raison d’État extraordinaire et prétend montrer de quelle manière une raison d’État ordinaire, pourtant conduite par le seul désir de domination, peut employer des moyens tout à fait compatibles avec les exigences de la morale chrétienne.— At the beginning of the treatise Della ragione di Stato, Botero claims his determined opposition to Machiavellism. He impugns any notion of the reason of State that would be based on immorality, that is on constant transgression of God’s prescriptions. But Botero doesn’t advocate the return to a theological foundation of politics. He uses the expression ragione di Stato to denote a notion of politics released from every relation to transcendent morality coming from God, an amoral notion that Machiavelli was already contemplating. In this matter, it is necessary to distinguish the ordinary from the extraordinary reason of State, because Botero shows how an ordinary reason of State, even looking for the only domination, is able to work in a way which is in full accordance with Christian morality. (shrink)