Avoiding whinges from various and potentially conflicting stakeholders is a major challenge for sustainable development and for the identification of sustainability scenarios or policies for biodiversity and ecosystem services. It turns out that independently complying with whinge thresholds and constraints of these stakeholders is not sufficient because dynamic ecological-economic interactions and uncertainties occur. Thus more demanding no whinge standards are needed. In this paper, we first argue that these new boundaries can be endogenously exhibited with the mathematical concepts of viability (...) kernel and viable controls. Second, it is shown how these no whinge kernels have components, such as harvesting of resources, that should remain within safe corridor while some other components, in particular biodiversity, have only lower conservation limits. Thus, using radar charts, we show how this no whinge kernels can take the shape of a tree that we name viability tree. These trees of viability capture the idea that the unbounded renewal potential of biodiversity combined with a bounded use of the different ecosystem services are crucial ingredients for the sustainability of socio-ecosystems and the design of no whinge policies reconciling the different stakeholders involved. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn this commentary I suggest that a comparative investigation of Ancient psychological notions may contribute to Professor Lloyd's project of understanding the role that analogy plays in human reasoning. In particular, I propose that the Greek notion of imagination may serve as a starting point. I argue that, because in Platonic and Aristotelian thought the ultimate object of knowledge is form, thinkers working in this paradigm were obliged to introduce a faculty mediating between the senses and the intellect. This is (...) the imagination. Some of the problems associated with Greek conceptions of imagination carry over to the use of analogy. I suggest that because Chinese thought had a very different approach to images and a different approach to the object of knowledge, they did not need to forge a conception of a specific faculty of imagination and were thus in a position to exploit analogies in a way which was rather different from Greeks. (shrink)

La recherche conduite dans le cadre de la thèse de doctorat (CROUZIER 2003) a été focalisée sur l’analyse des liens professionnels tissés entre les dispositifs RASED et les équipes éducatives des écoles primaires. Nous avons co-construit les données nécessaires à leur compréhension et choisi des traitements combinant les avantages du quantitatif et du qualitatif. Nous avons en particulier retenu une approche statistique fondée sur l’analyse statistique textuelle (LEBART SALEM 1994) pour explorer le corpus construit à partir d’entretiens auprès d’un échantillon (...) de professionnels concernés par les aides spécialisées à l’école primaire. Le choix de l’approche statistique s’inscrit dans une conception du raisonnement statistique développée par J.C. Régnier (REGNIER 1998, 2002). L’opérationnalisation du traitement a été rendue possible par le recours à un outil informatique, le logiciel S.P.A.D. (Système Portable de l’Analyse des Données) du CISIA. Cet outil permet de décrypter les corpus obtenus par des méthodes d’analyse factorielle de correspondances multiples. Différentes procédures ont été appliquées aux corpus bruts puis codés. Cette approche “quantiqualitative”, apportant une plus-value interprétative, décrypte de façon singulière la complexité de la collaboration entre acteurs. Abstrac: This PhD dissertation (CROUZIER 2003) focuses on the analysis of the professional relationships between the French institutional comprehensive remedial scheme known as RASED and educational teams in primary schools. We have jointly identified the data relevant to a thorough understanding of such relationships, opting for a method of data processing combining the advantages of both quantitative and qualitative approaches. We have chiefly relied on a specific brand of textual statistics (LEBART SALEM 1994) in order to explore a corpus made up of interviews with the primary school staffs involved in the scheme. The statistical approach accords with the conception of statistical processing developed by JC Regnier (REGNIER 1998, 2002). The processing itself has been engineered thanks to CISIA’s software, known as SPAD (portable data processing system). It has enabled us to decrypt the different types of corpuses through Correspondence Analysis (CA). Both the raw and the coded corpuses have been submitted to different types of processing. The approach, combining quantitative and qualitative elements, opens up on to new powerful interpretative insights and sheds a new light on the intricate network of interaction between the people involved. (shrink)

Eric Weil, who died at Nice on February 1, 1977, was a prominent philosopher and an authority on Hegel. He was born at Parchim on June 6, 1904. From 1922 to 1928 he studied under E. Cassirer at Hamburg and Berlin. His doctoral thesis “Die Philosophie des Pietro Pomponazziz” was published in 1932 in the Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie. In 1933 he migrated to France, received French nationality, took part in World War II, and became a prisoner of war (...) in Germany. From 1946 to 1956 he taught in the Ecole Practique des Hautes Etudes in Paris, graduated again, this time in France, with La Logique de la philosophie, his main work published in 1950, was a professor at the universities of Lille, where he organized the Congress of the Internationale Hegel Vereinigung in 1968, and Nice, received an honorary degree at Munster in 1969. His main works are also: Hegel et l’Etat, Philosophie politique, Philosophie morale, Problemes kantiens, Essais et Conférences. For a complete bibliography up to 1970 see Archives de Philosophie 1970, p. 605–622. He helped to get rid of some false interpretations rejected also emphatically the marxist interpretation of Hegel. For Weil, as for, so he thought, Aristotle and Hegel, philosophy is an endless endeavor to build up a “discours coherent” of reality as a whole. Man is a finite being, needy, compelled to act in order to live but, as he is at the same time reasonable, he may live meaningfully, promote freedom and justice, undertake to understand himself and the whole of reality, even violence and error, and mainly the behavior of other people and their conceptions of the world. As philosophy considers man not as an object but as a subject, it is not a science properly but, mainly as the logic of philosophy, it is as coherent and as strict as a science. Weil disliked “constructivism” - as deducing a system from a “necessary being”, or predicting the course of history. Though he was often a fellow traveller of Hegel, he acknowledged more and more that he felt a kantian, but a “post-hegelian” kantian. (shrink)

The authors consider four aspects of contemporary medical ethics in France: abortion and contraception; artificial insemination; suicide and euthanasia, and drug trials on healthy human volunteers, and then outline the various ethical codes which apply to French doctors. Many in France who accept technological progress are unwilling or unable to acknowledge the impact upon medical ethics of this progress. The conflict is epitomised by the new role being demanded from the doctor. Where formerly he was regarded as the guardian of (...) traditional values today he is urged to adapt, to change, to take account of the technological innovations in medicine. `In such a situation,' the authors ask, `how is it possible to avoid a feeling of uneasiness?'. (shrink)

Investigating Girard's new propositionnal calculus which aims at a large scale study of computation, we stumble quickly on that question: What is a multiplicative connective? We give here a detailed answer together with our motivations and expectations.

Much innovation has taken place in the development of medical schools and licensure exam processes across the African continent. Still, little attention has been paid to education that enables the multidisciplinary, critical thinking needed to understand and help shape the larger social systems in which health care is delivered. Although more than half of medical schools in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States offer at least one medical humanities course, this is less common in Africa. We report on (...) the “liberal arts approach” to medical curricula undertaken by the University of Global Health Equity beginning in 2019. The first six-month semester of the curriculum, called Foundations in Social Medicine, includes courses in critical thinking and communication, African history and global political economy, medical anthropology and social medicine, psychology and health, gender and social justice, information technology and health, and community-based training. Additionally, an inquiry-based pedagogy with relatively small classes is featured within an overall institutional culture that emphasizes health equity. We identify key competencies for physicians interested in pursuing global health equity and how such competencies relate to liberal arts integration into the African medical school curriculum and pedagogical approach. We conclude with a call for a research agenda that can better evaluate the impact of such innovations on physicians’ education and subsequent practices. (shrink)

BackgroundAn analysis of the position statements of secular US medical and surgical professional societies on physician-assisted suicide (PAS) and euthanasia have not been published recently. Available statements were evaluated for position, content, and sentiment.MethodsIn order to create a comprehensive list of secular medical and surgical societies, the results of a systematic search using Google were cross-referenced with a list of societies that have a seat on the American Medical Association House of Delegates. Societies with position statements were identified. These statements (...) were divided into 5 categories: opposed to PAS and/or euthanasia, studied neutrality, supportive, acknowledgement without statement, and no statement. Linguistic analysis was performed using RapidMinder in order to determine word frequency and sentiment respective to individual statements. To ensure accuracy, only statements with word counts > 100 were analyzed. A 2-tailed independentttest was used to test for variance among sentiment scores of opposing and studied neutrality statements.ResultsOf 150 societies, only 12 (8%) have position statements on PAS and euthanasia: 11 for PAS (5 opposing and 4 studied neutrality) and 9 for euthanasia (6 opposing and 2 studied neutrality). Although the most popular words used in opposing and studied neutrality statements are similar, notable exceptions exist (suicide,medicine, andtreatmentappear frequently in opposing statements, but not in studied neutrality statements, whereaspsychologists,law, andindividualsappear frequently in studied neutrality statements, but not in opposing statements). Sentiment scores for opposing and studied neutrality statements do not differ (mean, 0.094 vs. 0.104;P = 0.90).ConclusionsFew US medical and surgical societies have position statements on PAS and euthanasia. Among them, opposing and studied neutrality statements share similar linguistic sentiment. Opposing and studied neutrality statements have clear differences, but share recommendations. Both opposing and studied neutrality statements cite potential risks of PAS legalization and suggest that good palliative care might diminish a patient’s desire for PAS. (shrink)

In this article I argue that among the southern Betsileo slave descendants are essentialised by free descendants. After explaining how this striking case of psychological essentialism manifests in the local context, I provide experimental evidence for it and discuss the results of three cognitive tasks that I ran in the field. I then suggest that slaves were not essentialised in the pre-colonial era and contend that the essentialist construal only became entrenched in the aftermath of the 1896 abolition of slavery, (...) which paradoxically triggered the historical process of essentialisation. (shrink)

This chapter represents an attempt to interpret a fundamental structure in Arabic music, maqām, in terms of Gadamer’s notion of the fusion of horizons. Often translated into English as “mode,” maqām goes beyond pitch set or scale. It is a musical reality, beautiful and fascinating, not well served by traditional theoretical tools, which deserves more attention. I argue, on the one hand, that Gadamerian hermeneutics can illuminate how maqām works, while showing, on the other, how maqām might contribute to a (...) better understanding of Gadamer’s thought. In the context of my overall argument, I deal with Gadamer’s key notions of play, imagination, indeterminacy, the centrality of the question and the notion of ethos. I show how Gadamerian hermeneutics applied to maqām can constribute to certain discussions in the philosophy of music. I suggest that maqām presents a challenge to Gadamer’s understandings of language and the musical work. Ultimately, it is appropriate to conceive of maqām as itself a horizon in which fusion of perspectives can take place. (shrink)

Mamardašvili did not develop a systematic philosophy that treats separately the various traditional disciplines of philosophy such as epistemology, logic, ethics, aesthetics etc. On the contrary, isolated from the direct influences of other currents of thought that might otherwise have given his own a different direction, Mamardašvili concentrated his attention on the very act of thought, the vitality of which had been undermined in philosophical understandings, including both Hegelian-Marxist attempts to situate the subject in history and re-appropriations of the Cartesian (...) cogito. In this paper I will outline the most pertinent elements of Mamardašvili’s attempt to find a unified subject of knowledge and action and attempt to show how in his view consciousness and conscience are indissoluble. (shrink)

philosophers of the islamic world have made extremely important contributions to understanding the imagination. Aristotle's account of phantasia in the De anima is, of course, at the heart of much of Islamic philosophical work on the imagination. Furthermore, certain elements of Islamic religious belief were crucial in shaping Islamic philosophers' interest in the imagination. However, in addition to these two obvious sources for Islamic philosophical thought concerning the imagination, there is an important Neoplatonic source in the 'Arabic Plotinus,' above all (...) in the pseudonymous Theology of Aristotle.1... (shrink)

Philosophers often devote their most painstaking work to distinguishing their own thought from that of philosophers with whom they, in fact, share a great affinity. One of the foremost challenges to Platonic thought has been to qualify its assertion that the One, although beyond being, is the ultimate principle of reality. For to assert the primacy of the One in certain philosophical contexts might seem to exclude the reality of multiplicity. Yet Platonic thought does not hold that multiplicity is simply (...) an illusion: the phenomenal world cannot be reduced to the One. Platonists and Neoplatonists have therefore constructed arguments to show why they are not committed to a position like that of Parmenides, who... (shrink)

Plotinus’s debt to the Stoic thought is well documented. Not only was this debt a function of the general intellectual atmosphere in which Plotinus worked, but the philosopher frequently adopted and modified Stoic positions consciously and carefully. The concept of oikeiôsis / οἰκείωσις plays an important role in Stoic thought. Indeed, some scholars assert that it provides the very foundations for Stoic ethics and political philosophy. In the present study, we will exam Plotinus’ use of this important concept. It shall (...) become clear that, on account of the great differences between Neoplatonic and Stoic metaphysics, Plotinus employs the notion of oikeiôsis in manners that are very distinct from the ways in which it was deployed by various Stoic thinkers. Nevertheless, it shall also become evident that Plotinus’ appropriation of the concept of oikeiôsis accorded him a conceptual tool by which to better think problems concerning the nature of the self. (shrink)

Plotinus’ philosophical project includes an important Socratic element. Plotinus is namely interested in both self-knowledge and care of soul and self. In this study I examine how through his interpretation of three passages from Plato, Plotinus develops an account of the role of care in his ethics. Care in Plotinus’ ethical thought takes three forms. First of all, care is involved in maintaining the unity of the embodied self. Secondly, situated in a providential universe, our souls – as sisters to (...) the world soul - take part in the providential order by caring for ‘lower’ realities. Finally, Plotinus develops an ethics of going beyond virtue, a process which involves care for the higher, potentially divine, self. (shrink)

Plotinus’ philosophical project includes an important Socratic element. Plotinus is namely interested in both self-knowledge and care of soul and self. In this study I examine how through his interpretation of three passages from Plato, Plotinus develops an account of the role of care in his ethics. Care in Plotinus’ ethical thought takes three forms. First of all, care is involved in maintaining the unity of the embodied self. Secondly, situated in a providential universe, our souls – as sisters to (...) the world soul - take part in the providential order by caring for ‘lower’ realities. Finally, Plotinus develops an ethics of going beyond virtue, a process which involves care for the higher, potentially divine, self. (shrink)

« Point de cantique, Tenir le pas gagné. Cependant c’est la veille. Recevons tous les influx de vigueur et de tendresse réelle. Et à l’aurore, armés d’une ardente patience, nous entrerons aux splendides villes. »Gageons que la guerre n’est rien d’autre que l’affrontement, par des moyens violents de groupes politiques et/ou sociaux qui cherchent, par ce biais, à résoudre..

A Hegel-Congress of the Internationale Hegel Vereinigung took place at Stuttgart in May 1975; it was organised together with the Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften, the Schelling-Kommission of the Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften and the city of Stuttgart. It proved a success. First it was not just a high and dry academical meeting of specialists, but it attracted more than 900 people and we had interested and sometimes heated discussions on major contemporary problems. It was also a success to bring together (...) philosophers from both Western and Eastern Europe, as a result of the patient endeavors of Prof. D. Henrich, the President, for collaboration with the Internationale Hegel Gesellschaft of Prof. W.D. Beyer. (shrink)

We have identified a sample of 53 societies outside of the classical Himalayan and Marquesean area that permit polyandrous unions. Our goal is to broadly describe the demographic, social, marital, and economic characteristics of these societies and to evaluate some hypotheses of the causes of polyandry. We demonstrate that although polyandry is rare it is not as rare as commonly believed, is found worldwide, and is most common in egalitarian societies. We also argue that polyandry likely existed during early human (...) history and should be examined from an evolutionary perspective. Our analysis reveals that it may be a predictable response to a high operational sex ratio favoring males and may also be a response to high rates of male mortality and, possibly, male absenteeism. Other factors may contribute, but our within-polyandry sample limits analysis. (shrink)

Big Ideas for Little Kids includes everything a teacher, a parent, or a college student needs to teach philosophy to elementary school children from picture books. Written in a clear and accessible style, the book explains why it is important to allow young children access to philosophy during primary-school education. Wartenberg also gives advice on how to construct a "learner-centered" classroom, in which children discuss philosophical issues with one another as they respond to open-ended questions by saying whether they agree (...) or disagree with what others have said. (shrink)