ʿAlī fils d’Abū Ṭālib, gendre et cousin du prophète Muḥammad, premier imam (chef, guide, leader) des Shi’ites et quatrième calife, est sans doute une des figures les plus centrales de différents types de spiritualité en islam. Cependant c’est surtout dans la spiritualité shi’ite, fondée principalement sur la figure de l’imam, qu’il constitue le véritable pivot autour duquel gravitent les doctrines religieuses les plus importantes. L’article envisage ce rôle à travers une problématique précise, celle des rapports qui lient la figure de (...) ʿAlī au Coran. Ainsi, sont examinés respectivement les rôles de ʿAlī d’abord comme acteur et sujet de l’exégèse de la Révélation, ensuite comme contenu et objet ultime de celle-ci. Cette dimension duelle semble s’appuyer sur la double nature, humaine et divine, de ʿAlī. C’est la raison pour laquelle l’article se termine par l’hypothèse de l’identification possible, par certain proto-Shi’ites, entre leur premier imam et le Christ. (shrink)

The papers in the 2010 “Clinical Ethics” number of the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy explore issues along La Frontera, the borders and boundaries of clinical ethics. The first three papers in this “Clinical Ethics” number of the Journal explore borders and boundaries drawn within clinical ethics, concerning the moral standing of complementary and alternative medicine, palliative sedation, and induced abortion and feticide. The fourth and fifth papers explore the borders and boundaries between research ethics and clinical ethics.

We offer a critique of one prominent understanding of the principle of respect for autonomy and of analyses of medical paternalism based on that understanding. Our main critique is that understanding respect for autonomy as respect for freedom from interference is mistaken because it is overly influenced by four-alarm cases, because it fails to appreciate the full dimensions of legal self-determination (one of its main sources), because it conflates the research and therapeutic settings, and because it fails to appreciate themes (...) of authority and power that have historically shaped the principle of respect for freedom from interference. We argue that respect for autonomy involves more than just freedom from interference and, on this basis, offer a critique of prevailing accounts of medical paternalism. (shrink)

S'il est un point que les réflexions contemporaines sur le temps ont mis en relief et inscrit profondément dans notre conscience, c'est que l'avenir qu'on espère dépend directement du présent qu'on réalise. Telle est notre attitude en face du présent, telle elle sera inéluctablement en face de l'avenir; et donc l'avenir lui-même, puisque ce dernier n'est rien sinon un présent caché encore, au cœur d'un présent déjà actuel, et explicite. Il est en effet de l'essence même de notre condition humaine (...) d'avoir un présent structuré et comme stratifié. Certes on peut imaginer le présent comme un point sans épaisseur, comme la limite évanescente entre un segment de ligne qui marque le passé à jamais révolu, et l'avenir qui se meut vers nous pour basculer inexorablement vers le non-être en franchissant ce présent. Mais cette image, utile pour bien des tâches, ne correspond d'aucune manière à la réalité vivante de la conscience humaine et des activités qui lui sont propres. Nous sommes dans le présent ce que nous sommes et ce que, en un sens, nous croyons pouvoir dire que nous avons été. Une grande partie de ce que nous appelons le passé, notre passé personnel et sans doute notre passé spécifique, est présent, non seulement à titre de souvenir, pouvant être, ou non, évoqué, mais à titre de schéma dynamique modifiant notre être-au-monde, notre présente réaction au réel le plus réel, à la situation où nous avons à déployer notre activité. (shrink)

The article is devoted to philosophy of mathematics. Mathematical heuristics, being a complex of methods for solving the non-standard problems of mathematics (such problems which have no known algorithms to be solved), is the main subject of the research. As a specific mechanism for thinking, generating elements of guesswork needed as the basis of mathematical heuristics, the author considers intuition. In the work, the author uses Descartes’s, Poincaré’s, Hadamard’s and Piaget’s findings. Based on Descartes’s concept of rational intuition, the author (...) develops the concept of heuristic intuition. As a result, the author turns to the question of possibility of a complete translation of the user-derived mathematical statements in a discourse, in fact, that means a maximum depth of mathematical proof, i.e. its maximum rationalization. For this purpose, it is necessary to re-attract the intuition since it is able to transform the intuitive elements into the discourse ones. Therefore, from this point of view, the rationale is intuitively derived mathematical proof should be no more than a ‘multilayer‘ creative process. In general, the author, based on Poincaré’s research, proves that the essence of mathematical creativity is not to «sort out» and «choose». Referring to examples for illustration, the author reveals moments of «interference» of intuition, even in the process of solving school problems. Therefore, it is currently impossible to ignore the phenomenon of intuition and the results that have been historically derived a theory of knowledge in the study of creative mechanisms. (shrink)

The paper illustrates how organic chemists dramatically altered their practices in the middle part of the twentieth century through the adoption of analytical instrumentation - such as ultraviolet and infrared absorption spectroscopy and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy - through which the difficult process of structure determination for small molecules became routine. Changes in practice were manifested in two ways: in the use of these instruments in the development of 'rule-based' theories; and in an increased focus on synthesis, at the expense (...) of chemical analysis. These rule-based theories took the form of generalizations relating structure to chemical and physical properties, as measured by instrumentation. This 'Instrumental Revolution' in organic chemistry was two-fold: encompassing an embrace of new tools that provided unprecedented access to structures, and a new way of thinking about molecules and their reactivity in terms of shape and structure. These practices suggest the possibility of a change in the ontological status of chemical structures, brought about by the regular use of instruments. The career of Robert Burns Woodward (1917-1979) provides the central historical examples for the paper. Woodward was an organic chemist at Harvard from 1937 until the time of his death. In 1965, he won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. (shrink)

In recent years, W. H. Walsh and William Dray have introduced to methodological studies of history the term “colligation.” An historian who colligates explains, roughly, what an event ‘really’ was, or what it ‘amounts to’, by relating particular events into a single entity, by synthesizing parts into a whole. He thus explains many of the events of fifteenth-century Italy as a renaissance or those of eighteenth-century France as a revolution. The explanatory power of colligation is said to lie in the (...) newness of the interpretation of a collection of events which historians have previously ascertained to have occurred. (shrink)

It is well-recognized that uncertainty is an endemic feature and limitation of clinical judgment and practice that cannot be eliminated in many cases. Among the tasks of clinical ethics is the responsible management of uncertainties, first articulated in E. Haavi Morreim’s very nice concept of the "moral management of medical uncertainty." The papers in the 2012 Clinical Ethics issue of the Journal provide philosophically innovative and clinically applicable accounts of the varieties of uncertainty in clinical medicine and therefore in clinical (...) ethics: epistemic uncertainty, metaphysical uncertainty, and relational uncertainty. (shrink)

This paper introduces the 2011 number of the Journal on Clinical Ethics. Philosophical critical appraisal is essential for the success of philosophical analysis and argument in clinical ethics. To clear away conceptual underbrush, papers in this Clinical Ethics number of the Journal address genetic engineering, conscience-based objections to forms of health care, placebos, and preventing exploitation of patients to be recruited to become research subjects.

The morally responsible practice of clinical medicine depends on many factors, the integrity of clinical judgment chief among them. Responsible clinical judgment requires that it be deliberative. The disciplines of the humanities, all of which contribute to clinical ethics—as the papers that follow illustrate—teach that deliberative reasoning includes critical self-awareness and self-scrutiny. Critical appraisal proves essential to achieving both. The papers in the 2013 Clinical Ethics number of the Journal provide distinctive critical appraisals of clinical judgment: concepts of race; narrative; (...) stewardship; and the Rule of Rescue. By becoming commonplace, such critical appraisals of clinical judgment become essential to clinical ethics. (shrink)

The five papers in the 2008 “Clinical Ethics” number of the journal address the conceptual and empirical foundations of clinical ethics. Three articles take up the concept of professionalism in medicine, exploring its possibilities and implications. The fourth article provides a distinctive, phenomenological account of the “placebo effect,” a vexing topic of surprising durability in the clinical setting. The final article, a systematic review of the qualitative literature on bedside rationing of resources, creates an empirical foundation for philosophical analysis and (...) argument of a distinctive kind. (shrink)

Central concepts and consensus views in clinical ethics are marked by instability. The papers in this number of the Journal take up two such central concepts, quality of life and moral status, and two such consensus views, that germ-line gene transfer should not be undertaken for the purposes of enhancement of human traits and that the ethical obligation of physicians to treat HIV infected patients rests on consent of the physician. One outcome of these philosophical investigations is that these two (...) concepts and consensus views are less stable than one might have thought. I explore the possibility of generalizing this outcome in a reflection on clinical ethics as the management of instability and incompleteness, including the instability and incompleteness of clinical ethics itself. In the course of this reflection I liken clinical ethics to abstract expressionism in mid-twentieth century Western art. (shrink)

Recent work in the ontology of music suggests that we will avoid confusion if we distinguish between two kinds of question that are typically posed in music ontology. Thus, a distinction has been made between fundamental ontology and higher-order ontology. The former addresses questions about the basic metaphysical options from which ontologists choose. For instance, are musical works types, indicated types, classes of particulars, or some other kind of entity? Higher-order ontology addresses the question of what lies ‘at the centre’ (...) of a specific form of music, such as rock or jazz—or perhaps classical music. The argument of this essay is, first, that a close examination of the best efforts in two of these territories shows that they have the effect of pressing the music in each sphere into implausible Procrustean beds. Second, it is argued that the general question that higher-order ontologies pose, that is, ‘What work-kind is it that lies at the centre of a given kind of music, F?’ is a question based on a mistaken but seductive assumption, namely that the concept of the work of F has actual application. In fact, these concepts—upon which higher-order ontology depends—are mere artefacts of philosophy. The question is also addressed why the assumption is so seductive. Finally, the question finally is posed about what, if anything, is implied from the foregoing about the traditional ontology of classical music. (shrink)

In Virgil's third eclogue, the goatherd Menalcas responds to his challenger Damoetas by offering as his wager in their contest of song a pair of embossed cups,caelatum diuini opus Alcimedontis, decorated with a pattern of vine and ivy. In the middle of this design, he says, are two figures. One is the astronomer Conon, and the other—at this point Menalcas, afflicted with a sudden loss of memory, professes to have forgotten the name of the second figure, and breaks off into (...) a question :quis fuit alter, | descripsit radio totum qui gentibus orbem, | tempora quae messor, quae curuus arator haberet?Various candidates for the identity of this second astronomer have been suggested, one of the most favoured being Eudoxus of Cnidus, whosePhaenomenahad been versified by the Hellenistic poet Aratus. In 1930 it was proposed by Léon Herrmann that Menalcas in fact answers his own question in his reference tocuruUS ARAToratEcl.3.42: the solution to Virgil's riddle is already written into the question, in the form of the anagram ofAratusconcealed within these two words. Strictly speaking, Hermann notes only that ‘Aratorau v. 42 évoque le nom d’Aratos’; he and later exponents of the theory tend to ignore the preceding ‘-us’—but there seems no reason to exclude it if an allusion to the Greek poet is to be seen in the two following syllables. (shrink)

Anagrams and syllabic wordplay of the kind championed by Frederick Ahl in his Metaformations have not always been favourably received by scholars of Latin poetry; I would hesitate to propose the following instance, were it not for the fact that its occurrence seems peculiarly apposite to the context in which it appears. That Roman poets were prepared to use such techniques to enhance the presentation of an argument by exemplifying its operation at a verbal level is demonstrated by the famous (...) passage of Lucretius in which the poet seeks to illustrate the tendency of semina … ardoris to create fire in wood by the literal presence of elements from the word for ‘fires’ in that denoting wood. A similar conception may underlie the association insinuated by the love elegists between amor and mors, suggesting that death is somehow ‘written into’ love: so Propertius declares laus in amore mori, while Tibullus appears to point to the lurking presence of death in the pursuit of love in the lines interea, dum fata sinunt, iungamus amores: | iam ueniet tenebris Mors adoperta caput – so swift and unexpected is death's approach that it is already present in aMOReS in the preceding line. Ovid's awareness of the poetic potential of this kind of play is fully exhibited in his celebrated account of Echo and Narcissus in Metamorphoses 3, where the subject matter gives the poet ample scope to exploit the humorous and pathetic possibilities afforded by Echo's fragmented repetitions of the frustrated entreaties of her beloved. (shrink)