La bioéthique est à la mode. Il faut " être pour "! La prochaine étude par le législateur français des lois " bioéthiques " en témoigne. Avortement, fabrication d'enfants " prêts-à-porter ", recherche biomédicale, clonage, génétique, rien n'échappe à la bioéthique. Et si, cheval de Troie pénétrant le droit, la morale, les déontologies, elle ne constituait qu'une habile machine de subversion des sciences médicales, d'appropriation globale de l'être humain. Des médecins, des philosophes, parlementaires, juristes engagés dans l'examen des doctrines et (...) mécanismes bioéthiques se sont posés la question. Leur réponse n'est vraiment pas celle du " consensus ". Elle impose au public savant et aux gens prétendus ordinaires et à leurs représentants dans la Cité, une réflexion, un retour vers une nouvelle liberté de penser. (shrink)

The University of Greenwich Generator is setting sail on a thrilling new journey of knowledge exchange with the launch of its first-ever podcast the Navigator. Crafted in collaboration with Lucien von Schomberg, Senior Lecturer in Creativity and Innovation at Greenwich Business School it promises to be an exciting platform for innovation, entrepreneurship, and thought-provoking conversation. The podcast aims to bridge the gap between academic insights and real-world issues in an easily digestible way. Through engaging conversations, listeners can expect to (...) gain valuable knowledge from industry leaders and academic experts alike. Operating on three key principles—knowledge communication, knowledge exchange, and knowledge creation—this podcast embodies the essence of the Generator's mission, inspiring, educating and fostering collaboration. The first episode explores the limitless potential of AI in today's world, unravelling its impact on business, education, and society. Guests share their profound insights, experiences, and practical advice, shedding light on how AI is shaping our future. The episode delved deep into the ethical implications but also vast potential of using AI in the future and how it will affect both education and the wider world. The episode boasts an impressive lineup of inaugural guests, including Jane Harrington, the Vice-Chancellor of The University of Greenwich, Carl Thomas, Enterprise Advisor, and founder of Audiowings, Ghislaine Boddington, Professor in Digital Immersion, and Neil Saunders, Senior Lecturer in Mathematical Sciences. Together, these guests provide diverse perspectives on the future of AI at the university and beyond. (shrink)

The "history of mentalities" considers the attitudes of ordinary people to everyday life. The approach is closely identified with the work of the Annales school. However, whereas the Annales historians refer to the material factors which condition human life, historians investigating mentalities examine psychological underpinnings. Historians who first developed guidelines for the history of mentalities were Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch, who were both concerned with collective systems of belief. Later, Philippe Ariès and Norbert Elias identified and developed theories (...) on early childhood. Finally, Michel Foucault considered the psychology of social deviants and nonconformists. This mode of interpretation provides a means of examining those aspects of life which the linear approach cannot address, such as the pressure of conformity, the sense of accelerating time, and the preoccupation with self. (shrink)

De Lucien de Samosate à Liu Cixin en passant par H. G. Wells, Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler, Sylvie Lainé et tant d’autres auteurs et autrices, la littérature, le cinéma et les séries de science-fiction ont inventé une myriade hallucinante d’extraterrestres, amis ou ennemis, humanoïdes ou non. Tous interrogent l’Humanité, son éthique et son devenir.

An English language translation accompanies the original Greek text of Aristotle's book about the nature of the state, constitutions, revolutions, democracy, and oligarchy.

Ethics in business is the most urgent problem facing America today. Now two of the best-selling authors of our time, Kenneth Blanchard and Norman Vincent Peale, join forces to meet this crisis head-on in this vitally important new book. The Power of Ethical Management proves you don't have to cheat to win. It shows today's managers how to bring integrity back to the workplace. It gives hard-hitting, practical, ethical strategies that build profits, productivity, and long-term success. From a straightforward three-step (...) Ethics Check that helps you evaluate any action or decision, to the "Five P's" of ethical behavior that will clarify your purpose and your goals, The Power of Ethical Management gives you an immensely useful set of tools. These can be put to work right away to enhance the performance of your business and to enrich the quality of your life. The Power of Ethical Management is no theoretical treatise Peale and Blanchard speak from their own enormous and unique experience, They reveal the nuts and bolts, practical strategies for ethical decisions that will show you why integrity pays. "So Vince Lombardi was wrong. Winning is not the only thing as headlines and hearings from Wall Street to Washington confirm. Now comes a better game plan from the powerful one-two punch of Ken Blanchard and Norman Vincent Peale in a quickreading new book, The Power of Ethical Management. Peale and Blanchard may be the best thing that has happened to business ethics since Mike Wallace invented 60 Minutes. -- JOHN MACK CARTIER Editor-in-Chief Good Housekeeping. (shrink)

The impact of digital media and technology on performance arts is evident when digital visual effects (VFX) filming techniques are introduced on a film set. Digital technologies influence the film actor’s approach to be congruent to and authentic within the circumstances of the scene. Actors require an effective skillset and strategies to successfully deliver an embodied performance aligning with the various digital VFX techniques. Focusing on imagination, action and emotion that would facilitate such an embodied performance, we drew on relevant (...) neuroscientific notions such as neuron reactivation, conceptual blending, as-if body states and affordances. Additionally, we incorporated relevant embodied performance concepts from Stanislavski, Laban/Bartenieff Movement Studies, Effector Patterns including the Emotional Body Approach and Lessac Kinesensics to the development of a digital acting programme, advancing the actor’s required skills and providing on-set digital acting strategies to support congruency with digital VFX and authenticity within the diegetic reality. The efficacy of this programme was determined by assessing pre- and post-intervention recordings of both a control and an experimental group of trained actors. Reflection-on-action journals from participants supplemented the assessment. The assessments and journals indicate that the acquired skillset and on-set digital acting strategies effectively improve the actor’s performance with digital VFX filming technology. (shrink)

Un nouveau mode de rapport au monde est ne en Grece ancienne: l'attitude critique, laquelle a marque durablement l'histoire occidentale pour ensuite s'imposer de plus en plus a l'echelle mondiale. Des ce moment beaucoup s'est joue, car l'independance de la pensee, le rapport questionnant au monde, le pur interet pour le connaitre, la tradition de la discussion critique et du franc-parler individuel - c'est-a-dire la tradition du rapport critique a la tradition - allaient non seulement penetrer a l'interieur meme des (...) doctrines juive, chretienne et musulmane pour en inflechir le cours, mais gagner a l'epoque moderne puis contemporaine leur espace propre dans la Cite. Inventeurs de la democratie et de la philosophie, les Grecs ont donne naissance a cet ethos-critique dont le mode d'etre, le pli culturel si l'on veut, n'allait plus nous quitter. En depit des detours et de tous les meandres, les Lumieres du XVIIIe, de meme qu'auparavant la Renaissance, se comprennent donc comme les fruits lointains des Lumieres antiques. Dit autrement, il n'y a rien d'absolument inedit dans la critique generale des croyances et l'atheisme moderne lui-meme, dans la recherche d'un fondement anthropologique a la Cite et a ses lois, dans la decouverte de la relativite des connaissances mais aussi des valeurs d'une culture a l'autre, dans l'exercice de la libre pensee, dans le questionnement radical porte sur la nature du lien politique et les meilleurs moyens d'assurer le bien-vivre-ensemble mais quelque chose comme le prolongement et l'elargissement dans l'espace moderne, de ce dont l'Athenes democratique a fourni le premier germe et la premiere impulsion. A relire les Grecs, generation apres generation, tous a des degres divers, Romains, Juifs, Chretiens, Musulmans, etc., s'inoculerent et se transmirent les uns les autres ce germe critique qui, selon les differents sols et les differentes periodes historiques, epousa des formes variees. Le present essai propose donc une relecture du monde moderne fondee sur une reinterpretation de l'input antique grec, une analyse qui tient compte de la nouvelle humanite, critique et reflechie, decouverte en Grece, et qui prend donc ses distances vis-a-vis des approches proposees par des auteurs comme H. Blumenberg (la Modernite releve d'une auto-affirmation absolument originale, d'une curiosite theoretique sans precedent dans l'histoire), M. Gauchet (le desenchantement du monde est un phenomene essentiellement moderne, la democratie d'aujourd'hui tout autre chose que la democratie antique), et R. Brague (l'Occident tient davantage de la Rome christianisee et hellenisee que d'Athenes). A partir de l'examen de cas concrets, tels que l'idee de creativite artistique dans l'Antiquite, l'agnosticisme ou l'atheisme, la satire sociale tous azimuts d'un Lucien de Samosate, on peut constater que la culture contemporaine n'est pas essentiellement differente mais reprend bien plutot le fil d'interrogations et d'audaces anciennes. Le monde moderne a rompu avec certains aspects de sa tradition, mais il n'a pas rompu avec son passe, celui plus ancien, qu'il redecouvre de maniere plus libre aujourd'hui. Le but de l'ouvrage n'est d'ailleurs aucunement de sacraliser l'hellenisme, mais de montrer que le potentiel critique, inscrit dans la dynamique meme de cette culture, peut nous aider a mieux faconner la societe ouverte de demain. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:INDIFFERENCE AND ENVY: THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF MODERN ECONOMY Paul Dumouchel University ofQuébec-Montréal 1. Girard and economics René Girard himself has not written very much on economics, at least explicitly. Though his works are full ofinsights into and short remarks on the sacrificial origin of different economic phenomena or the way in which mimetic relations and commercial transactions are often intertwined and act upon each other.1 Unlike religion, psychology, (...) psychoanalysis, literature and anthropology, the analysis of modem and traditional economies from the point ofview ofmimetic theory has never been carried out by Girard himself, but for the most part by other people, for example, in the French speaking world, which I know best, essentially by Michel Aglietta and André Orléan in La violence de la monnaie (1982) and by Jean-Pierre Dupuy and myself in L'enfer des choses (1979) and as well as others, such as, by Mark Anspach, Andrew Feenberg, P. Lantz, A. Orléan, G-H. de Radkowsky and Lucien Scubla in various works on economy, economic anthropology, or the place and role of money in literary texts.2 In a way, this is somewhat surprising since the relationship between mimetic and economic phenomena, at least in a broad sense, was seen quite early on. For example, soon after the original publication Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque (1961) the French Marxist Lucien Goldman wrote in his Pour une sociologie du Roman (1964) that Girard's work was the most important book to read in order to understand 1 For example, Mensonge romantique (18-23); Des choses cachées (82-88). 2 See Anspach, Feenberg, Lantz, Orléan [passim], de Radkowski. 150Paul Dumouchel the effects of economic alienation on literature since Georg Lukács's Theory of the Novel (1920). Moreover in a footnote in Les origines du capitalisme (1971) Jean Baechler suggested that those wishing to understand the nature of the infinite desire for acquisition which capitalists economies have institutionalized should read Girard's book.3 Whatever the reason for Girard's relative disinterest in economic phenomena others have not been prevented from tackling this problem and it bears witness in a special way to the dynamism and intellectual power ofthe mimetic theory that its application to the field ofeconomics has essentially, ifnot entirely, been due to the work of others rather than to the efforts of René Girard himself. 2. The substantivist-formalist debate In the late 1 940's and early 1 950's a debate began that divided (and still divides) the community ofeconomists and ofanthropologists interested in economic phenomena. It concerns the nature ofeconomy and is generally referred to as the substantivist-formalist debate. It was first formulated in the works of the Austrian economist, Karl Polanyi.4 In The Great Transformation (1945), a book on the history ofthe formation and organization ofthe market economy in Europe from the late 1 8th to early 20th centuries, Polanyi already argued that the modem market economy was a rare historical accident. Furthermore Polanyi said, unlike what liberal and economic ideologies pretend, thatthere is nothingnatural aboutthe market. It does not correspond to any spontaneous human tendency to barter and exchange, and it does not arise by itself as soon as certain conditions are satisfied. Onthe contrary, modem markets have been put into place through sustained and voluntary state policies which consciously destroyed traditional solidarities, authorized the unlimited sale of land and labor and literally created the labor market, for example, in England through the Reform Bill of 1834 that repealed the existing Poor Laws which had prevented the free circulation of labor. The system formed by market economies, the balance of power among European states and the gold 3 Interestingly, 24 years later, in the second vastly enlarged edition of that work, Le capitalisme, (1995) the reference to Girard has disappeared though the text ofthe original work, which now constitutes the second part of the book, is otherwise reprinted in its integrity. 4 Actually Polanyi in The Livelihood ofMan (1977) sees the origin of the debate in Carl Mengers, Principles ofEconomics [1871]. Let us say then that it found its first modern formulation in the work of Polanyi. Indifference andEnvy... (shrink)

Within the Husserlian phenomenological philosophical tradition, description and interpretation co-exist. However, teaching the practice of phenomenological psychological research requires careful articulation of the differences between a descriptive and an interpretive relationship to what is provided by qualitative data. If as researchers we neglect the epistemological foundations of our work or avoid working through difficult methodological issues, then our work invites dismissal as inadequate science, undermining the effort to strongly establish psychology along qualitative lines. The first article in this two-part discussion (...) provides a Husserlian investigation of the meaning of ‘method’ for psychology as a human science. This investigation is undertaken in the light of some researchers’ appropriations of Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics in the service of non-methodical praxes. The second article will address some implications of the attempt to structure qualitative psychological research along ‘Gadamerian’ lines, taking seriously the references to Gadamer’s work made by researchers such as Van Manen and Smith. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology , Volume 11, Edition 1 May 2011, 69-85. (shrink)

Man (Islam); Islamic philosophy; Islamic ethics.

Why is it that the study of Ethics is so unpopular? It is because there are so many systems of Ethics, and they are all in such hopeless contradiction. Why are there so many systems? Because each writer starts with his theory and then attempts to get the facts to agree with it. What is the remedy? The remedy, says Professor Levy-Bruhl, is to start with the practice. And what then? Then, he says, you find that the practice is everything, (...) that you need no theory, and that every ethical writer is in harmony with every other. 'Every ethical doctrine,' says Professor Levy-Bruhl, 'jealously defends the originality of its ethical principle against the objections of others, but it formulates the guiding rules of conduct, the concrete precepts of justice and charity, in the same terms as its rivals, whether its adherent is a disciple of Kant, a critical philosopher, a pessimist, a positivist, an evolutionist, a spiritualist, or a theologian.' The way out of the chaos of theoretical Ethics, then, is to deny its existence. There is no such science. The only science of Ethics is the practical. Its object of study is the conscience of man. Its rules and obligations are what the conscience reveals to experience. It takes Professor Levy-Bruhl half his book to get rid of theoretical ethics. Then, however, he is free, and he moves more rapidly in the discussion of Natural Ethics and Ethical Feeling. He ends with a chapter of Practical Results. -The Expository Times, Vol. 17. (shrink)

Philosophy; philosophical theology; philosophical anthropology; history.

Dire que la pensée des primitifs est peu conceptuelle équivaut, en fait, à dire qu'elle n'est pas attachée à l'inviolabilité des lois des phénomènes ni à la permanence et constance des formes des organismes, ou, en d'autres termes, n'est jamais gênée par ce que nous appellerions les miracles ou des ruptures de l'ordre de la nature.

al-majmūʻah 1. Kayfa naʻmal lil-Islām -- Muqawwimāt shakhṣīyat al-Muslim -- al-Tawāzun wa-al-iʻtidāl fī ḥayāt al-Muslim.