BackgroundEven though virtual reality is more and more considered for its power of distraction in different medical contexts, the optimal conditions for its use still have to be determined in order to design interfaces adapted to therapeutic support in oncology.ObjectiveThe objective of this study was to examine the benefits of VR using two immersion methods and comparing them with each other in a population of women with breast cancer who have undergone breast surgery, during scar massage sessions.MethodsIn a physiotherapy center, (...) each patient participated in four experimental conditions in a random order: two sessions used virtual immersion, one session proposed musical listening and the fourth one was a standard session care. The impact of the level of patient involvement in the virtual world was apprehended through the evaluation of the feeling of presence; the estimation of elapsed time of the physiotherapy sessions and particular attention was paid to the evaluation of patient emotional state.ResultsOur study showed an increase in positive emotions and a decrease in anxiety regardless which support methods were offered. Participatory VR created a feeling of more intense spatial presence.ConclusionOur results highlight the importance of the context in which VR should be offered. The presence of the practitioner and his interactions with the patient can provide a context just as favorable in reducing anxiety as the emotional regulation tools used. The use of technological tools should be favored when the practitioner is unavailable during the treatment phase or, even, in order to reduce the monotonous nature of repetitive therapeutic sessions. (shrink)

Mental fatigue can be studied by using either the time-on-task protocol or the sequential task protocol. In the time-on-task protocol, participants perform a long and effortful task and a decrease in performance in this task is generally observed over time. In the sequential task protocol, a first effortful or control task is followed by a second effortful task. The performance in the second task is generally worse after the effortful task than after the control task. The principal aim of the (...) present experiment is to examine the relationship between these two decrements in performance while concomitantly using a sequential task protocol and assessing the performance of the first effortful task as a function of time-on-task. We expect a positive correlation between these two decrements in performance. A total of 83 participants performed a 30-min fatiguing mental task or a control task followed by a time-to-exhaustion handgrip task. As expected, this protocol combining the time-on-task and sequential task protocols allowed us to observe a decrease in performance over time during the Stroop task, a worst performance in the handgrip task after the Stroop task by comparison to the control task, a positive correlation between these two effects. The decrease in performance during the Stroop task also correlated with the subjective measures of boredom and fatigue, whereas the detrimental effect observed in the handgrip task did not. Our findings suggest that the two fatigue-related phenomena share a common mechanism but are not completely equivalent. (shrink)

Moral or ethical questions are vital because they affect our daily lives: what is the best choice we can make, the best action to take in a given situation, and ultimately, the best way to live our lives? Health ethics has contributed to moving ethics toward a more experience-based and user-oriented theoretical and methodological stance but remains in our practice an incomplete lever for human development and flourishing. This context led us to envision and develop the stance of a “living (...) ethics”, described in this inaugural collective and programmatic paper as an effort to consolidate creative collaboration between a wide array of stakeholders. We engaged in a participatory discussion and collective writing process known as instrumentalist concept analysis. This process included initial local consultations, an exploratory literature review, the constitution of a working group of 21 co-authors, and 8 workshops supporting a collaborative thinking and writing process. First, a living ethics designates a stance attentive to human experience and the role played by morality in human existence. Second, a living ethics represents an ongoing effort to interrogate and scrutinize our moral experiences to facilitate adaptation of people and contexts. It promotes the active and inclusive engagement of both individuals and communities in envisioning and enacting scenarios which correspond to their flourishing as authentic ethical agents. Living ethics encourages meaningful participation of stakeholders because moral questions touch deeply upon who we are and who we want to be. We explain various aspects of a living ethics stance, including its theoretical, methodological, and practical implications as well as some barriers to its enactment based on the reflections resulting from the collaborative thinking and writing process. (shrink)

An historical review of the concepts of self-consciousness is presented, highlighting the important role of the body (particularly, body perception but also body action) and the social other in the construction of self-consciousness. More precisely, body perception, especially intermodal sensory perception including kinesthetic perception, is involved in the construction of a sense of self allowing self-nonself differentiation. Furthermore, the social other, through very early social and emotional interactions, provides meaning to the infant’s perception and contributes to the development of his/her (...) symbolization capacities. This is a necessary condition for body image representation and awareness of a permanent self in a time-space continuum (invariant over time and space). Self-image recognition impairments in the mirror are also discussed regarding a comprehensive developmental theory of self-consciousness. Then, a neuropsychological and neurophysiological approach to self-consciousness reviews the role of complex brain activation/integration pathways and the mirror neuron system in self-consciousness. Finally, this article offers new perspectives on self-consciousness evaluation using the mirror as an experimental paradigm to study self- and other- image and body recognition. (shrink)

Les recherches de Natalie Depraz sur l’intersubjectivité rejoignent ici celles de Frédéric Mauriac, particulièrement dans les cas dits « d’urgence psychiatrique ». La question est ainsi de savoir comment poser et penser le rapport fulgurant de la force vitale à ce désir tout humain de vouloir en finir. En ces cas, quelles paroles faut-il oser et quel mode de relation convient-il d’instaurer? La contribution entend offrir des perspectives théoriques et pratiques, essentiellement thérapeutiques, en mettant d’abord en évidence, d’une part, la (...) situation de la phénoménologie henryenne devant la phénoménologie historique et, d’autre part, sa situation devant une praxis fondée sur la singularité de l’approche en deuxième personne. (shrink)

Ces ouvrages de Nathalie Sage-Pranchère sont issus de deux thèses : une thèse de l’École des chartes publiée en 2007 et une thèse de doctorat d’histoire soutenue en 2011 et publiée en 2017. Ils sont complémentaires grâce à leurs points de vue différents, qui articulent l’échelle locale (la Corrèze) à l’échelle nationale, et à leur propos qui part d’une histoire corrézienne totale – parcours individuels et formation des sages-femmes, histoire des accouchées – pour arriver en 2017 à l’histoire...

Mon objectif dans cette contribution est d’explorer la pratique phénoménologique en jeu au sein même des descriptions de Michel Foucault. Un tel travail dépasse la portée d’un examen unique et ponctuel et supposerait de mobiliser les champs expérientiels multiples qu’a observés et traités Foucault de l’intérieur : la prison, la clinique, la sexualité. Il sera ici circonscrit à ce que je crois être le noyau de la pratique en jeu. Ce que Foucault nomme de son côté « le souci de (...) soi », « la pratique de soi » ou encore « la technique de soi », et c’est ce qui permet de mettre au jour la conception foucaldienne du sujet comme soi. Pour ce faire, je vais parcourir le Cours de 1981-1982 en suivant le fil conducteur des occurrences du thème de l’attention. Pourquoi cela? Je suis guidée, dans ce parcours, par l’hypothèse selon laquelle l’attention (plus que la réflexion qui est retour sur soi et clôture, donc en définitive objectivante) est, pour la phénoménologie, le nom concret, expérientiel, pratique de l’ épochè, c’est-à-dire de la relation à soi du sujet comme présence à soi. Foucault ne parlant jamais d’ épochè ou de réduction (ni d’ailleurs de réflexion), mais plutôt d’attention, en lien avec le souci de soi, la pratique de soi, ou encore l’exercice, il semble que les concepts méthodiques husserliens, ou toute philosophie réflexive résiduelle, ne peuvent que faire écran à l’intuition immédiate du sens de l’expérience et doivent être évités au profit de termes plus sobres et d’emblée intelligibles comme l’attention, le souci et le soin. (shrink)

In 2010, two years after the global financial collapse that triggered the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s, the best-selling publication in France was not that year’s Prix Goncourt,1 Michel Houellebecq’s La carte et le territoire (The Map and the Territory), a novel published by Flammarion, one of Paris’s leading publishing houses. That honor went to Indignez-vous! (Time for Outrage!), a 32-page pamphlet authored by 93-year-old Stéphane Hessel, a former hero of the French Resistance, a concentration (...) camp survivor and career diplomat. Hessel’s booklet, issued by Indigène Editions, a small provincial publisher, has since sold over 2 million copies, reaching an estimated 10 million .. (shrink)

La quatrième de couverture indique : "Sous la Ve République, vingt-cinq secrétaires d'Etat ou ministres ont occupé le ministère de l'Environnement, de Robert Poujade (1971) à Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet (2012). Même si l'intitulé de ce ministère et ses prérogatives ont évolué au cours des années, il n'en reste pas moins que les préoccupations et difficultés abordées par les différents successeurs n'ont guère changé. Faire prendre conscience aux autres ministères d'adopter de bonnes habitudes écologiques, permettre aux citoyens d'appréhender les grands enjeux (...) actuels liés à l'environnement : voici deux missions essentielles qu'ils ont à coeur de défendre. Cet ouvrage d'actualité se propose de retracer de manière chronologique et exhaustive les travaux des célèbres ministres, hommes et femmes, de gauche ou de droite, qui se sont succédés. De la création du ministère de l'impossible à l'organisation du Grenelle de l'environnement par Jean-Louis Borloo jusqu'au 2 juillet 2013 - jour où Delphine Batho est démise de ses fonctions de ministre de l'Ecologie et du Développement durable -, Michel Lamy aborde point par point les faits marquants des quarante dernières années.Une rétrospective riche pour aller plus loin dans notre connaissance de l'écologie politique et mieux appréhender l'avenir en matière d'environnement.". (shrink)

Philosophe hors du commun, François Châtelet (1925-1985) a profondément marqué le paysage intellectuel français du XXe siècle. Cofondateur, avec Michel Foucault et Gilles Deleuze, du département de philosophie du Centre universitaire expérimental de Vincennes, aujourd'hui Université Paris VIII, il a dirigé ce département jusqu'à sa mort. Les textes réunis ici se composent de quatre articles de François Châtelet devenus introuvables et une série de textes de philosophes qui mettent en valeur, tant ses talents d'historien de la philosophie, de pédagogue que (...) de philosophe engagé. C'est tout un ensemble de souvenirs d'un philosophe médiatique qui est donné à lire, luttant par l'histoire des concepts contre l'orthodoxie marxiste. François Châtelet fut le cofondateur avec Jacques Derrida, Jean-Pierre Faye et Dominique Lecourt du Collège international de philosophie. Il militait pour la pratique d'une philosophie ouverte et populaire et n'a eu de cesse de décloisonner la philosophie et de l'ouvrir pour la mettre en commun. (shrink)

Ce gros livre est le fruit d’un travail collectif, réalisé à l’initiative de l’Agence nationale de recherche sur le sida et les hépatites virales (ANRS), par un collectif de treize chercheur-e-s (sociologues, démographes, épidémiologistes, psycho-sociologues, économistes). Un long questionnaire a été élaboré et soumis par téléphone par soixante et un enquêteurs de l’Institut de sondage Ipsos à plus de 12 000 personnes âgées de 18 à 69 ans entre septembre 2005 et mars 2006. Cette enquête dite...

The epistolary corpus of M. Cornelius Fronto, the rhetoric teacher of the ‘princes’ M. Aurelius and L. Verus, offers valuable insights into the functioning of the monarchical order of the Principate, despite the seemingly trivial subject matter of many of his letters, due to the unique level of communication. Especially the communication with the domus Augusta provides important additions to the comparable letters of Pliny the Younger. While scholars have so far concentrated on Fronto’s relationship with his pupil Marcus, this (...) contribution focuses on the communication with and about the adoptive father of his pupils, Antoninus Pius, because it makes tangible the ‘rules of the game’ of the interaction between the senatorial elite and the princeps who came from their ranks. (shrink)

In his influential article ‘Essence and Modality’, Fine proposes a definition of necessity in terms of the primitive essentialist notion ‘true in virtue of the nature of’. Fine’s proposal is suggestive, but it admits of different interpretations, leaving it unsettled what the precise formulation of an Essentialist definition of necessity should be. In this paper, four different versions of the definition are discussed: a singular, a plural reading, and an existential variant of Fine’s original suggestion and an alternative version proposed (...) by Correia which is not based on Fine’s primitive essentialist notion. The first main point of the paper is that the singular reading is untenable. The second that given plausible background assumptions, the remaining three definitions are extensionally equivalent. The third is that, this equivalence notwithstanding, Essentialists should adopt Correia’s version of the definition, since both the existential variant, which has de facto been adopted as the standard version of the definition in the literature, and the plural reading suffer from problems connected to Fine’s primitive essentialist notion. (shrink)

A common feature of all standard theories of the laws of nature is that they are "absolutist": They take laws to be either all metaphysically necessary or all contingent. Science, however, gives us reason to think that there are laws of both kinds, suggesting that standard theories should make way for "non-absolutist" alternatives: theories which accommodate laws of both modal statuses. In this paper, we set out three explanatory challenges for any candidate non-absolutist theory and discuss the prospects of the (...) two extant candidates in light of these challenges. We then develop our own non-absolutist theory, the essentialist DTA account, which combines the nomic-necessitation or DTA account with an essentialist approach to metaphysical modality in order to meet the three explanatory challenges. Finally, we argue that the distinction between kinematical and dynamical laws found in physical theories supports both non-absolutism in general and our proposed essentialist DTA view in particular. (shrink)

In his treatment of the issues raised by the movements of women for equal rights a century ago, Michels anticipated controversies and conflicts about which people care deeply today. He took a clear position in support of the desirability of equality between the sexes. In consequence, it remains relevant to current debates within feminism over equality and difference and the corresponding challenge to, and feminist critique of, social science arising from the (re) emergence of "difference" feminism.Sexual Ethics constitutes both (...) an analysis of the "woman problem" and a document describing the wars between the sexes during this period and an important and overlooked piece of history of the classic sociological tradition. Michels observed that the national and economic conflicts in modern Europe were vast in scale and revealed sharply sensed injustices, and also that sex antagonisms are becoming more acute. He presented an argument, consistent with his theoretical position, about the seriousness of women's rights. Michels' discussions of sexuality, sexual morality, and the relations of the sexes had as its stimulus "the new sexual ethic" advocated by feminists. He pointed out that true equality required equality of rights to sexual liberty for women or chastity prior to marriage for men.Michels supported premarital chastity for men as an ideal, but he doubted that very many would practice it. Michels was virtually alone in the sociological tradition in seeking to illuminate the "struggle for love" between men and women by reference to the "erotic coquetry" in the sexual behavior of "lower animals." Despite his stand for equality of men and women in sexual matters, a recurrent theme in Sexual Ethics is that men are sexually more aggressive than women, at least in part due to social structures and cultural traditions. Michels advocated family planning (but opposed abortion) in the interests of marital and family happiness and economic well-being, especially for the poor.In his new introduction, Terry R. Kandal discusses Robert Michels' life. He explores, among other topics, Michels' treatment of the woman question and the reactions of Michels' contemporaries to the same question. He also discusses the feminist critique of social science, and the place of Michels in and the gender questions of our times. The book will be of particular interest to those interested in the history of relations between men and women as well as those interested in questions of biological determinism. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Tuomas Tahko has argued for a hybrid view of the laws of nature, according to which some physical laws are metaphysically necessary, while others are metaphysically contingent. In this paper, we show that his criterion for distinguishing between these two kinds of laws — which crucially relies on the essences of natural kinds — is on its own unsatisfactory. We then propose an alternative way of drawing the metaphysically necessary/contingent distinction for laws of physics based on (...) the central kinematical/dynamical distinction used in physical theorising, and argue that the criterion can be used to amend Tahko’s own account, but also that it can be combined with different metaphysical views about the source of necessity. (shrink)

Series Foreword vii Introduction: The Event “Nietzsche” 2 I Nietzsche the Metapsychologist 30 “God Is Dead” 34 The Ascetic Ideal 46 Nihilism . . . 62 . . . as a “Crisis of Sublimation”? 72 II Noon 86 Troubles with Truth 90 From Nothingness Incorporated . . . 124 . . . via Double Affirmation . . . 132 . . . to Nothingness as Minimal Difference 150 Addendum: On Love as Comedy 164 Notes 183.

It has been argued that quantum mechanics forces us to accept the existence of metaphysical, mind-independent indeterminacy. In this paper we provide an interpretation of the indeterminacy involved in the quantum phenomena in terms of a view that we call Plural Metaphysical Supervaluationism. According to it, quantum indeterminacy is captured in terms of an irreducibly plural relation between the actual world and various misrepresentations of it.

Vaidya has recently argued that while Husserl’s method for acquiring knowledge of essence through use of our imagination is subject to a vicious epistemic circle, we can still use the method to successfully attain objectual understanding of essence. In this paper, I argue that the Husserlian objectual understanding-based epistemology envisaged by Vaidya suffers from a similar epistemic circularity as its knowledge-based foil. I argue that there is a straight-forward solution to this problem, but then raise three serious problems for an (...) amended version of Vaidya’s proposal and any similar Husserlian epistemology of essence. The paper closes with some general reflections on applying the Husserlian method to the contemporary notion of essence and on the idea of refocusing the epistemology of essence on understanding instead of knowledge. (shrink)

Gideon Rosen has recently sketched an argument which aims to establish that the notion of metaphysical modality is systematically ambiguous. His argument contains a crucial sub-argument which has been used to argue for Metaphysical Contingentism, the view that some claims of fundamental metaphysics are metaphysically contingent rather than necessary. In this paper, Rosen’s argument is explicated in detail and it is argued that the most straight-forward reconstruction fails to support its intended conclusion. Two possible ways to save the argument are (...) rebutted and it is furthermore argued that the crucial sub-argument only supports a rather particular variant of Metaphysical Contingentism. (shrink)

This paper provides an overview of the history of the notion of essence in 20th century analytic philosophy, focusing on views held by influential analytic philosophers who discussed, or relied on essence or cognate notions in their works. It in particular covers Russell and Moore’s different approaches to essence before and after breaking with British idealism, the (pre- and post-)logical positivists’ critique of metaphysics and rejection of essence (Wittgenstein, Carnap, Schlick, Stebbing), the tendency to loosen the notion of logical necessity (...) to accommodate certain metaphysical truths in Wittgenstein and others, Quine’s logical rehabilitation of metaphysics and criticism of de re modality, the modal view of essence promoted by the development of quantified modal logic (C. I. Lewis, Barcan Marcus, Kripke) and direct reference theory (Barcan Marcus, Kripke, Putnam), and the emergence of the notion of metaphysical necessity (Kneale, Kripke), and finally Fine’s re-establishment of a Neo-Aristotelian, hyperintensional notion of essence in contemporary metaphysics. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Klio Jahrgang: 97 Heft: 1 Seiten: 332-338.

Rorty's relationship with Nietzsche is complicated. On the one hand, Rorty endorses Nietzsche's break with Platonic philosophy and its quest for truth, even if he sometimes finds it inadequate. He also sees Nietzsche as a superlative private philosopher, who models the virtues of literary creation, a tact he borrows from Nehamas. On the other hand, Rorty tends to minimize key elements of Nietzsche's teaching, including his clearly illiberal morality and what he sees as democracy's inherent shortcomings. Rather than seeing Nietzsche (...) as the philosopher of the will to power and would‐be founder of civilizations, Rorty's Nietzsche is a pragmatist and poet who is devoid of any proper public teaching. (shrink)

The starting point of this paper is an argument to the conclusion that the definition of metaphysical possibility in terms of correct conceivability, conceivability informed by knowledge of relevant essences, found in Rosen (2006) is equivalent to a version of the essentialist definition of metaphysical necessity. This argument appears to show that correct conceivability is a notion of conceivability by name only and is therefore of no interest to epistemologists of modality. In this paper, I present the equivalence argument, explain (...) the idealizing assumptions involved in it and sketch a version of the conceivability approach which weakens these assumptions in order to show that the notion of correct conceivability can still play a specific limited role in the epistemology of modality. (shrink)

Two approaches to elevating certain laws of nature over others have come to prominence recently. On the one hand, according to the meta-laws approach, there are meta-laws, laws which relate to laws as those laws relate to particular facts. On the other hand, according to the modal, or non-absolutist, approach, some laws are necessary in a stricter sense than others. Both approaches play an important role in current research, questioning the ‘orthodoxy’ represented by the leading philosophical theories of natural laws—Humeanism, (...) the DTA view, dispositional essentialism and primitivism. This paper clarifies the relations between these two emerging approaches, as well as their applicability to physical laws and the status of the challenges they pose for standard theories of laws of nature. We first argue that, despite some significant similarities between the two approaches (especially in the context of Lange’s counterfactual account of laws), they are in general distinct and largely independent of each other. Then, we argue that the support for meta-laws from physical theory and practice is more questionable than usually presented. (shrink)

Essentialists claim that we can distinguish between an object's essential and its accidental properties. Following important developments in modal logic during the 1960s and 70s, the orthodox view was that the essential properties of an object are its necessary properties. In his influential 1994 paper "Essence and Modality", Kit Fine argues that the orthodox view is wrong. His two main claims are that first, essentiality cannot be defined in terms of necessity and second, that necessity should instead be defined in (...) terms of essentiality. In my dissertation, I aim to undermine both of his claims in order to defend a variation of the orthodox view. To do this, I first develop Fine's proposal for an essentialist definition of necessity into a more general essentialist theory of modality. I then raise a series of problems for the resulting theory. Finally, I introduce and defend a novel definition of essentiality in terms of metaphysical necessity and a notion of metaphysical dependence. (shrink)

This paper motivates and defends a principle which captures a systematic connection between essence, truth, and grounding. It says that if a proposition expresses an essential truth, i.e., if it is true in virtue of the nature of some objects, then there are grounds for its truth which involve these objects. Together with the assumption that a fact can only be grounded in facts which are relevant to it, this principle is then applied in an argument against the monotonicity of (...) the Essentialist notion ‘true in virtue of the nature of’. (shrink)

Ces notes de terrain rendent compte d'une enquête sur un mouvement collectif contemporain qui a organisé pendant cinq ans des rencontres non-mixtes homosexuelles appelées Croisières. Ces rencontres bi-annuelles d'une semaine visaient à rassembler des homosexuels proches des idées libertaires et ne se reconnaissant pas dans les normes du mainstream gay et proposaient au contraire une alternative à ce modèle. L'hypothèse proposée est que, si les Croisières ont été pensées d'abord dans une perspective politique, elles ont eu aussi et peut-être avant (...) tout une fonction initiatique et thérapeutique pour ses participants. En effet, ces rencontres ont été, pour un certain nombre de participants l'occasion de faire émerger une parole sur des violences sexuelles subies et un moyen de les prendre en charge. (shrink)