Dans une lettre, Merleau-Ponty décrit ainsi l'intention qu'il a développée dans cet ouvrage, écrit pour l'essentiel en 1952 et resté depuis en chantier : «Toute grande prose est aussi une recréation de l'instrument signifiant, désormais manié selon une syntaxe neuve. Le prosaïque se borne à toucher par des signes convenus des significations déjà installées dans la culture. La grande prose est l'art de capter un sens qui n'avait jamais été objectivé jusque-là et de le rendre accessible à tous ceux qui (...) parlent la même langue. Un écrivain se survit lorsqu'il n'est plus capable de fonder ainsi une universalité nouvelle, et de communiquer dans le risque.»Le philosophe nous livre ici ses réflexions sur le langage en général, mais aussi une théorie de l'expression qui l'engage autant vers les thèmes du dialogue et du rapport à autrui, vers la problématique anthropologique de la communication, que vers l'expressivité dans l'art et dans ses premières manifestations chez l'enfant. (shrink)

Claude Lefort is one of the leading social and political theorists in France today. This anthology of his most important work published over the last four decades makes his writing widely accessible to an English-speaking audience for the first time. With exceptional skill Lefort combines the analysis of contemporary political events with a sensitivity to the history of political thought. His critical account of the development of bureaucracy and totalitarianism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe is a timely contribution (...) to current debates about the nature and shortcomings of these societies. His incisive analyses of Marx's theory of history and concept of ideology provide the backdrop for a highly original account of the role of symbolism in modern societies. While critical of many traditional assumptions and doctrines, Lefort develops a political position based on a reappraisal of the idea of human rights and a reconsideration of what "democracy" means today. The Political Forms of Modern Society is a major contribution to contemporary social and political theory. The volume includes a substantial introduction that describes the context of Lefort's writings and highlights the central themes of his work. (shrink)

To investigate the current status of hospital clinical ethics committees (CEC) and how they have evolved in Canada over the past 20 years, this paper presents an overview of the findings from a 2008 survey and compares these findings with two previous Canadian surveys conducted in 1989 and 1984. All Canadian hospitals over 100 beds, of which at least some were acute care, were surveyed to determine the structure of CEC, how they function, the perceived achievements of these committees and (...) opinions about areas with which CEC should be involved. The percentage of hospitals with CEC in our sample was found to be 85% compared with 58% and 18% in 1989 and 1984, respectively. The wide variation in the size of committees and the composition of their membership has continued. Meetings of CEC have become more regularised and formalised over time. CEC continue to be predominately advisory in their nature, and by 2008 there was a shift in the priority of the activities of CEC to meeting ethics education needs and providing counselling and support with less emphasis on advising about policy and procedures. More research is needed on how best to define what the scope of activities of CEC should be in order to meet the needs of hospitals in Canada and elsewhere. More research also is needed on the actual outcomes to patients, families, health professionals and organisations from the work of these committees in order to support the considerable time committee members devote to this endeavour. (shrink)

Writing involves risks—the risk that one will be misunderstood, the risk of being persecuted, the risks of being made a champion for causes in which one does not believe, this risk of inadvertently supporting a reader’s prejudices, to name a few. In trying to give expression to what is true, the writer must “clear a passage within the agitated world of passions,” an undertaking that always to some extent fails: writers are never the master of their own speech. In _Writing: (...) The Political Test, _France’s leading political philosopher, Claude Lefort, illuminates the process by which writers negotiate difficult path to free themselves from the ideological and contextual traps that would doom their attempts to articulate a new vision. Lefort examines writers whose works provide special insights into this problem of risk, both literary artists and political philosophers. Among them are Salman Rushdie, Sade, Tocqueville,m Machiavelli, Leo Strauss, Orwell, Kant, Robespierre, Guizot, and Pierre Clastres. In Tocqueville, for example, Lefort finds that the author’s improvisatory and open-ended expression represents the character of the democratic experience. Orwell’s work on totalitarianism shows up the totalitarian subject’s complicity in this political regime. And Rushdie is remarkable for his solid attack on relativism. With the character and fate of the political forms of modernity, democracy, and totalitarianism a central theme, Lefort concludes with some reflections on the collapse of the Soviet Union. This intriguing and accessible exploration of literature’s political aspects and political philosophy’s literary ones will be welcomed by those who have been stymied by current efforts to bridge these two fields. Taken together, the essays in this volume also stand as an intellectual autobiography of Lefort, making it an excellent introduction to his work for less experience students of political theory or philosophy. (shrink)

Hospitals in many countries have had clinical ethics committees for over 20 years. Despite this, there has been little research to evaluate these committees and growing evidence that they are underutilized. To address this gap, we investigated the question ‘What are the barriers and facilitators nurses and physicians perceive in consulting their hospital ethics committee?’ Thirty-four nurses, 10 nurse managers and 31 physicians working at four Canadian hospitals were interviewed using a semi-structured interview guide as part of a larger investigation. (...) We used content analysis of the interview data related to barriers and facilitators to use of hospital ethics committees to identify nine categories of barriers and nine categories of facilitators. These categories as well as their subcategories are discussed and those specific to nurses or physicians are identified. The need to increase health professionals' use of clinical ethics committees through reducing barriers and maximizing facilitators is discussed. (shrink)

Nurses and physicians may experience ethical conflict when there is a difference between their own values, their professional values or the values of their organization. The distribution of limited health care resources can be a major source of ethical conflict. Relatively few studies have examined nurses' and physicians' ethical conflict with organizations. This study examined the research question ‘What are the organizational ethical conflicts that hospital nurses and physicians experience in their practice?’ We interviewed 34 registered nurses, 10 nurse managers, (...) and 31 physicians as part of a larger study, and asked them to describe their ethical conflicts with organizations. Through content analysis, we identified themes of nurses' and physicians' ethical conflict with organizations and compared the themes for nurses with those for physicians. (shrink)

Much of the literature on clinical ethical conflict has been specific to a specialty area or a particular patient group, as well as to a single profession. This study identifies themes of hospital nurses’ and physicians’ clinical ethical conflicts that cut across the spectrum of clinical specialty areas, and compares the themes identified by nurses with those identified by physicians. We interviewed 34 clinical nurses, 10 nurse managers and 31 physicians working at four different Canadian hospitals as part of a (...) larger study on clinical ethics committees and nurses’ and physicians’ use of these committees. We describe nine themes of clinical ethical conflict that were common to both hospital nurses and physicians, and three themes that were specific to physicians. Following this, we suggest reasons for differences in nurses’ and physicians’ ethical conflicts and discuss implications for practice and research. (shrink)

Al-Jazeera and other satellite television stations have transformed Arab politics over the last decade.

The question of the oeuvre -- The concept of Machiavellianism -- Reading The prince. First signs -- The logic of force -- The social abyss and attachment to power -- Good and evil, the stable and the unstable, the real and the imaginary -- The present and the possible -- Reading The discourses. From The prince to The discourses -- Rome and the "historical" society -- Class difference -- War, and the difference of times -- Authority and the political subject (...) -- The oeuvre, ideology, and interpretation. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to compare two authors: Hans Kelsen and Leo Strauss. More specifically, it will compare Kelsen’s “What is Justice?”—his Farewell Lecture given at Berkeley in 1952—and Leo Strauss’s Natural Right and History—one of the main works on political philosophy published in twentieth century America. Both are key texts dealing with the same subject, justice. Although the two texts were written around the same time by authors who shared a similar history, they seem to defend radically (...) opposed points of view. However, despite and beyond their otherwise real differences, the two texts articulate the same important idea: if one wants to think about political issues, one has to address the question of justice. This chapter will attempt to illustrate through a comparison of these two texts the importance of addressing the question of justice, especially in our modern democracies. (shrink)

BackgroundDeciphering the amount of work provided by different co-authors of a scientific paper has been a recurrent problem in science. Despite the myriad of metrics available, the scientific community still largely relies on the position in the list of authors to evaluate contributions, a metric that attributes subjective and unfounded credit to co-authors. We propose an easy to apply, universally comparable and fair metric to measure and report co-authors contribution in the scientific literature. MethodsThe proposed Author Contribution Index (ACI) is (...) based on contribution percentages provided by the authors, preferably at the time of submission. Researchers can use ACI to compare the contributions of different authors, describe the contribution profile of a particular researcher or analyse how contribution changes through time. We provide such an analysis based on contribution percentages provided by 97 scientists from the field of ecology who voluntarily responded to an online anonymous survey.ResultsACI is simple to understand and to implement because it is based solely on percentage contributions and the number of co-authors. It provides a continuous score that reflects the contribution of one author as compared to the average contribution of all other authors. For example, ACI(i) = 3, means that author i contributed three times more than what the other authors contributed on average. Our analysis comprised 836 papers published in 2014-2016 and revealed patterns of ACI values that relate to career advancement.ConclusionThere are many examples of author contribution indices that have been proposed but none has really been adopted by scientific journals. Many of the proposed solutions are either too complicated, not accurate enough or not comparable across articles, authors and disciplines. The author contribution index presented here addresses these three major issues and has the potential to contribute to more transparency in the science literature. If adopted by scientific journals, it could provide job seekers, recruiters and evaluating bodies with a tool to gather information that is essential to them and cannot be easily and accurately obtained otherwise. We also suggest that scientists use the index regardless of whether it is implemented by journals or not. (shrink)

There is a tendency today to substitute the affirmation of the absolute value of peace for an earlier, fully-formulated ideal of universal peace. This formula, if I am not mistaken, bears the mark of a new exigency: how to maintain the philosophical task, that is, give a basis to the idea of peace that does not arise solely from circumstantial considerations—however imperious they may be, since they come from the knowledge of the danger that a new world war would bring (...) to entire populations—without again falling under Utopian illusions that have fed the projects of perpetual peace. However, some of the difficulties with which the present consideration will deal give a glimpse of the definition of peace as an absolute value. I think it would be wise to examine this definition briefly in order to clear a way for myself. (shrink)

We study price formulas suited for empirical research in financial markets in which put–call parity is satisfied. We find a connection between risk and the bid–ask spread. We further study the compatibility of the model with market frictions, and determine market subsets where the Fundamental Theorem of Asset Pricing applies. Finally, we characterize the price formula.

Por que o nome do um encanta? Não será porque, mesmo ao preço do mais cruel sofrimento, os homens têm nele a ilusão de guardarem sua própria nomeação e, ao mesmo tempo, permanecerem associados? La Boétie parece ensinar, assim, que os homens perdem a liberdade, mas não o desejo de se tornarem livres.

In order to raise the question of a potential compatibility between the awareness of Otherness on the one hand, and a form of universality on the other, some hypotheses should first be formulated and defined. 1) How does moral relativism equate to the rejection of universal discourses? 2) Consequently, how can this rejection be understood as a result of Modernity? 3) How can Modernity be understood as recognition of Otherness? The current paper will attempt to outline some answers to these (...) questions based on a comparative reading between Kelsen and Lefort. Firstly, in order to explicate the main lines of the Kelsenian relativistic axiology it seems crucial to consider his second edition of the Pure Theory of Law, since one can find within it the grounds for a limitation of human cognition. His Farewell Lecture, “What is justice?”, is also relevant to this theme since in it he claims that the human world is a world of relative and conflicting values. The combination of these two ideas leads to the rejection of Universalist discourses – identified with the ones of Natural Law theories – in the name of science. Secondly, three of Lefort’s articles seem to be relevant. The first, “The Image of the Body and Totalitarianism”, enables us to understand his symbolic political philosophy, and more importantly, to introduce his definition of Modernity. “Dissolution of Marks and Democratic Challenge” focuses more on the concept of moral relativism, whilst interpreting it as a consistent reaction to modern indeterminacy. Finally, “Politics and Human Rights” offers a restricted concept of Human Rights, reminiscent of Hannah Arendt’s views, namely that human rights mean the rights to have rights. (shrink)

The present paper studies adjectives and participles with good or bad meanings used with ἀνήρ and ἄνθρωπος by Attic orators in the fourth century BC. It appears that most of the adjectives and participles used with ἀνήρ give this noun good connotation, whereas most of those used with ἄνθρωπος give it bad connotation. Indeed, the orators often use the commonplace ἀγαθός ἀνήρ and καλὸς κἀγαθός ἀνήρ; other adjectives and participles also confirm that ἀνήρ is perceived as “good man”, whereas ἄνθρωπος (...) is most of the time perceived as “bad man”. Even without such words, ἀνήρ can be most of the time understood as “good man”, whereas ἄνθρωπος alone can be understood more often as “bad individual”. The final part of the paper suggests ways to explain this fact. (shrink)

Tocqueville's judgment of the role of 18 th century men of letters in the preparation of the Revolution is well known. Under their influence, “each public passion disguised itself… in philosophy; political life was violendy forced back into the literature.” Less attention is paid to Tocqueville's reflections on the rise of new theoreticians — so-called “economists or physiocrats.” Tocqueville himself admits that they were not as influential as the philosophies, but he thinks that it is in their writings “that one (...) can best study the true nature” of the Revolution. Further: “One recognizes already in their books mis revolutionary, democratic temperament we know so well. (shrink)

If we take 1968 as a vantage point, certain ideological displacements become evident. When comparing the decade before with the one after the great tumult—which, although not a revolution, still briefly shook French society—one notices a change in the intellectual climate. It is not simply that actors have aged and sometimes changed their costumes, nor that others have come on the scene: the play itself is no longer the same. Since in the following pages I will argue that there has (...) been a renaissance in political thought, it might be useful to begin by listing the most significant ideas that have emerged during the last 50 years and to explain why they have to be interpreted differently. (shrink)

The work that Maurice Merleau-Ponty planned to call _The Prose of the World,_ or _Introduction to the Prose of the World,_ was unfinished at the time of his death. The book was to constitute the first section of a two-part work whose aim was to offer, as an extension of his Phenomenology of Perception, a theory of truth. This edition's editor, Claude Lefort, has interpreted and transcribed the surviving typescript, reproducing Merleau-Ponty's own notes and adding documentation and commentary.

When The Teachers of Gurdjieff was first published some 25 years ago, it made a very considerable stir. George Gurdjieff was one of the most famous mystics before the war, a teaching master who had many fashionable and influential pupils. He had a striking appearance and manner of teaching, one that was to prove influential. The meaning of his teaching and the sources of it were a puzzle. How did he come by his knowledge? What was to become of it? (...) These were questions that engaged many seekers. This book offers, among the adventures of the search and the souks of Baghdad and Aleppo, striking and timeless advice to those interested in finding spirituality. Its appeal is far beyond that of one seeker in one era, but offers us information, today, on how to evaluate different forms of teaching, how to study, and even some tantalizing information on the role of Jesus. (shrink)