Pourquoi parler d'espoirs déçus à propos de la loi Neuwirth (1967)? L'analyse des archives du ministère de la Santé montre comment l'administration a tergiversé, invoquant la nécessaire protection de la santé publique, et a freiné, jusqu'en 1972-1973 l'application de la première loi sur la contraception. Il reste alors à comprendre comment s'est construit un « mythe » déjà amoindri par la promulgation de la loi de 1974.

Dans son livre "L’imposture antispéciste", Ariane Nicolas prétend montrer l’incohérence et la dangerosité de l’antispécisme. Ce qu’elle montre surtout, nous dit Valéry Giroux, c’est qu’elle comprend très mal le sujet qu’elle cherche désespérément – et peut-être même malhonnêtement – à discréditer. Compte rendu d’une lecture désolante.

The aim of the article was to develop the thesis that patient’s decisions about truth and responsibility are central to the process of psychotherapy and yet they are rarely explicitly articulated. In the first part of the text, I outlined the anthropological context of the thesis, according to which human intentionality and psychological mechanisms have the status of domains of objective reality that are ontologically separate, although in the patient’s experience they combine with one another. Next, with reference to the (...) classical opinions of psychotherapy, I identified two aspects of patient decisions related to her/his psychopathology: adaptive (more pronounced in childhood) and moral (more pronounced in adulthood). I went on to isolate groups of psychological operating mechanisms involved in both truth- and responsibility-avoidance choices and, using clinical illustration, showed how the therapist can support alternative decisions. Finally, I further clarified the understanding of the proposed working model by indicating the different therapeutic consequences of revealing psychological mechanisms vs. decision-making based on the type of patient disorder and the anthropological-moral character of his/her choices. (shrink)

Annoncé à grand fracas, le décryptage do génome humain devait nous révéler le secret ultime de la vie et ouvrir la voie à de nouvelles thérapies miracles. Espoirs déçus : à l'ère de la post-génomique, les secrets du vivant sont maintenant recherchés dans les théories de la complexité, dans la convergence des efforts des biologistes, des physiciens et des mathématiciens. Comment comprendre la signification de cette succession rapide d'objectifs apparemment différents, de cette alternance d'espoirs et de désillusions? Dans ce livre (...) novateur, Michel Morange propose une clé pour rendre compte de ces difficultés, et de beaucoup d'autres analogues touchant toutes les branches de la biologie. Les annonces sensationnelles reflètent l'espoir toujours déçu qu'une explication unique pourrait suffire. Or les faits biologiques - comme ceux relevant de bien d'autres disciplines scientifiques -ne peuvent être expliqués par un principe d'intelligibilité unique. Exemples à l'appui et de façon très pédagogique, Michel Morange montre pourquoi des explications différentes doivent être articulées pour décrire le fonctionnement des macromolécules aussi bien que l'évolution humaine ou le développement des cancers. Admettre une idée aussi simple n'est pas évident, car tout scientifique a été formé à privilégier un principe d'intelligibilité particulier. L'articulation entre explications différentes est pourtant indispensable pour le progrès des connaissances ; elle est aussi une exigence éthique ; elle est requise pour que la science conserve sa place dans nos sociétés. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:“The Whole Internal World His Own”: Locke and Metaphor ReconsideredS. H. ClarkWhy need I name thy Boyle, whose pious search, Amid the dark recesses of his works, The great Creator sought? And why thy Locke, Who made the whole internal world his own?Oh decus! Anglicae certe oh lux altera gentis!... Tu caecas rerum causas, fontemque severum Pande, Pater; tibi enim, tibi, veri magne Sacerdos, Corda patent hominum, atque (...) altae penetralia Mentis.Fourfold Annihilation & at the clangor of the Arrows of Intellect The innumerable Chariots of the Almighty appeard in Heaven And Bacon & Newton & Locke, & Milton & Shakespear & Chaucer1Two features of these encomia to John Locke, composed by James Thomson, Thomas Gray, and William Blake, are immediately striking. Firstly, they are delivered by poets in a tradition customarily seen as a reaction to the intellectual climate induced by Locke’s Essay, a book which Blake famously claimed to regard with “Contempt and Abhorrence.” 2 Secondly, the familiar and somewhat hackneyed characterizations of Locke as philosopher of common-sense, [End Page 241] empiricism, and liberal ideology are refreshingly absent. For Gray he is “veri magne Sacerdos,” great priest of truth; Thomson places him in a pantheon including Shakespeare, Milton, Spenser, and Chaucer; and this ranking is explicitly endorsed in Blake’s “Milton & Shakspear & Chaucer.” Comparable praise of Locke’s imaginative power is conspicuously absent from even the most generous tributes of recent commentators. 3Even if Locke’s philosophical contribution to a variety of debates is fully acknowledged, the question remains of why his major work, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, was held in such high popular esteem—veneration is not too strong a word—during the subsequent century. The text itself appears an improbable candidate for such canonization: George Saintsbury accused its prose of being “positively mean in every point of style,” 4 and certainly in comparison with the poised and lucid ironies of Berkeley and Hume, it cannot but appear prolix, diffuse, and repetitive. The chief (and frequently only) merit grudgingly accorded to it is of disarming informality. Rosalie Colie’s emphasis on the “exploitation of the generic and rhetorical possibilities in the essay form itself “ highlights the conscious manipulation of authorial distance through which Locke creates the effect of sprawling inclusiveness and incom-pletion, but at the expense of conceding that “in exchange for the frankness with which the essayist appeared to present his thinking self, he was allowed certain liberties from logical rigour.” 5 Though the suggestion that a major philosophical text seeks to evade “logical rigour” might seem damning enough, there is a still more insidious equation of Locke’s “middle-style,” his desire “to make, what I have to say, as easie and intelligible to all sort of Readers as I can,” with a complicity with the expectations of his audience. 6 Other critics, notably John Richetti, have put a more positive gloss on the “simple and fortuitously concocted circle of friends” to whom the Essay is addressed, but even these accounts have been obliged to stress the representative and consensual nature of Locke’s thought. 7 This view is perhaps most elegantly expressed by Leslie Stephen: “Locke ruled the thought of his own and the coming period [End Page 242] because he interpreted so completely the fundamental beliefs which had been worked out at this time. He ruled, that is, by obeying.” 8William Walker correctly observes that “identifying and interpreting metaphors of mind” in the Essay are “standard practices of mainstream philosophical commentary from Leibniz to Rorty,” but also notes that these analyses are usually concerned with the degree to which Locke’s reliance on figuration was at variance with and compromised his epistemological doctrine. 9 I would argue that the poetic tributes previously quoted offer a more suggestive and adequate guide to the original impact of his work. In order to substantiate this claim, I shall begin by examining Locke’s apparent renunciation of, yet paradoxical dependence upon metaphor; go on to look at the connection of the “Horizon” to the elegiac presentation of memory and the ethic of mental “Labour”; and conclude by analyzing the complex interdependence of candle and sun within the light imagery employed in the... (shrink)

It neither is nor need be doubted that tutamen opis, preserved like many another true lection in the margin of G and R, is what Catullus wrote. The tutū opus which OGR present in their texts is a simple error arising from the abbreviation of tamen as S0009838800022916_inline1. But the verse still fails to satisfy and is universally esteemed corrupt. The description of Peleus as dear exceedingly to his yet unborn and unbegotten son is so absurd a form of address (...) that all editors now adopt from the interpolated MSS the conjecture ‘clarissime nato.’ This description is neither absurd nor untrue, but it is yet untimely, and sorts ill with the bridegroom's other titles. The ‘decus eximium,’ the ‘magnae uirtutes,’ the ‘tutela Emathiae,’ all are already his: the glory reflected from his heroic son belongs to the future and is part of that prophecy to which in the next two verses he is bidden to give ear. clarissime nupta would be appropriate, and would resemble 25 ‘eximie taedis felicibus aucte’ and Ouid. met. XI 217 sq. ‘coniuge Peleus | clarus erat diua’; but ‘most illustrious in thy son’ breaks away from the rest of this prelude and forestalls what is to come in 338 and the following verses. There is therefore an undercurrent of feeling that even now all is not well: ‘de coniectura ilia dubitari potest, cum propriae Pelei ipsius uirtutes hie praedicentur’ says Baehrens, and Schwabe even proposes so wretched an alternative as ‘carissime fato.’. (shrink)

It would be worth knowing whom the historian married. His wife's name might disclose some local tie in the Sabine country; or it might permit a guess about alliances with families at the metropolis, whether ancient in repute or newly risen to influence. Marriage is a normal device for advancement – ‘decus ac robur’. Cicero did well for himself when, about the year 79 B.C., he married Terentia. She was the half-sister of a Fabia, who was a Vestal Virgin. (...) The Fabii are not only noble but patrician, albeit in temporary eclipse. (shrink)

L'objectif de la collection «Philosophies» est de faciliter l'accès à une œuvre ou à un thème philosophique. Dans ses publications, elle vise le grand public et non une poignée de spécialistes. C'est une caractéristique qu'il faut garder en tête lorsque nous abordons le présent livre de Pierre-Marie Morel. En effet, la présentation de l'atomisme qu'il nous offre n'entre pas dans tous les détails et évite les grandes controverses. Les discussions trop pointues cèdent la place à une explication d'ensemble mettant en (...) lumière l'évolution de la pensée atomiste. Ceux qui cherchent une introduction simple, mais non simpliste, à l'atomisme ancien ne seront pas déçus, car le livre de P.-M. Morel est une réussite à cet égard. L'auteur a su éviter le superflu pour nous présenter l'essentiel. Dans ce livre, l'atomisme est abordé au travers de ses trois plus grands représentants: Démocrite, Épicure et Lucrèce. Leur doctrine respective n'est pas étudiée systématiquement, mais par le biais du concept de nécessité. C'est sur ce concept que s'édifie l'ensemble de l'ouvrage qui se divise en trois sections principales: 1) Philosophie naturelle et nécessité; 2) Nécessité et liberté; 3) Connaissance et nécessité. Nous aborderons dans l'ordre chacune d'entre elles. (shrink)