Le bonheur; le bonheur est là, à notre portée. Il suffit de nous y mettre immédiatement! Audacieuse, étonnante, renversante, la philosophie de Robert Misrahi nous embarque. Elle est à lire par gros temps, elle agit comme un remontant. Cette pensée solaire est un élan, une force, un souffle qui nous réveille. Elle ravive la liberté, chante le Désir, célèbre la réflexion, matériaux essentiels à la construction de notre joie et de notre bonheur. Cette introduction à la philosophie misrahienne est une (...) invitation à ce beau voyage. Simple, didactique et pratique, elle donne envie de vagabonder, de sillonner, d'explorer et peu à peu d'aller vers le grand large, vers l'œuvre entière. Elle est destinée à tous. Cher lecteur, hâte-toi, hâte-toi donc d'embarquer pour la joie et le bonheur!"--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Que peut-on attendre d'un « citoyen du monde » dans l'espace européen à venir? Que représente le cosmopolitisme en Europe? Voici quelques-unes des questions posées par cet ouvrage qui présente les réflexions de chercheurs européens et non européens sur le cosmopolitisme. Les regards des spécialistes sur la question sont variés et la réalité est analysée à partir de différentes disciplines. Ainsi, science politique, histoire, droit, langues, littérature et civilisation se conjuguent pour présenter une vision toujours évolutive, parfois idéale, du cosmopolitisme. (...) On considère souvent le cosmopolitisme comme obsolète. N'est-ce pas, au contraire, une des réponses possibles à la crise que traverse l'Union européenne en ce début de XXIe siècle? (shrink)

After having defined the KARO logic for specifying intelligent agents in earlier work we now turn to the question how to realise agents specified in the KARO framework. To this end we look at agent programming languages that we have defined, and investigate how programs in these languages can be linked to the KARO logic.

The past 50 years have seen an accumulation of evidence suggesting that associative learning depends on high-level cognitive processes that give rise to propositional knowledge. Yet, many learning theorists maintain a belief in a learning mechanism in which links between mental representations are formed automatically. We characterize and highlight the differences between the propositional and link approaches, and review the relevant empirical evidence. We conclude that learning is the consequence of propositional reasoning processes that cooperate with the unconscious processes involved (...) in memory retrieval and perception. We argue that this new conceptual framework allows many of the important recent advances in associative learning research to be retained, but recast in a model that provides a firmer foundation for both immediate application and future research. (shrink)

Until the late twentieth century, there were three main political currents in the Netherlands: Christian, Labor, and Liberal, giving Christian party politics a stronger position than in European countries with a binary division between conservative and progressive. The history of the debate about embryo research coincides with the end of this period. Whereas in the 1980s the Christian Democrat party still had strong religiously motivated views about embryo protection, it has since lost both the power and the drive to pursue (...) this. However, due to strategic opportunities arising in the margin of Dutch coalition politics, smaller parties inspired by Christian belief are still quite influential on issues of medical ethics in the highly fragmented political landscape of the present. (shrink)

When the COVID-19 surge hit New York City hospitals, the Division of Medical Ethics at Weill Cornell Medical College, and our affiliated ethics consultation services, faced waves of ethical issues sweeping forward with intensity and urgency. In this article, we describe our experience over an eight-week period (16 March through 10 May 2020), and describe three types of services: clinical ethics consultation (CEC); service practice communications/interventions (SPCI); and organizational ethics advisement (OEA). We tell this narrative through the prism of time, (...) describing the evolution of ethical issues and trends as the pandemic unfolded. We delineate three phases: anticipation and preparation, crisis management, and reflection and adjustment. The first phase focused predominantly on ways to address impending resource shortages and to plan for remote ethics consultation, and CECs focused on code status discussions with surrogates. The second phase was characterized by the dramatic convergence of a rapid increase in the number of critically ill patients, a growing scarcity of resources, and the reassignment/ redeployment of staff outside their specialty areas. The third phase was characterized by the recognition that while the worst of the crisis was waning, its medium- and long-term consequences continued to pose immense challenges. We note that there were times during the crisis that serving in the role of clinical ethics consultant created a sense of dis-ease as novel as the coronavirus itself. In retrospect we learned that our activities far exceeded the familiar terrain of clinical ethics consultation and extended into other spheres of organizational life in novel ways that were unanticipated before this pandemic. To that end, we defined and categorized a middle level of ethics consultation, which we have termed service practice communication intervention (SPCI). This is an underappreciated dimension of the work that ethics consult services are capable of in times of crisis. We believe that the pandemic has revealed the many enduring ways that ethics consultation services can more robustly contribute to the ethical life of their institutions moving forward. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to take relational ethics concepts and apply them to the context of application to research ethics committees for approval to carry out research. The process of a multinational qualitative research application is described. The article suggests that a relational ethics approach can address two issues: how qualitative proposals are interpreted by research ethics committees and how this safeguards potentially vulnerable respondents. In relational terms, the governance of a research project may be enhanced by shared (...) ownership and willingness to engage in mutual dialogue. This challenges both researchers and research ethics committees to reframe their understanding of roles and functions in the assessment of research protocols, particularly those of a qualitative nature and those that address end-of-life issues. (shrink)