L'une des grandes contributions a l'etude de la philosophie d'Aristote inspirees par la pensee moderne et oeuvre majeure sur l'histoire du concept de mouvement en general - des presocratiques jusqu'a Hegel -, Aristote, ses devanciers, ses successeurs de Jan Patocka est lui-meme l'expression d'un double mouvement. Porte, en tant que recherche sur la philosophie aristotelicienne de la nature et sa signification pour les sciences modernes, par des motifs phenomenologiques, il entreprend en meme temps, a partir d'Aristote, une reevaluation des points (...) de depart de la phenomenologie et de la philosophie de l'existence, de facon a orienter la philosophie moderne sur le concept de mouvement comme accomplissement de la vie. Livre charniere donc, qui aura attendu pres de cinquante ans avant d'etre traduit. (shrink)

In this essay, Domenico Jervolino summarizes twenty years of Ricoeur’s reading of Patočka’s work, up to the Neapolitan conference of 1997. Nowhere is Ricoeur closer to Patočka’s a-subjective phenomenology. Both thinkers belong, together with authors like Merleau-Ponty and Levinas, to a third phase of the phenomenological movement, marked by the search for a new approach to the relation between human beings and world, beyond Husserl and Heidegger. In the search for this approach, Patočka strongly underlines the relation between body, temporality (...) and sociality. Central to this new encounter of Patočka and Ricoeur is the discovery of an idea of inter-human community based on a a-subjective conception of existence. (shrink)

Neuf études sur l'art et le temps - c'est-à-dire - l'art et l'histoire. Regard historique sur l'esthétique, analyse des conceptions du Beau dans la tradition philosophique, au travers d'exemples venant de la Grèce, de la Renaissance, du Romantisme, et d'auteurs comme Burckhardt ou Hegel - ces essais sont le prétexte à une exploration des grandes questions métaphysiques sur l'art et les hommes, analyses par un auteur dont l'engagement concret contre le régime totalitaire de son pays porte la marque de son (...) souci de l'homme et de sa dignité. (shrink)

O artigo desenvolve uma reflexão sobre o conceito winnicottiano de núcleo isolado do si-mesmo, ao qual se atribui o caráter de ser permanentemente desconhecido e incomunicável. O tema é discutido a partir de um outro conceito do mesmo autor, o de cisão da personalidade em verdadeiro e falso si-mesmo, com a ajuda de textos de Marion Milner em que esta questiona Winnicott acerca do isolamento e incomunicabilidade. Na sequência, é examinada a importância terapêutica do "objeto que sobrevive". Sobre este último (...) tema, é oferecida uma ilustração clínica.The article develops a reflection on Winnicott's concept of isolated self, to which are attributed characters of being permanently unknown and incommunicable. This topic is further discussed with the help of another concept of the same author, that of scision into the true and the false self, and of some texts by Marion Milner where Winnicott's ideas of isolation and incommunicability are questioned. In the sequence, the therapeutic significance of the "object which survives" is examined. To that end, a clinical exemple is presented and analized. (shrink)

Winnicotts Konzept des »Holding« bezieht sich auf das komplexe psychische Tun und Wirken der Mutter für ihr neugeborenes Kind, also darauf, dass sie sowohl als »Umwelt-Mutter« als auch als »Objekt-Mutter« fungieren muss. Während das Holding mit der Umwelt-Mutter assoziiert ist, möchte ich das »Containing« hier der Objekt-Mutter zuordnen. Es soll gezeigt werden, dass Winnicott diese Konzepte in Anlehnung an Freuds frühe Beobachtungen der für die emotionale Entwicklung des Kindes entscheidenden Rolle der Mutter erarbeitete. Obwohl die Rolle des Vaters ebenso wichtig (...) sei, betonte Winnicott, es liege in der Hand der Mutter, der Psyche des Kindes die Bedeutung des Vaters nahezubringen – oder nicht. Anknüpfend an Winnicotts späte Formulierungen aus »Objektverwendung und Identifizierung« wird vorgeschlagen, dass das psychische Überleben des Objekts die entscheidende interpsychische Dynamik im Kern der Eltern-Kind-Beziehung ist. Das intrapsychisch entstehende subjektiv überlebende Objekt gewinnt im Kontext der analytischen Situation potenziell an Stärke, wenn der Analytiker imstande ist, sein Überleben zu unterstützen. Um diese Themen kreist Winnicotts Objektbeziehungstheorie. (shrink)

Rassemblant douze textes rédigés entre 1934 et 1976, ce recueil remet les Essais hérétiques en perspective en permettant de saisir quelques-unes des principales lignes de force qui font l'unité intime de l'œuvre de Patocka et communiquent à sa pensée la tonalité et la tension éthiques qui lui donnent son éclat particulier à l'intérieur du mouvement phénoménologique. Ligne de force de la liberté en tant qu'expérience fondamentale de l'être historique qu'est l'homme, transcendance qui, dans sa négativité, rejoint le " pas en (...) arrière " des analyses phénoménologiques. Ligne, négative là encore, de la problématisation socratique. Ligne du destin qui s'ensuit et qui, incarnation exemplaire du conflit de la philosophie avec le monde comme il va, renvoie en direction du " sacrifice radical " à travers lequel la liberté, reniée à force de trop se revendiquer, refait signe à l'époque moderne, poussant Patocka, dans un regard qui embrasse toute l'étendue de l'histoire spirituelle de l'Europe, à considérer le Gestell heideggérien à travers le prisme du polemos dont parlait Héraclite. Écrits " polémiques " donc et " pathétiques ", autant que " politiques ", qui nous parlent de l'humanisme, de la modernité et de ce qui ne prétend pas " sauver ", mais qui résiste dans l'expérience philosophique vécue en tant que " soin de l'âme " - à la fois ébranlement radical et mode fondamental de la responsabilité vis-à-vis d'un sens à jamais problématique. (shrink)

Un texte inédit de Jan Patocka (1907-1977) intitulé " Sur les problèmes des traductions philosophiques " (1968) dans une traduction française originale d'Erika Abrams ouvre ce volume collectif qui cherche à penser l'existence humaine et le monde commun grâce à l'oeuvre aussi capitale que protéiforme de ce philosophe tchèque. Des spécialistes en phénoménologie, en philosophie sociale et politique, en anthropologie et en esthétique déploient ici sa richesse et sa fécondité à travers quatre problématiques : le Monde commun, le Mouvement critique (...) de la liberté, la Phénoménologie et la théorie du mouvement de l'existence, le Temps et l'Histoire. (shrink)

Masaryk’s philosophical approach to reality is largely characterised by its orientation towards the positivism of Auguste Comte, which Masaryk sought to offset with the psychologism of J. S. Mill. The combination of these positivist approaches became the positive starting point for Masaryk’s ethics. But that was not the only influence on his ethics. Masaryk’s German translation of Hume’s book, titled Eine Untersuchung über die Prinzipien der Moral von David Hume (1883), reveals that the main stimuli that shaped Masaryk’s ideas about (...) ethics came from David Hume. Although the need for scientific evidence became a fundamental principle of Masaryk’s thought, the need to objectively anchor ethics in rational theism necessitated in this area a departure from his positivist outlook. Masaryk’s lectures on practical philosophy attest to this fact. The reason for his departure from a positivist stance was due to the metaphysical nature of his concept of psychology. (shrink)

In a recent paper in Psychological Science, Kouider and Dupoux reported obtaining unconscious Stroop priming only when subjects had partial awareness of the masked distractor words . Kouider and Dupoux conjectured that semantic priming occurs only when such partial awareness is present. The present experiments tested this conjecture in an affective categorization priming task that differed from Kouider and Dupoux’s in using masked distractors that subjects had practiced earlier as visible words. Experiment 1 showed priming from practiced words when subjects (...) had no partial awareness of those words. Experiment 2 showed that, in the absence of partial awareness, practiced words yielded priming but not-practiced words did not. Experiment 3 corroborated Experiment 1 and 2s results using a different test of partial awareness. These results suggest that unconscious processing of subword elements drives masked semantic priming by practiced words. (shrink)

Neither in theory nor in practice does there exist a single model of decision making. It is very difficult to identify a model, or models, which would be most useful during and after a disaster. Within the disaster timeframe (a difficult and complex situation), specific moral dilemmas arise. All the decision making theories tend to be associated with different assumptions about human nature, the quality of the decisions made and the manner in which they are made. Different assumptions may result (...) in different tools being used and subsequently different consequences. The paper will provide a general introduction to the ethical decision making model, and will suggest two ways in which decisions in ethics might be made. The paper will try to deepen the discussion, and suggest answers to questions such as which type of ethical decision making is better in a specific situation such as a disaster? Is there any need to use a different decision making model (from an ethical point of view) in a disaster than in another event? Nonetheless, the article does not provide explicit solutions to these questions, since providing them would require further investigation than is the aim of this paper. (shrink)

The development of early childhood care, education, and development programs in Indonesia suggests unexpected linkages between democratization, empowerment, and neoliberal policy regimes. Despite the shift to grassroots organizing and to empowerment as a goal of development, in Indonesia there is tremendous continuity in the use of women's work to provide social welfare at the community level. Ethnographic research illuminates the impact on women's work and their own interpretation of programs to empower children.

According to metaphysical coherentism, grounding relations form an interconnected system in which things ground each other and nothing is ungrounded. This potentially viable view’s logical territory remains largely unexplored. In this paper, I describe that territory by articulating four varieties of metaphysical coherentism. I do not argue for any variety in particular. Rather, I aim to show that not all issues which might be raised against coherentism will be equally problematic for all the versions of that view, which features far (...) more nuance and diversity than is typically ascribed to it. (shrink)

This paper considers whether Marx's views about communism change significantly during his lifetime. According to the ‘standard story’, as Marx got older he dropped the vision of self-realization in labour that he spoke of in his early writings, and adopted a more pessimistic account of labour, where real freedom is achieved outside the working-day, in leisure. Other commentators, however, have argued that there is no pessimistic shift in Marx's thought on this matter. This paper offers a different reading of this (...) debate. It argues that there are two visions of the good life in Marx. However, it suggests that these two visions cannot be understood in terms of a simple shift between a ‘young’ and ‘mature’ Marx. Rather, it claims that Marx moves between these two visions throughout his writings. In this way, it suggests that Marx's intellectual development on this issue is best understood as an oscillation rather than a shift. Once this interpretive claim is advanced, the paper then moves on to consider some potential causes and implications of Marx's life-long oscillation between two different conceptions of the good life. (shrink)

Der Band enthält Beiträge von Medizinern, Juristen, Philosophen und Naturwissenschaftlern aus Estland, Polen, den Niederlanden und Deutschland zu Themen der Ethik und Wissenschaftstheorie der Medizin. Diese Beiträge sind im Rahmen des «Arbeitskreises für Ethik und Wissenschaftstheorie der Medizin in Ostmitteleuropa» entstanden, der auf einer Kooperationsvereinbarung des Interdisziplinären Zentrums für Ethik der Europa-Universität Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder) und des Instituts für Geschichte und Ethik der Medizin der Universität Halle-Wittenberg beruht. Sie befassen sich u. a. mit der Gesundheitsreform in Polen, Tschechien und Ungarn, (...) mit ethischen Problemen bei Abtreibung, HIV-Infektion, Drogenkonsum, Sterbehilfe und Gentechnik sowie dem Theorie-Praxis-Verhältnis in der Medizin. (shrink)

Our aim in this article is to bring some clarity to the clinical ethics expertise debate by critiquing and replacing the taxonomy offered by the Core Competencies report. The orienting question for our taxonomy is: Can clinical ethicists offer justified, normative recommendations for active patient cases? Views that answer “no” are characterized as a “negative” view of clinical ethics expertise and are further differentiated based on (a) why they think ethicists cannot give justified normative recommendations and (b) what they think (...) ethicists can offer, if they cannot offer recommendations. Views that answer “yes” to the orienting question are characterized as a “positive” view of clinical ethics expertise. Positive views are distinguished according to four additional questions. First (P1), how are those recommendations generated? Second (P2), what is the nature of the recommendations? Third (P3), we ask, how are the recommendations justified? And finally (P4), how are the recommendations communicated? (shrink)

This study clarifies the need for a renewed account of the body in physiotherapy to fill sizable gaps between physiotherapeutical theory and practice. Physiotherapists are trained to approach bodily functioning from an objectivist perspective; however, their therapeutic interactions with patients are not limited to the provision of natural-scientific explanations. Physiotherapists’ practice corresponds well to theorisation of the body as the bearer of original bodily intentionality, as outlined by Merleau-Ponty and elaborated upon by enactivists. We clarify how physiotherapeutical practice corroborates Merleau-Ponty’s (...) critical arguments against objectivist interpretations of the body; particularly, his analyses demonstrate that norms of optimal corporeal functioning are highly individual and variable in time and thus do not directly depend on generic physiological structures. In practice, objectively measurable physical deviations rarely correspond to specific subjective difficulties and, similarly, patients’ reflective insights into their own motor deficiencies do not necessarily produce meaningful motor improvements. Physiotherapeutical procedures can be understood neither as mechanical manipulations of patients’ machine-like bodies by experts nor as a process of such manipulation by way of instructing patients’ explicit conscious awareness. Rather, physiotherapeutical practice and theory can benefit from the philosophical interpretation of motor disorders as modifications of bodily intentionality. Consequently, motor performances addressed in physiotherapy are interpreted as relational features of a living organism coupled with its environment, and motor disorders are approached as failures to optimally manage the motor requirements of a given situation owing to a relative loss of the capacity to structure one’s relation with their environment through motor action. Building on this, we argue that the process of physiotherapy is most effective when understood as a bodily interaction to guide patients towards discovering better ways of grasping a situation as meaningful through bodily postures and movements. (shrink)

Moral pluralism poses a foundational problem for secular clinical ethics: How can ethical dilemmas be resolved in a context where there is disagreement not only on particular cases, but further, on...

This paper provides an analysis of the intrinsic/extrinsic distinction, as applied both to properties and to relations. In contrast to other accounts, the approach taken here locates the source of a property’s intrinsicality or extrinsicality in the manner in which that property is ‘logically constituted’, and thus – plausibly – in its nature or essence, rather than in e.g. its modal profile. Another respect in which the present proposal differs from many extant analyses lies in the fact that it does (...) not seek to analyse the ‘global’ distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic properties on the basis of the ‘local’ distinction between having a property intrinsically and having it extrinsically. Instead, the latter distinction is explicated on the basis of the former. (shrink)

Marx’s vision of unalienated production is often thought to be subject to decisive objections. This article argues that these objections rely on a misinterpretation of Marx’s position. It provides a new interpretation of Marx’s vision of unalienated production. Unlike another well-known account, it suggests that unalienated production involves realizing oneself through providing others with the goods and services they need for their self-realization. It argues that this view is appealing and that it offers a more successful response to objections than (...) previous interpretations. In doing so, it hopes to put Marx’s concern with alienation and nonalienation back on the table. (shrink)

This paper clarifies Merleau-Ponty’s original account of “higher-order” cognition as fundamentally embodied and enacted. Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy inspired theories that deemphasize overlaps between conceptual knowledge and motor intentionality or, on the contrary, focus exclusively on abstract thought. In contrast, this paper explores the link between Merleau-Ponty’s account of motor intentionality and his interpretations of our capacity to understand and interact productively with cultural symbolic systems. I develop my interpretation based on Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of two neuropathological modifications of motor intentionality, the case (...) of the brain-injured war veteran Schneider, and a neurological disorder known as Gerstmann’s syndrome. Building on my analysis of Schneider’s sensorimotor compensatory performances in relation to his limitations in the domains of algebra, geometry, and language usage, I demonstrate a strong continuity between the sense of embodiment and enaction at all these levels. Based on Merleau-Ponty’s interpretations, I argue that “higher-order” cognition is impaired in Schneider insofar as his injury limits his sensorimotor capacity to dynamically produce comparatively more complex differentiations of any given phenomenal structure. I then show how Merleau-Ponty develops and specifies his interpretation of Schneider’s intellectual difficulties in relation to the ambiguous role of the body, and in particular the hand, in Gerstmann’s syndrome. I explain how Merleau-Ponty defends the idea that sensorimotor and quasi-representational cognition are mutually irreducible, while maintaining that symbol-based cognition is a fundamentally enactive and embodied process. (shrink)

This paper is divided into three sections. The first presents some examples of the killing/letting die distinction. The second draws a further distinction between what I call negative and positive cases of acting or refraining. Here I argue that the moral significance of the acting/refraining distinction is different for positive and for negative cases. In the third section I apply the above distinction to euthanasia, and argue that mercy killing should be regarded as analogous to positive rather than negative cases. (...) On the basis of this, I then support active rather than passive euthanasia. (shrink)