The paper discusses Dr. Floris Tomasini's paper “What Is Bioethics: Notes toward a New Approach?”. Based on Tomasini's account of methodological and ethical pluralism, the paper explores the demarcation problem of bioethics and suggests a full methodological laissez-faire.

Claudian compares Eutropius in his consular robes to a monkey, dressed in silk to amuse dinner guests, but with his buttocks bare . The situation has not failed to attract the notice of scholars. Christiansen and Fargues called attention to the striking and original use of the monkey-simile . Alan Cameron has suggested that the present example is drawn from life: ‘Who can doubt that this was a typical dinner divertissement in the elegant circles of Claudian's day-or at least one (...) Claudian himself had witnessed?’ He cites E. R. Curtius's assertion that metaphorical apes are uncommon in ancient literature ; that may be relatively true, but when Demosthenes is entitled to address his opponent as similar licence in subsequent invective is unlimited. (shrink)

The lesion and transplantation data cited by Sinden et al., when considered in tandem, seem to harbor an internal inconsistency, raising questions of false localization of function. The extrapolation of such data to cognitive impairment and potential treatment strategies in Alzheimer's disease is problematic. Patients with focal basal forebrain lesions (e.g., anterior communicating artery aneurysm rupture) might be a more appropriate target population.

What characterizes emergency today is the proliferation of the term. Any event or situation supposedly has the potential to become an emergency. Emergencies may happen anywhere and at any time. They are not contained within one functional sector or one domain of life. The substantive focus of the articles collected in this special issue reflects this proliferation: they explore ways of governing in, by and through emergencies across different types of emergencies and different domains of life. In response to this (...) proliferation, the issue opens up critical work on the politics of emergency beyond the ‘state of exception’ as dominant paradigm. Emergency is treated as a problem for government that calls for the invention of new techniques or the redeployment of existing techniques. Through this shift in emphasis, the articles in this issue disclose relations between modalities of power and emergency life that differ from the ‘lightening flash’ of a sovereign decision on the exception taken from outside of life, or the capacity to ‘mould’ an always-already emergent life from within life. (shrink)