'A whole man, made of all men, worth all of them, and any one of them worth him.' This was how Jean-Paul Sartre characterized himself at the end of his autobiographical study, Words. And Bernard-Henri Levy shows how Sartre cannot be understood without taking into account his relations with the intellectual forebears and contemporaries, the lovers and friends, with whom he conducted a lifelong debate. His thinking was essentially a tumultuous dialogue with his whole age and himself. He learned from (...) Gide the art of freedom, and how to experiment with inherited fictional forms. He was a fellow-traveller of communism, and yet his relations with the Party were deeply ambiguous. He was fascinated by Freud but trenchantly critical of psychoanalysis. Beneath Sartre's complex and ever-mutating political commitments, Levy detects a polarity between anarchic individualism on the one hand, and a longing for absolute community that brought him close to totalitarianism on the other. Levy depicts Sartre as a man who could succumb to the twentieth century's catastrophic attraction to violence and the false messianism of its total political solutions, while also being one of the fiercest critics of its illusions and shortcomings. (shrink)

An account of successive legal theories in England and America against a background of the varieties of natural law in the ancient, medieval and modern worlds. The outcome in Legal Realism provides insight into contemporary issues in law and the judicial process and their relation to moral philosophy. As Levy shows, legal theory has always been inspired by forces outside the law in philosophy and politics. In England the philosophy of Utilitarianism as expounded by Bentham and Austin brought legal positivism (...) into prominence as an alternative to natural law. In the United States the philosophy of pragmatism spearheaded by James and Dewey and shared by Justice Holmes gave the functional turn resulting in the movement of Legal Realism. After sketching the background of varieties of natural law in the ancient, medieval, and modern worlds, Levy presents leading figures and trends in England and the United States. The book is written so as to be intelligible to lawyers, philosophers, and students of cultural history and social science. (shrink)

Kill one person, and it is considered murder.Kill ten thousand person, and it is considered foreign policy.-Anonymous.

Kill one person, and it is considered murder.Kill ten thousand person, and it is considered foreign policy.-Anonymous.

_A trenchant look at how the coronavirus reveals the dangerous fault lines of contemporary society As seen on CNN's Fareed Zakaria GPS: “A stirring alarm addressed to an unsettled world.” _(Kirkus Reviews_)__ Forget the world that came before. The author of _American Vertigo_ serves up an incisive look at how COVID-19 reveals the dangerous fault lines of contemporary society._ With medical mysteries, rising death tolls, and conspiracy theories beamed minute by minute through the vast web universe, the coronavirus pandemic has (...) irrevocably altered societies around the world. In this sharp essay, world-renowned philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy interrogates the many meanings and metaphors we have assigned to the pandemic—and what they tell us about ourselves. Drawing on the philosophical tradition from Plato and Aristotle to Lacan and Foucault, Lévy asks uncomfortable questions about reality and mythology: he rejects the idea that the virus is a warning from nature, the inevitable result of global capitalism; he questions the heroic status of doctors, asking us to think critically about the loci of authority and power; he challenges the panicked polarization that dominates online discourse. Lucid, incisive, and always original, Lévy takes a bird’s-eye view of the most consequential historical event of our time and proposes a way to defend human society from threats to our collective future. A portion of the author’s proceeds will be donated to Binc (The Book Industry Charitable Foundation). (shrink)

JEFFREY ANDREW BARASH. — Ce qui m’a beaucoup intéressé dans vos écrits récents et notamment dans votre livre Le siècle de Sartre, c’est la manière dont vous abordez le phénomène du totalitarisme, phénomène central pour comprendre le XXe siècle. Or, s’agissant du phénomène totalitaire, nous avons assisté à l’émergence d’un nouveau..

This absorbing volume at last contextualizes and elucidates the final thoughts of a brilliant and influential mind.

Cytogenetic research has had a major impact on the field of reproductive medicine, providing an insight into the frequency of chromosomal abnormalities that occur during gametogenesis, embryonic development and pregnancy. In humans, aneuploidy has been found to be relatively common during fetal life, necessitating prenatal screening of high‐risk pregnancies. Aneuploidy rates are higher still during the preimplantation stage of development. An increasing number of IVF laboratories have attempted to improve pregnancy rates by using preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) to ensure that (...) the embryos transferred to the mother are chromosomally normal. This paper reviews some of the techniques that are key to the detection of aneuploidy in reproductive samples including comparative genomic hybridization (CGH). CGH has provided an unparalleled insight into the nature of chromosome imbalance in human embryos and polar bodies. The clinical application of CGH for the purposes of PGD and the future extensions of the methodology, including DNA microarrays, are discussed. BioEssays 25:289–300, 2003. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

JEFFREY ANDREW BARASH. — Ce qui m’a beaucoup intéressé dans vos écrits récents et notamment dans votre livre Le siècle de Sartre, c’est la manière dont vous abordez le phénomène du totalitarisme, phénomène central pour comprendre le XXe siècle. Or, s’agissant du phénomène totalitaire, nous avons assisté à l’émergence d’un nouveau...