Background: As actors with the key responsibility for the protection of human research participants, Research Ethics Committees (RECs) need to be competent and well-resourced in order to fulfil their roles. Despite recent programs designed to strengthen RECs in Africa, much more needs to be accomplished before these committees can function optimally.Objective: To assess training needs for biomedical research ethics evaluation among targeted countries.Methods: Members of RECs operating in three targeted African countries were surveyed between August and November 2007. Before implementing (...) the survey, ethical approvals were obtained from RECs in Switzerland, Cameroon, Mali and Tanzania. Data were collected using a semi-structured questionnaire in English and in French.Results: A total of 74 respondents participated in the study. The participation rate was 68%. Seventy one percent of respondents reported having received some training in research ethics evaluation. This training was given by national institutions (31%) and international institutions (69%). Researchers and REC members were ranked as the top target audiences to be trained. Of 32 topics, the top five training priorities were: basic ethical principles, coverage of applicable laws and regulations, how to conduct ethics review, evaluating informed consent processes and the role of the REC.Conclusion: Although the majority of REC members in the targeted African countries had received training in ethics, they expressed a need for additional training. The results of this survey have been used to design a training program in research ethics evaluation that meets this need. (shrink)

BackgroundInternational guidelines recommend ethical and scientific quality standards for managing and reporting adverse events occurring during clinical trials to competent research ethics committees and regulatory authorities. The purpose of this study was to determine whether clinical trial protocols in Cameroon are developed in line with national requirements and international guidelines as far as detecting, reporting and investigating of adverse events is concerned.MethodsIt was a documentary review of all approved clinical trial protocols that were submitted at the Cameroon National Ethics Committee (...) for evaluation from 1997 through 2012. Data were extracted using a preconceived and validated grid. Protocol review process targeted the title, abstract, objectives, methodology, resources, and the chapter on safety.ResultsIn total, 106 clinical trial protocols were identified from 2173 protocols seen in the archive and 104 included for review. Seventy six trials did not include the surveillance of adverse events as part of their objective. A total of 91 protocols did not budget for adverse event surveillance, 76 did not have a data safety management board, 11 included insurance for participants, 47 did not include a case definition for serious adverse events, 33 described procedures to detect adverse events, 33 described procedure for reporting and 22 described procedure for investigating adverse events.DiscussionsMost clinical trial protocols in Cameroon are developed to focus on benefits and pay little attention to harms. The development of national guidelines can improve the surveillance of adverse events in clinical trial research conducted in Cameroon. Adverse events surveillance tools and a budget are critical for an adequate planning for adverse event surveillance when developing trial protocols.ConclusionClinical trial protocols submitted in the Cameroon National Ethics Committee do not adequately plan to assess adverse events in clinical trial protocols. In order to improve on the safety of participants and marketed drug, there is a need to develop national guidelines for clinical trials by the government, and to improve evaluation procedures and monitoring of ongoing trials by the ethics committee. (shrink)

Defense of a non-psychological dynamics of demonstrative thoughts.

This article discusses the common ground between William James and the tradition of philosophical anthropology. Recent commentators on this overlap have characterised philosophical anthropology as combining science and Kantian teleology, for instance in Kant’s seminal definition of anthropology as being concerned with what the human being makes of itself, as distinct from what attributes it is given by nature. This article registers the tension between Kantian thinking, which reckons to ground experience in a priori categories, and William James’s psychology, which (...) begins and ends with experience. It explores overlap between James’s approach and the characteristic holism of 18th-century philosophical anthropology, which centres on the idea of understanding and analysing the human as a whole, and presents the main anthropological elements of James’s position, namely his antipathy to separation, his concerns about the binomial terms of traditional philosophy, his preference for experience over substances, his sense that this holist doctrine of experience shows a way out of sterile impasses, a preference for description over causation, and scepticism. It then goes on to register the common ground with key ideas in the work of anthropologists from around 1800, along with some references to anthropologists who come in James’s wake, in particular Max Scheler and Arnold Gehlen, in order to reconceptualise the connection between James’s ideas and the tradition of anthropological thinking in German letters since the late 18th-century, beyond its characterisation as a combination of scientific positivism and teleology. (shrink)

Que ce soit sur le plan réglementaire ou à travers un calendrier événementiel qui leur est spécifique, les sports ont partie liée avec différentes formes de temporalités. De ce point de vue, il est possible de classer les compétitions sportives selon trois catégories de rapport au temps : les sports où le temps est systématiquement mesuré mais ne fixe pas les conditions de lʼaccomplissement de lʼépreuve, les...

This is an excellent book on Santayana. It establishes Lovely as a Santayana scholar, ranking him with the likes of Lachs, Levinson, and Woodward. He has a thorough command of both the primary sources and secondary literature. Since many American naturalists writing on religion have either a liberal Protestant or a liberal Jewish background, Santayana’s Roman Catholic background provides a needed balance. Santayana, like many great American philosophers, helps point the way to a truly postmodern appreciation of religion. The first (...) chapter considers Santayana’s paradoxical relationship to Catholicism. His outlook was nontheistic yet included a Catholic cultural sensibility, theological .. (shrink)

Our utterances are typically if not always "situated," in the sense that they are true or false relative to unarticulated parameters of the extra-linguistic context. The problem is to explain how these parameters are determined, given that nothing in the uttered sentences indicates them. It is tempting to claim that they must be determined at the level of thought or intention. However, as many philosophers have observed, thoughts themselves are no less situated than utterances. Unarticulated parameters need not be mentally (...) represented. In this paper, I try to make precise the notion of representation at stake here. In one sense of 'representation', something is represented if it is inferentially relevant. In another, less demanding sense, something is represented if it is relevant to the construction of a context-sensitive, ad hoc concept. Ad hoc concepts act as "proxies" for cognitively more demanding representations. They "imitate" the latter's epistemic and pragmatic roles while being inferentially less sophisticated. Thus, there are two senses in which a thought can be said to be situated: (1) its truth-value is relative to a non-represented contextual parameter, (2) its truth-value is not itself relative, but it involves a context-sensitive, ad hoc concept. (shrink)

It is widely assumed, both in philosophy and in the cognitive sciences, that perception essentially involves a relative or egocentric frame of reference. Levinson has explicitly challenged this assumption, arguing instead in favour of the 'neo-Whorfian' hypothesis that the frame of reference dominant in a given language infiltrates spatial representations in non-linguistic, and in particular perceptual, modalities. Our aim in this paper is to assess Levinson's neo-Whorfian hypothesis at the philosophical level and to explore the further possibility that perception may (...) not just use frames of reference other than the relative one but may also, in some cases at least, be perspective-free. (shrink)

J. Dokic s'interroge sur le concept de perception : en quoi consiste-t-elle? comment fonctionne-t-elle?, etc. Cette analyse est suivie de deux textes commentés, l'un de George Berkeley "Les idées du haut et du bas", et "Le contenu non conceptuel" de John McDowell.

This book explores moral questions that go beyond the issues commonly considered in the ethics of action.

Platon, Aristote et les stoïciens ont pensé le monde comme le Tout (to pan ou to holon) sans utiliser les termes abstraits de pantotès ou de holotès. Il n’y a qu’un seul monde, celui dans lequel nous vivons, qui est une réalité éternelle et singulière. Le concept de totalité suppose un écart par rapport à la totalité concrète existante, il apparaît comme celui de totalitas en latin quand la philosophie met en avant la contingence du monde, ou sa secondarité par (...) rapport à un monde plus parfait, le monde intelligible. (shrink)

Derrida n’entend pas simplement hériter de Hegel mais interrompre sa relève, précisant que l’enjeu est ici « énorme ». Pourquoi? Parce qu’il est question ici de la relation entre la vérité et sa transmission, entre l’enseignement et la pratique de la philosophie en Allemagne et en France, entre un système de pensée qui articule la politique, l’art, la religion et sa désarticulation contemporaine. Confronté à un texte « majeur » de la tradition philosophique, Derrida l’interrompt alors en recourant aux textes (...) mineurs, en particulier la correspondance de Hegel, qu’il détourne pour rendre possible une correspondance entre dialectique et déconstruction, mais aussi entre deux philosophes qui s’adressent toujours à un autre et sont hantés par ce tiers, fantôme ou pierre impossibles à relever. (shrink)

Nous sommes des mutants : la science des mutations du vivant reste indissociable des techniques qui rendent nos corps modifiables. Nous sommes des mythants : nous gardons la tendance à nous réapproprier la vie en lui donnant un sens qui la surplombe, si bien que le don de la vie comme celui des organes restent pris dans la logique mythique du don et du sacrifice. Nous sommes dans une mutation, dit J.-L. Nancy : dans une époque où la vie s’exploite (...) ou se transmet, se marchande ou se partage, où elle (se) demande sans s’imposer. C’est ainsi qu’une mutation historique sort de l’histoire. (shrink)

Jean-Luc Nancy est reconnu aujourd’hui comme l’un des plus importants philosophes français contemporains. Ces dernières années, son œuvre a fait l’objet, en France et dans plusieurs pays étrangers, de rencontres suivies de publications. Il était temps qu’un colloque international consacré à son travail ait lieu à l’Université de Strasbourg, où il a enseigné pendant plus de trente ans. Ce colloque s’est tenu en novembre 2015 avec la participation de Jean-Luc Nancy qui l’a accompagné de sa prés...

This essay argues that Freud’s case of Little Hans, while complicated by Hans’ father’s dual role in the analysis and in the Oedipal drama itself, provides valuable insight into the nature of psychoanalytic evidence and argument. The case provides direct, if sometimes ambiguous, evidence concerning primal phantasies and infantile sexuality--issues of universality, the role of experience, and the nature of phantasy are explored. Four strands of Freud’s analysis of Little Hans’ horse phobia are also explored. While the toxicological theory of (...) anxiety is problematical and was subsequently abandoned by Freud himself, the other strands have great explanatory power and offer advantages over behaviorist and other alternative accounts. A kind of theoretical rigor in the concepts employed is argued to be among those advantages. The inevitably theory-laden character of observation is emphasized throughout, and it is argued that psychoanalysis provides a far more powerful theory than certain critiques would allow. (shrink)