Universities in Cameroon are playing an active part in HIV/AIDS research and much of this research is carried out by students, usually for the purpose of a dissertation/thesis. Student theses/dissertations present research findings in a much more comprehensive manner and have been described as the stepping-stone of a budding scientist’s potential in becoming an independent researcher. It is therefore important to verify how students handle issues of research ethics.

The intellectual founding fathers of the French Third Republic were innovative thinkers who achieved an original synthesis of republican and liberal principles. This becomes evident when one examines the works of four philosophers who played a crucial role in the French intellectual and political life of the period extending from the 1870s to the early 1900s: Emile Littre, Charles Renouvier, Henry Michel and Alfred Fouillee. Among their many contributions to moral and political philosophy, I highlight two themes: a) a conception (...) of political liberty that grants a pre-eminent place to civic education as a means to free citizens from domination by dogmatic religious authorities, sectarian political movements or unexamined beliefs of any kind; b) the need to implement reasonable social reforms in order to ensure that the many and complex relations of functional interdependence constitutive of modern societies are equitable and realize an ideal of national solidarity. I suggest that these ideas ought to be carefully examined by contemporary proponents of civic republicanism. (shrink)

Walter Burley (1275-c.1344) and John Wyclif (1328-1384) follow two clearly stated doctrinal options: on the one hand, they are realists and, on the other, they defend a correspondence theory of truth that involves specific correlates for true propositions, in short: truth-makers. Both characteristics are interdependent: such a conception of truth requires a certain kind of ontology. This study shows that a) in their explanation of what it means for a proposition to be true, Burley and Wyclif both develop what we (...) could call a theory of intentionality in order to explain the relation that must obtain between the human mind and the truth-makers, and b) that their explanations reach back to Augustine, more precisely to his theory of ocular vision as exposed in the De trinitate IX as well as to his conception of ideas found in the Quaestio de ideis. (shrink)

resumo Esse artigo investiga a leitura que Shaftesbury fez de Marco Aurélio, a fim de comparar a visão estóica da individual ida de e da ide nt ida de pessoal com o conceito lockia no de “self” e, de ma ne i ra mais ge ral, com os mo dos pelos quais a filosofia mo de rna entendeu o si-me s mo. A ênfase recai sobre a conexão int r í nseca ent re sistema e s u b j e (...) t i v ida de no estoicismo imperial. Discute-se a re s i s t ê nc ia de autores cont e m p o r âneos em aceitar a descrição da alma ra c io nal dos estóicos como um “self”. Também se discute a aplicação que Mic hel Foucault fez do seu conceito de “subjetivação” à id é ia estóica de “si-me s mo ”. palavras-chave Estoicismo; self; identidade pessoal; Shaftesbury; Marco Aurélio; Foucault. (shrink)

Cet ouvrage rassemble cinq textes. L'introduction (Guy Bouchard) dénonce l'opprobre injustifiée qui entoure souvent l'utopie et plaide en faveur de son actualité. Le chapitre 1 (Laurent Giroux) thématise les rapports entre utopie et philosophie en suivant deux pistes, celle d'une philosophie de l'utopie et celle de l'utopie philosophique. Le chapitre 2 (Gilbert Leclerc) aborde l'éducation permanente dans la perspective de la portée existentielle de l'utopie et de son impact sociétal. Le chapitre 3 (G. B.) définit l'utopie comme une société (...) idéalisée dans le domaine de la fiction; elle voisine la para-utopie (société idéalisée dans un cadre théorique), l'une et l'autre constituant les deux volets de "l'hétéropolitique"; il est aussi question de la signification et des rôles de l'utopie, lesquels permettent de réfuter les principaux reproches qu'on lui adresse. La conclusion (G. B.) met en évidence le rôle historiogène de la pensée hétéropolitique. (shrink)

This paper investigates the idea of reasoning, in a local (or contextual) way, under prioritized and possibly inconsistent knowledge bases. Priorities are not supposed to be given globally between all the beliefs in the knowledge base, but locally inside sets of pieces of information responsible for inconsistencies. This local stratification offers more flexibility for representing priorities between beliefs. Given this local ordering, we discuss five basic definitions of influence relations between conflicts. These elementary notions of influence between two conflicts A (...) and B exhaustively explore the situations where solving A leads to solve B. Then we propose natural approaches to restore the coherence of a knowledge base on the basis of influence relations between locally-stratified conflicts. (shrink)

Contributors: Steven Barbone, Laurent Bove, Edwin Curley, Valérie Debuiche, Michael Della Rocca, Simon B. Duffy, Daniel Garber, Pascale Gillot, Céline Hervet, Jonathan Israel, Chantal Jaquet, Mogens Lærke, Jacqueline Lagrée, Martin Lin, Yitzhak Y. Melamed, Pierre-François Moreau, Steven Nadler, Knox Peden, Alison Peterman, Charles Ramond, Michael A. Rosenthal, Pascal Sévérac, Hasana Sharp, Jack Stetter, Ariel Suhamy, Lorenzo Vinciguerra.

EBONY PATTERSON, RUBEN MARTINEZ, LAURENT CRENSHAW, KARLA R. WILLIAMS, LARRY BROWN, TIFFANY HALL, KRISTEN M.J. HARRIS, MICHAEL SMITH, KHYLA CRAINE, NYAH CARMICHAEL, SHANNA DUBOSE, EBONY DAVIS, NICOLE BREWER, KARLA HARLIN, BRIAN HARRIS, KATRINA GIPSON, CANDICE B.N. REYNOLDS.

Hutcheson on the I dea of B eauty PATRICIA M. MATTHEWS IN "POPPIES ON THE WHEAT," Helen Jackson compares the farmer's experience of "counting the bread and wine by autumn's gain" to the pleasure she feels on her observation of the same farm: A tropic tide of air with ebb and flow Bathes all the fields of wheat until they glow Like flashing seas of green, which toss and beat Around the vines? Although we may express ourselves less poetically, we (...) have all had the experi- ence of being immediately pleased with some complex object: the dramatic view from a mountain peak, a series of movements in dance, a pretty face. In An Inquiry Concerning Beauty, Order, Harmony, Design, 2 Francis Hutcheson ar- gues that this common phenomenon is the key to understanding beauty.3 The kinds of pleasure heretofore recognized by modern philosophers have been limited to sensible pleasures immediately associated with simple sensations like taste and smells, and rational pleasures mediated by a process of reflection on the advantage that objects may bring us. This limited understanding of plea- sure misses the fact that we often take an immediate pleasure in complex objects that is not reducible to either of these two recognized kinds of plea- sure. Based on this insight, Hutcheson argues that beauty is immediately perceived by an internal sense, much in the way that we take an immediate pleasure in individual tastes or colors. Further, he.. (shrink)

T o educate citizens for democra c y appears to be the goal of pluralist societies, but not for a n y fo r m of democratic o r ganization, but for one that understands that the ex ercise of personal autono m y and the training of the will through the l o gic of dial o gue are indispensa b le. T o reach this goal, it seems necessa r y to cult i v ate human capital (technical (...) skills and kn o wledge), social capital (social skills) and the p r udence to d e v elop a good life. But not on l y that, also needed is a sense of justice, e x ercised within the fram e w ork of mutual rec o gnition in the fram e w ork of a dial o gue that is built not on l y on l o gic but also on sentiment. T o spell out these points is the aim of this a r ticle. (shrink)

I n th e inte r na l histo r y o f Zapatism o th e mos t remarka b l e featur e i s th e symbiotic proces s w hic h occur s bet w ee n th e Zapatist a gue r rilla s i n th e mountain s o f Chiapa s an d the indigenou s peopl e i n th e communities . Th e fo r me r g i v (...) e milita r y inst r uctio n t o th e latte r , w hil e sl o w ly adoptin g thei r v alue s an d ideol o g y . I n th e en d , bot h fo r m a n ew milita r y o r ganization , th e Zapatist a A r m y o f Nationa l Liberation . Thi s a r m y i s uniqu e compared wit h othe r milita r y o r ganizations , a s i t act s on ly defens i v e ly t o protec t indigenou s rights an d i t i s no t a n independenc e m o v ement , autonomou s i n it s functioning , l e gitimat e and l e gal , wit h a hig h representatio n o f w ome n ( w h o especial ly singl e ou t thi s o r ganization), mad e u p o f socia l suppo r t base s an d a traine d an d discipline d militia , strong ly suppo r ted by c i vi l societ y , h a vin g a radica l leftis t ideol o g y , w hic h remain s i n constan t rebellio n and resistanc e t o pressure s fro m th e authorities , th e M e xica n a r m y an d paramilitaries. (shrink)

The autho r , after pointing out the reasons w h y the debate in the EU and in Spain continue to ignore w hat he calls the radical l y political meaning of the phenomenon of mig ration, tries to a r gue that the conditions and the consequences of the re c o gnition of immigration are a political question ( e v en the political question). He focuses in pa r ticular on the pro b lem of (...) immi g rants ' access to citizenship, to propose, li k e Rubio or Carens, a g radual g ranting (in time and space) but mere l y temporary -based on sta b le residence- of citizenship to immi g rants that is understood as pa r t of a plural multiple and inclus i v e concept of citizenship. (shrink)

This is the first volume of a two-volume project whose aim is to publish all the known Middle English manuscript translations of the French Somme le mi, a thirteenth-century manual of religious instruction offering teaching on the Decalogue, the seven deadly sins and their remedies, compiled by the Dominican friar Laurent of Orleans. The project extends and deepens our knowledge of the influence of this popular French text, known today only from the versions entitled The Ayen bite of Inwit (...) and The Book of Vices and Virtues, published in 1866 and 1942, respectively. This volume presents the versions extant in BL MSS Royal 18. A. x and Add. 37677; the second will cover the versions in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 494, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 1286, and Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS e Musaeo 23. The texts of both volumes have been prepared with the help of the recently-published edition of the French text, a circumstance from which the earlier English editions were unable to benefit. It is likely that the versions edited here for the first time will make a considerable contribution to our understanding of the processes of textual transmission and to that of translation itself in English literary circles of the fifteenth century. (shrink)

This paper seeks to reinterpret the life and work of J. B. S. Haldane by focusing on an illuminating but largely ignored essay he published in 1927, "The Last Judgment" -- the sequel to his better known work, "Daedalus" (1924). This astonishing essay expresses a vision of the human future over the next 40,000,000 years, one that revises and updates Wellsian futurism with the long range implications of the "new biology" for human destiny. That vision served as a kind of (...) lifelong credo, one that infused and informed his diverse scientific work, political activities, and popular writing, and that gave unity and coherence to his remarkable career. (shrink)

L’objectivité permettrait d’assurer la supériorité de la science par rapport à d’autres modes de connaissance. Elle doit donc être défendue, surtout en cette « ère de post-vérité » où les « faits alternatifs » remplacent les faits avérés, en politique comme ailleurs. Or les attaques proviennent autant de l’extérieur que de l’intérieur de la sphère philosophique. Il convient donc de tenter d’opérer la réconciliation la plus large possible avec deux représentants de clans (très) opposés, Mario Bunge et Bruno Latour. Réinvestissant (...) les grandes conceptions de la notion d’objectivité, je propose ici trois chantiers pour cette réconciliation : la mise au rancart des conceptions naïves et parfois insincères de la science, la réévaluation des contextes de découverte et de justification, et celle de la distinction faits-valeurs. (shrink)

This article argues that many situations in social life can be analyzed by their requirement for the justification of action. It is in particular in situations of dispute that a need arises to explicate the grounds on which responsibility for errors is distributed and on which new agreement can be reached. Since a plurality of mutually incompatible modes of justification exists, disputes can be understood as disagreements either about whether the accepted rule of justification has not been violated or about (...) which mode of justification to apply at all. The article develops a grammar of such modes of justification, called orders of worth, and argues that the human capacity for criticism becomes visible in the daily occurrence of disputes over criteria for justification. At the same time, it is underlined that not all social situations can be interpreted with the help of such a sense of justice, which resides on a notion of equivalence. Regimes of love, of violence or of familiarity are systematically distinct from regimes of justification. (shrink)

Since the 1990s, the terms “Lamarckism” and “Lamarckian” have seen a significant resurgence in biological publications. The discovery of new molecular mechanisms have been interpreted as evidence supporting the reality and efficiency of the inheritance of acquired characters, and thus the revival of Lamarckism. The present paper aims at giving a critical evaluation of such interpretations. I argue that two types of arguments allow to draw a clear distinction between the genuine Lamarckian concept of inheritance of acquired characters and transgenerational (...) epigenetic inheritance. The first concerns the explanandum of the processes under consideration: molecular mechanisms of transgenerational epigenetic inheritance are understood as evolved products of natural selection. This means that the kind of inheritance of acquired characters they might be responsible for is an obligatory emergent feature of evolution, whereas traditional Lamarckisms conceived the inheritance of acquired characters as a property inherent in living matter itself. The second argument concerns the explanans of the inheritance of acquired characters: in light of current knowledge, epigenetic mechanisms are not able to drive adaptive evolution by themselves. Emergent Lamarckian phenomena would be possible if and only if individual epigenetic variation allowed the inheritance of acquired characters to be a factor of unlimited change. This implies specific requirements for epigenetic variation, which I explicitly define and expand upon. I then show that given current knowledge, these requirements are not empirically grounded. (shrink)

The belief in free will has been frequently challenged since Benjamin Libet published his famous experiment in 1983. Although Libet’s experiment is highly dependent upon subjective reports, no study has been conducted that focused on a first-person or introspective perspective of the task. We took a neurophenomenological approach in an N = 1 study providing reliable and valid measures of the first-person perspective in conjunction with brain dynamics. We found that a larger readiness potential is attributable to more frequent occurrences (...) of self-initiated movements during negative deflections of the slow cortical potentials . These negative deflections occur in parallel with an inner impulse reported by an expert meditator which may in turn lead to a voluntary act. We demonstrate in this proof-of-principle approach that the first-person perspective obtained by an expert meditator in conjunction with neural signal analysis can contribute to our understanding of the neural underpinnings of voluntary acts. (shrink)

This book presents a state-of-the-art multidisciplinary perspective on psychological, physiological and computational approaches to understanding the ...

Bob B. He: Two-dimensional X-ray diffraction Content Type Journal Article Category Book Review Pages 1-2 DOI 10.1007/s10698-011-9135-8 Authors George B. Kauffman, Department of Chemistry, California State University, Fresno, Fresno, CA 93740-8034, USA Journal Foundations of Chemistry Online ISSN 1572-8463 Print ISSN 1386-4238.

Jean-Paul Sartre, in describing the realization of his freedom, was often inclined to say mysterious things like ‘I am what I am not’, ‘I am not what I am’ He was therefore plainly contradicting himself, but was this merely a playful literary figure , or was he really being incoherent? By the latter judgment I do not mean to reject his statements entirely ; for I believe there is an intimate link between contradiction and freedom, as I shall explain in (...) this paper. But a minor thing we must first have out of the way is the suggestion that Sartre's language was just a rhetorical trope, designed merely to express some banal platitude in a bemusing way: ‘I am not yet what I will be’, ‘I am no longer what I was’ are sane and sensible, for instance, but cannot be the meant content of Sartre's sayings, since, while they would indeed describe the reform of some character, they would be appropriate only before or after some metamorphosis, not, as Sartre clearly intended, in the midst of some process of riddance and conversion, whether radical or otherwise. Yet, in the turmoil of such a change, ‘I am not what I am’ still, surely, cannot be true, and if that is the case, Sartre must be being inocherent, and therefore, obfuscating and deliberately obscure, and hence, it seems, must properly be rejected by all right and clear thinking men. (shrink)