Diversity is an undeniable fact of nature, and there is now evidence that nature did not stop generating diversity just before “designing” the human brain :15,468–15,473. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1509654112, 2015). If neurodiversity is a fact of nature, what about neurodivergence? Although the terms “neurodiversity” and “neurodivergence” are sometimes used interchangeably, this is, we believe, a mistake: “neurodiversity” is a term of inclusion whereas “neurodivergence” is a term of exclusion. To make the difference clear, note that everyone can be said to be neurodiverse, (...) but that it is almost impossible for everyone to be neurodivergent. Neurodivergence is, we claim here, a fact of society. Neurodivergent individuals are those whose cognitive profile diverges from an established cognitive norm, a norm that is not an objective statistical fact of human neurological functioning but a standard established and maintained by socio-political processes. In this paper, we describe the socio-political mechanisms that build neurodivergence out of neurodiversity which, inspired by Mihai :395–416. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-017-0186-z, 2018), we call “epistemic and cognitive marginalization”. First, we extend the traditional concept of neurodiversity, which we believe too closely tied to a neuroreductionist conception of cognition, to that of “extended neurodiversity,” thereby viewing neurodiversity through the lens of 4E cognition. Considering that human cognition depends on epistemic resources, both for their construction and their online dynamic expression, we hypothesize that the differential access to epistemic resources in society, a form of epistemic injustice, is an overlooked mechanism that turns neurodiversity into neurodivergence. In doing so, we shed light on a type of epistemic injustice that might be missing from the epistemic injustice literature: cognitive injustices. (shrink)

Biobanking activities for genetic research purposes have recently undergone nothing short of a small revolution. Many biobanks have left their traditional home of a small refrigerator in a laboratory to reach the unprecedented proportion of large, sophisticated storage centers containing DNA samples from whole populations. As we turn our attention to research on complex diseases and show great interest in human genetic variation and genetic epidemiology, we need to base our research not only on the DNA of small family cohorts, (...) but on larger sample collections, coupled with geographic location, genealogical information, and environmental and medical data. Population genetic research projects are underway around the world. Setting up such large-scale population biobanks is a challenge for any researcher. Population genetic research projects raise legal, ethical, and social issues that need to be addressed properly in order to maintain the trust of the population, an absolute requirement for the success of such research endeavour. (shrink)

Biobanking activities for genetic research purposes have recently undergone nothing short of a small revolution. Many biobanks have left their traditional home of a small refrigerator in a laboratory to reach the unprecedented proportion of large, sophisticated storage centers containing DNA samples from whole populations. As we turn our attention to research on complex diseases and show great interest in human genetic variation and genetic epidemiology, we need to base our research not only on the DNA of small family cohorts, (...) but on larger sample collections, coupled with geographic location, genealogical information, and environmental and medical data. Population genetic research projects are underway around the world. Setting up such large-scale population biobanks is a challenge for any researcher. Population genetic research projects raise legal, ethical, and social issues that need to be addressed properly in order to maintain the trust of the population, an absolute requirement for the success of such research endeavour. (shrink)

Bien que les approches basées sur les déficits soient encore prédominantes en formation à l’enseignement, on reconnaît de plus en plus l’apport potentiel des approches basées sur les forces, afin de développer une identité professionnelle positive. Conséquemment, nous avons expérimenté une activité innovante d’écriture réflexive, basée sur la psychologie positive, auprès de 50 stagiaires en enseignement préscolaire/primaire au Québec. L’analyse de ces empreintes offre de dégager divers aspects constitutifs de l’identité professionnelle des stagiaires, de décrire l’évolution du processus de construction (...) identitaire, ce qui permet d’apprécier la contribution de ce type d’activité pour rendre ce processus plus explicite. (shrink)

Human enhancement technologies raise serious ethical questions about health practices no longer content simply to treat disease, but which now also propose to “optimize” human beings’ physical, cognitive and psychological abilities. These technologies call for a reassessment of our relationship to health, the human body and the body's organic, identity and social functions. In nursing, such considerations are in their infancy. In this paper, we argue for the relevance of critical phenomenology as a way to better understand the ethical issues (...) related to human enhancement technologies (HET). In so doing, we seek to problematize HET and assess their influence on the future development of nursing science and practice. It is difficult to anticipate the concrete effects of HET, we suggest, because these practices reconfigure the meaning of normativity and disorient our conventional ethical landscape. In this context, we argue that the later work of Martin Heidegger and Michel Foucault invites a critical perspective into how techno‐scientific discourses modify our relationship to care, to health and to our own social and corporeal identities. Despite the traditional philosophical opposition between phenomenology and critical theory, we maintain that a hybrid critical phenomenological approach opens new ways to assess the integration of technology and practice. Our analysis understands HET as a process of “hybridization” between technological objects and human subjects. Critical phenomenology thus effectively questions anthropocentric definitions of technology, challenges the dichotomy between curative treatment and enhancement and, finally, prompts valuable reflection on the implications of HET for nursing theory and practice. (shrink)

This article reads with Michi Saagiig Nishnaabe writer and independent scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, and Nêhiyaw legal scholar and novelist Tracey Lindberg. The practice of reading with involves heeding textual instructions and prioritising narrative terms of engagement. Indigenous bodies layered with resurgent potential in Lindberg’s and Simpson’s fictions refuse to re-centre the legacy of white settler coloniality. Attending to the process of reading with, as a relational undertaking, involves re-apprising cross-generational legacies and re-membering collective responsibilities.

Cet article se propose de montrer que le langage en traduction joue un rôle performatif parce que les termes qu’il emploie retraduisent des normes sociales et des positions institutionnelles construites dans une autre culture, avec d’autres conditions historiques. Dans le cas de la naissance des sciences de la communication en Chine, des concepts américains sur la communication sont venus par leur traduction à la rencontre des normes et positions chinoises sur le journalisme et la propagande, engendrant une reconfiguration mutuelle des (...) actants, qu’ils soient sociaux ou langagiers. Nous étudions comment le système socio-culturel de la Chine a recréé un ordre local propre sous la forme d’une discipline spécifique à ce pays, xinwen chuanboxue .This article sets out to show that language in translation plays a performative role, because the terms it uses effectively retranslate social norms and institutional positions that were built up in a different culture and in different historical circumstances. In the case of the emerging communication sciences in China, American concepts on communication, which arrived in translation, came to encounter Chinese norms and positions on journalism and propaganda, and this caused a mutual reconfiguration of the actants, both social and linguistic. We look here at how the Chinese socio-cultural system re-created its own local order in the form of a discipline which is specific to the country, “xinwen chuanboxue”. (shrink)

I aim here to confront texts of Levinas and Sartre in an attempt to rethink the relation of the poIitical to the ethical in the early eighties in France. The method is essentially to try to think a passage from one domain into the other without privileging poIitics over ethics or vice versa while uncovering their organic and dialectical interaction, a subject that an only be touched upon via the bridging metaphor of a Visage that can liberate oneself from the (...) totalization of egoity. My purpose, thus, is not to confront Levinas and Sartre but to allow them to embark on a dialogue constructed around the paradigm of the question of the Other. (shrink)

How do René Girard’s theories apply to a context of double colonization? Through a new interpretation of Alexis Wright’s novel Plains of Promise, this paper aims to show the crosscultural relevance of mimetic theory. The study will highlight the way in which the scapegoat mechanism is represented in the Australian colonial context. It also offers a Girardian analysis of the predicament of female characters of Aboriginal descent who are victims of sexual violence.

Le De mundi caelestis terrestrisque constitutione liber, attribué à tort à Bède, est un texte curieux, qui, élaboré en milieu monastique au XIe ou XIIe siècle, présente peu de références scripturaires, mais renseigne sur la réception médiévale des textes scientifiques et philosophiques latins d'époque tardive.

When philosophers participate in the interdisciplinary ethical, environmental, economic, legal, and social analysis of nanotechnologies, what is their specific contribution? At first glance, the contribution of philosophy appears to be a clarification of the various moral and ethical arguments that are commonly presented in philosophical discussion. But if this is the only contribution of philosophy, then it can offer no more than a stalemate position, in which each moral and ethical argument nullifies all the others. To provide an alternative, we (...) must analyze the reasons behind the prevailing individual and cultural relativism in ethics. The epistemological investigation of this stalemate position will guide us to the core problem of the relation between theory and action . The stalemate can be overcome from a pragmatic philosophical standpoint, which combines epistemology, philosophy of language—that is, the philosophy of speech acts—and practical reasoning—that is, reasoning about decision-making . From this philosophical standpoint, it will be possible to show how philosophy can accompany and support the development of nanotechnologies. (shrink)

The genetically manipulated organism crisis demonstrated that technological development based solely on the law of the marketplace and State protection against serious risks to health and safety is no longer a warrant of ethical acceptability. In the first part of our paper, we critique the implicitly individualist social-acceptance model for State regulation of technology and recommend an interdisciplinary approach for comprehensive analysis of the impacts and ethical acceptability of technologies. In the second part, we present a framework for the analysis (...) of impacts and acceptability, devised—with the goal of supporting the development of specific nanotechnological applications—by a team of researchers from various disciplines. At the conceptual level, this analytic framework is intended to make explicit those various operations required in preparing a judgement about the acceptability of technologies that have been implicit in the classical analysis of toxicological risk. On a practical level, we present a reflective tool that makes it possible to take into account all the dimensions involved and understand the reasons invoked in determining impacts, assessing them, and arriving at a judgement about acceptability. (shrink)

How can technological development, economic development, and the claims from society be reconciled? How should responsible innovation be promoted? The “responsible social uses” approach proposed here was devised with these considerations in view. In this article, a support procedure for promoting responsible social uses is set out and presented. First, the context in which this procedure emerged, which incorporates features of both the user-experience approach and that of ethical acceptability in technological development, is specified. Next, the characteristic features of the (...) procedure are presented, that is, its purpose, fundamental orientation, and component parts as experimented by partners. Third, the RSU approach is compared with other support approaches and considered in term of how each approach assumes responsible innovation. Briefly, the RSU procedure is a way of addressing the issue of responsible innovation through an effective integration of social concerns. (shrink)

The worldwide COVID-19 pandemic has shed more light on the difficulty of making health care decisions integrating scientific knowledge and values associated to life and death issues, human suffering, quality of life, economic losses, liberty of movement, etc. But the difficulties related to health care decisions and the use of innovative drugs or technologies are not new, and many countries have created agencies that have the mandate to evaluate new technologies in health care. Health Technological Assessment (HTA) reports’ aim is (...) to guide the decision makers in these difficult matters. There are two ethical components in HTA. The first is the report’s presentation of an ethical evaluation of the technology. The second is the value-ladenness of the HTA decision-making process itself. When implicit value judgments are not elicited, the justification of the final decision cannot be transparent. The present paper aims to identify and elicit the implicit value-judgments related to each step of the HTA process. This research is grounded on an applied ethics decision-making paradigm based on the role of value judgments in the decision-making process. The first part discusses two different approaches to values and value judgments in HTA. In the second part, citations mentioning value judgments extracted from a systematic review on the integration of ethics into HTA were categorized to elicit the value judgments and their criteria for each different HTA decision-making steps. The results show that there are 18 decision-making steps in the HTA process where 23 implicit value-judgments can be recognized. The range of these value judgments encompasses the whole HTA process: from the initial request, the presenting of the principal issues, to the final report’s dissemination. Since stakeholders need to understand which value judgments the conclusion of a report relies on, eliciting the implicit value judgments in the HTA decision-making process should yield more transparency. (shrink)

For John Dewey, philosophy is "the theory of education in its most general aspects." Throughout history we see a close tie between an author's philosophical thought and his educational principles. Jacques Maritain is quite aware of this, and manifests it in his own writing. In Maritain the educational theorist is Maritain the metaphysician. His metaphysics of the human person and of human action, of knowledge and free will, treated in Existence and the Existent, are at the heart of Towards a (...) Philosophy of Education, not only in a general way but even in its practical application, such as the choice of a curriculum and the pedagogical methods used. (shrink)

L'article a pour objectif de poser les accords premiers et nécessaires à l'élaboration de la parole éthique aujourd'hui. Revenant sur la distinction langage - parole, l'A. propose d'orienter la recherche sur la parole , où le recours aux fondements de la véracité du dire est remplacé par le partage de sens et les raisons de croire. Cette orientation exige de définir le rôle de la philosophie, d'orienter la recherche en éthique sur la délibération humaine et de tenter la corroboration avec (...) des sciences humaines telles la psychologie du développement moral et la psychanalyse.This article aims to trace the basic agreements necessary to the articulation of ethics today. The A. proposes that research be oriented on the dialogical aspect of speech, proposing to insist thus upon reasons to believe and upon the sharing of meaning sharing rather than upon the foundational aspect of ethical language. The orientation supposes that the role of philosophy be redefined, that ethics be centered on human deliberation and that corroborations be searched with other human sciences, namely moral développement psychology and psychoanalysis. (shrink)

Il s’agit d’approfondir la comparaison de l’ « activité d’immobilité » [Χν≅ργεια 3κινησBας] au repos en Éthique à Nic. VII 15, 1154 b 21-31, et en cela de montrer en quoi ils sont identiques et en quoi ils sont différents. Le point de départ est que Aristote vise avant tout l’activité du premier moteur et qu’il a conçu tout d’abord l’ « activité d’immobilité » pour expliquer la continuité éternelle du mouvement du ciel. Cela conduit naturellement à la Physique où (...) le premier moteur et le repos sont définis. Le passage le plus important est certainement VI 8, 239 a 23 - b 4 où les deux sont également traités. Mais c’est aussi un des passages les plus litigieux, car la lecture proposée dans cet article n’est pas celle qui est proposée généralement par les traducteurs et commentateurs qui ne rattachent pas ce passage à ce qui précède, mais le considère comme une préfiguration du chapitre 9 où se trouvent exposés les problèmes de Zénon. Une grande part de l’article est consacrée à l’analyse de leur lecture, afin de redonner à ce passage la position clé qu’il mérite comme un jalon sur le chemin qui conduit à poser l’éternelle immobilité du premier moteur à la fin de la Physique. Ce passage est crucial, car Aristote y distingue l’activité du premier moteur immobile du repos en l’affirmant « dans l’instant » comme il l’avait fait d’ailleurs en Éthique à Nic. X 3, 1174 b 9 en distinguant l’ « activité d’immobilité » du mouvement. L’une des thèses avancées dans cet article est que seule l’instantanéité permet à cette activité d’être principe d’éternité. (shrink)

Robert Castel is an eminent figure in the social sciences because of his innovative contributions to various social and health fields. The seminal work of this poststructuralist author and social activist has influenced several research disciplines, but has not yet had a significant impact on nursing. In this article, we will present the thinking of this man, who considered himself a sociologist, philosopher and “historian of the present.” We will examine the most important issues he explored during his career, including (...) the psychiatric apparatus, the management of risk and the social vulnerability. We believe that this thinker's perspective on diverse social issues is very relevant to nursing practice and research and to the health sciences in general. The concepts he developed and utilized with finesse provide us with a critical reading of many contemporary health issues, particularly in mental health and psychiatric nursing. Castel's critical and engaged approach incites mobilization for social justice and greater protections for marginalized and vulnerable persons. These principles of advocacy and social justice are also at the heart of the nursing profession. (shrink)

t. 1. Codes et comités d'éthique -- t. 2. L'expérience québécoise.

How are we to understand the fact that the philosophical debate over nanotechnologies has been reduced to a clash of seemingly preprogrammed arguments and counterarguments that paralyzes all rational discussion of the ultimate ethical question of social acceptability in matters of nanotechnological development? With this issue as its starting point, the study reported on here, intended to further comprehension of the issues rather than provide a cause-and-effect explanation, seeks to achieve a rational grasp of what is being said through the (...) appeals made to this or that principle in the range of arguments put forward in publications on the subject. We present the results of the study’s analyses in two parts. In the first, we lay out the seven categories of argument that emerged from an analysis of the literature: the arguments based on nature, dignity, the good life, utility, equity, autonomy, and rights. In the second part, we present the background moral stances that support each category of argument. Identifying the different categories of argument and the moral stance that underlies each category will enable a better grasp of the reasons for the multiplicity of the arguments that figure in discussions of the acceptability of nanotechnologies and will ultimately contribute to overcoming the tendency towards talking past each other that all too often disfigures the exchange. Clarifying the implications of the moral arguments deployed in the debate over nanotechnologies may make it possible to reduce the confusion observable in these exchanges and contribute to a better grasp of the reasons for their current unproductiveness. (shrink)

Worldwide, the literature reports that many residents in long‐term care (LTC) homes are sedentary. In Canada, personal support workers (PSWs) provide most of the direct care in LTC homes and could play a key role in promoting activity for residents. The purpose of this institutional ethnographic study was to uncover the social organization of LTC work and to discover how this organization influenced the physical activity of residents. Data were collected in two LTC homes in Ontario, Canada through participant observations (...) with PSWs and interviews with people within and external to the homes. Findings explicate the links between meals, lifts and transfers, and the LTC standards to reveal that physical activity is considered an add‐on program in the purview of physiotherapists. Some of the LTC standards which are intended to product good outcomes for residents actually disrupt the work of PSWs making it difficult for them to respond to the physical activity needs of residents. This descriptive ethnographic account is an important first step in trying to find a solution to optimize real activities of daily living into life in LTC. (shrink)

Healthcare systems and health professionals are facing a litany of stressors that have been compounded by the pandemic, and consequently, this has further perpetuated suboptimal mental health and burnout in nursing. The purpose of this paper is to report select findings from a larger, national study exploring gendered experiences of mental health, leave of absence (LOA), and return to work from the perspectives of nurses and key stakeholders. Given the breadth of the data, this paper will focus exclusively on the (...) qualitative results from 53 frontline Canadian nurses who were purposively recruited for their workplace insight. This paper focuses on the substantive theme of “Breaking Point,” in which nurses articulated a multiplicity of stress points at the individual, organizational, and societal levels that amplified burnout and accelerated mental health LOA from the workplace. These findings exemplify the complexities that underlie nurses' mental health and burnout and highlight the urgent need for multipronged individual, organizational, and structural interventions. Robust and timely interventions are needed to restore the health of the nursing profession and sustain its future. (shrink)