Open Access Books

Bioethics deals with the governance of life science technologies. An appropriate understanding of the relationship between life, nature, and human nature is thus always presupposed in bioethical discourses. However, bioethics has encountered difficulties in taking a stance about this. References to human nature are often condemned as pre-modern, illiberal, and essentialist. Therefore, mainstream bioethics tries to avoid taking a stance and chooses starting points that can hope to achieve broad societal consensus. These strategies are, however, not very plausible when a liberal consensus is unlikely to receive global support and when bioethical questions become more challenging. This chapter acknowledges the importance of these challenges and assumes that it is necessary to clarify the normative status of references to concepts like ‘human nature’ and ‘the human being’. It will argue that debates on philosophical anthropology in the first half of the twentieth century make it possible to refer to human nature without problematic essentialist and ahistorical assumptions. Specifically, it will introduce the philosophical anthropology of Helmuth Plessner and show how it is both important and necessary for ethics in general, and bioethics in particular.

La fiction comme agencement d’actions renvoie au premier abord à un corpus romanesque extensible aux expressions cinématographique, voire théâtrale, sans recouvrir pour autant tout le champ littéraire. Ce volume propose d’en ouvrir la définition à d’autres corpus, notamment poétiques, plus ou moins rebelles à toute description en termes de fable ou d’histoire. La parenté étymologique entre fiction et figure dans les langues romanes oriente vers cette acception générale susceptible d’englober tous les discours comme le fait Mallarmé : la fiction « semble être le procédé même de l’esprit humain »./> Il s’agit ici d’examiner le lien entre des pratiques d’écriture-lecture et une certaine idée de la fiction, trompeusement uniformisée sous un vocable commun, en s’attachant notamment aux écritures d’auteurs butant sur la fiction romanesque en lien avec l’idée qu’ils s’en font, ou ayant publié séparément des recueils poétiques et des romans. Et nous tenterons aussi plus largement, grâce aux philosophes, linguistes, et spécialistes d’autres cultures, de déterminer si vraiment tous les discours relèvent de la fiction au même degré.

This Special Issue, titled “Cardiac Arrhythmia: Molecular Mechanisms and Therapeutic Strategies” is a collection of papers on cardiac arrhythmia. It covers everything from the mechanisms of atrial and ventricular arrhythmia to information on up-and-coming treatments.

The abuse of methamphetamines in Southeast Asia has become a major problem over the past decade. Thailand has been particularly hard hit: methamphetamine abuse now affects all sectors of Thai society. In the early 1990s, methamphetamine manufacturers moved their laboratories across the border into Burma, and began large-scale production. The new cheaper product, yaa baa or 'madness medicine', flooded the local market and spread quickly to the surrounding countries. Yaa baa from laboratories in Burma has been found also in Europe and the United States.The authors analyse the growth of methamphetamine production in Burma in its political context, which makes the book valuable. There are many books about opium and heroin production in the Golden Triangle, but this is the first about methamphetamines. This book fills an important gap in the literature about the Golden Triangle.

Comment faire vivre ensemble des individus égaux en droits et différents par leurs convictions ? Pour répondre à ce défi venu de l'avènement de la modernité et de la déconstruction de l'unité de foi qu'elle a impliquée, la France a instauré, à partir de 1789, un régime « laïque » d'existence politique : l'État se plaçait hier au service de la vérité religieuse ; on lui assigne désormais de simplement assurer, dans l'ordre, la liberté de conscience de ses assujettis. Ce régime de sécularité ne s'est pas fixé toutefois dans un modèle unique d'articulation de la relation entre le pouvoir politique et les communautés de croyances. Au cours des deux siècles qui viennent de s'écouler, tout en s'adossant, continûment, au double principe de neutralité de l'État et de liberté de conscience, la politique religieuse de la France a épousé des formes variées, sous la pression des conjonctures politiques, et, plus encore, des transformations de la figure même de la modernité. Le présent ouvrage se propose de rendre compte de ces mutations, en repérant, depuis la Révolution, trois grands moments dans l'agencement de la laïcité. La première étape, qui court du régime napoléonien à la Troisième République, laisse apparaître, selon la logique concordataire, un modèle d'alliance officielle de l'État et des cultes. Avec la Troisième République s'inaugure le moment de la séparation, qui trouve son point de cristallisation dans la loi du 9 décembre 1905. La logique qu'il dessine se trouve remise en cause à partir des années 1960 : s'impose alors un système inédit de reconnaissance, fondé sur un partenariat implicite entre l'État et les forces religieuses, dans un contexte marqué par l'expansion croisée des revendications identitaires et des angoisses sécuritaires. Cette approche aboutit à questionner fortement les théories pérennalistes qui entendent penser la laïcité hexagonale dans la stabilité de son concept originel. Elle rappelle, à l'inverse, qu'en France même, la politique des cultes s'est toujours construite de manière vivante, dans l'interaction sans cesse renouvelée du culturel, du social et du juridique.

La peste, ce fléau majeur de l'histoire des hommes est pour beaucoup une maladie historique, dépassée, dont l'énigme de la propagation semble résolue. Il n'en est rien. Dans la lutte séculaire que l'homme mène contre la peste, la connaissance précise des modes de sa dispersion forment un élément-clé. Ainsi l'identification des puces responsables de l'épidémisation constitue-t-elle un enjeu de première importance.

Autoinflammation, as a relatively new field in clinical rheumatology, has gained an increasing importance in recent years. The number of identified entities and affected patients has gradually increased, and some of the involved pathways have already been identified. This progress allows a deeper understanding of closely linked diseases, namely, inflammasomopathies, interferonopathies, Relo-pathies, and proteasome associated syndromes. These insights have not only improved their classification but also helped to identify new treatment targets of pro-inflammatory cytokines, including IL-1ß, IL-6, interferon-, and TNF-alpha. Nevertheless, there is still a high medical need, especially in reliable outcome measures, for confirmation of data from controlled clinical trials and, finally, also for long-term experience from registers. This issue welcomes all types of papers on the broad spectrum of clinical characteristics, prognosis, pathophysiology, and treatment of autoinflammatory diseases. The goal of this Special Issue is to further raise awareness of autoinflammatory processes and to better separate them from well-established autoimmune diseases. It is clear that we have entered a new age in this complex field, linking rheumatology even closer to immunology.

Industrial / commercial art & design

Digital communications technology has immeasurably enhanced our capacity to store, retrieve, and exchange information. But who controls our access to information, and who decides what others have a right to know about us? In Controlling Knowledge, author Lorna Stefanick offers a thought-provoking and user-friendly overview of the regulatory regime that currently governs freedom of information and the protection of privacy. Aiming to clarify rather than mystify, Stefanick outlines the history and application of FOIP legislation, with special focus on how these laws affect the individual. To illustrate the impact of FOIP, she examines the notion of informed consent, looks at concerns about surveillance in the digital age, and explores the sometimes insidious influence of Facebook. Specialists in public policy and public administration, information technology, communications, law, criminal justice, sociology, and health care will find much here that bears directly on their work, while students and general readers will welcome the book's down-to-earth language and accessible style. Intended to serve as a "citizen's guide," Controlling Knowledge is a vital resource for anyone seeking to understand how freedom of information and privacy protection are legally defined and how this legislation is shaping our individual rights as citizens of the information age.

ethics & moral philosophy; philosophy

Tourism is that area of activity of contemporary man that touches on various fields of human interest. Representatives of numerous academic disciplines find it intriguing for its exceptionally interdisciplinary character. Conditions for and consequences of the development of tourism are investigated, among others, by economists, geographers, sociologists, experts in culture, anthropologists, management and social policy specialists and even by representatives of some natural sciences. Researchers dealing with tourism need to meet strict methodological requirements, but they get access to a very interesting subject of scientific inquiry, which combines social, cultural, economic and environmental aspects to create an ontologically new quality offering epistemological challenges.

The chapters included in the book describe recent developments in the field of superconductivity. The book deals with both the experiment and the theory. Superconducting and normal-state properties are studied by various methods. The authors presented investigations of traditional and new materials. In particular, studies of oxides, pnictides, chalcogenides and intermetallic compounds are included. The superconducting order parameter symmetry is discussed and consequences of its actual non-conventional symmetry are studied. Impurity and tunneling effects (both quasiparticle and Josephson ones) are among topics covered in the chapters. Special attention is paid to the competition between superconductivity and other instabilities, which lead to the Fermi surface gapping.

From ancient skills passed down through imitation to the apprentice systems of ancient civilizations and onward to the formal vocational education systems of today, Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) has existed for thousands of years. It has made significant contributions to society, the economy, and technological advancements throughout the course of human civilization. While the contemporary concepts and principles of TVET have a history of only a few hundred years, the professional and technical talents nurtured by TVET have initiated and completed numerous industrial revolutions, exerting a profound influence on modernization initiatives. High-quality TVET construction is recognized as a crucial driver in promoting global social and economic development. Therefore, as an integral part of the educational system, countries worldwide spare no effort in constructing vocational education systems. Understanding vocational education experiences from around the world can assist each country or region in drawing inspiration when developing their own TVET systems. This book gathers research experiences from various countries and regions in the realms of 'Educational Policies and Institutions” and 'Curriculum and Instruction”, aiming to offer readers insights from diverse TVET achievements in different contexts and backgrounds.

In the face of major global demographic change, social care policy and practice are in urgent need of radical reform and reassessment. Rising poverty, inequality and pressure on local communities internationally, are also increasing the urgent need for reform. Drawing on the crisis-ridden UK experience as a case-study, this highly original book identifies the limits of the traditional welfare state in taking forward policy for the twenty-first century. The proposals amount to a renewed approach to social care, based on the philosophy of independent living as originally developed by the international disabled people’s movement and subsequently embodied in a United Nations treaty applicable to all in need of care and support. Despite wide international sign up since adoption in 2008 there is little evidence of any nation successfully delivering. For the first time, this book offers both a blueprint for an environmentally sustainable, rights-based approach to social care and a practical route to achieving it.

Entre l’effondrement de l’Empire napoléonien en 1815 et le milieu des années 1850, où la « question napolitaine » devient une affaire diplomatique internationale, la partie continentale du royaume des Deux-Siciles voit s’affirmer un scénario de politisation cohérent qui associe la revendication des libertés politiques à l’opposition à la monarchie bourbonienne. À partir de la documentation administrative bourbonienne, des écrits personnels des libéraux et de leurs productions politiques, on se propose d’étudier ce mouvement politique par ses acteurs. Il a pris la forme d’une société civile d’opposition réticulée et disparate, davantage anti-absolutiste qu’elle n’est idéologiquement libérale. À travers les circuits locaux, nationaux et transnationaux de la politisation libérale dans le Mezzogiorno pré-unitaire, c’est la singularité du Risorgimento méridional qu’on voudrait mettre en évidence, entre adhésions et résistances à la construction nationale italienne et réappropriations de cette dernière.