Alain Van

In his political philosophy Lefort endeavours to revive the thinking of „the political”. Owing to the influence of Marxism and the positive political sciences, this reality has fallen into oblivion. Indeed, the political sciences consider politics as a relatively autonomous region within the social whole, forgetting that this relative autonomy is itself the consequence of a political, i.e. democratic, mode of instituting society. Thinking „the political” is for Lefort thinking again the mode of institution of societies. This study shows then that according to Lefort a particular mode of instituting society is at the same time the institution of a particular experience of the social reality. Social reality is always represented social reality. According to Lefort now the representation of power plays a central role in this symbolic instituting of society. It is indeed in and by the symbolic representation of power — which it gives to itself— that society constitutes its selfrepresentation and thus its reality. The concrete determination-figuration of power is constitutive of the concrete determination-figuration of the social world. In the second part of this study Lefort's interpretation of the „democratic revolution” and the democratic „mise en forme” of society is then exposed. He sees this revolution as a symbolic mutation of the absolutistic image of power. In democracy, power is represented as social power, and the place of power as an empty place. The first representation broke with the absolutistic view of power as mediation of the divine power, whereas the second put an end to the equally absolutistic image of power as incarnated in the king's body. The consequences of the latter change must especially be stressed. Indeed, through it the absolutistic society became „incorporated” i.e. its unity and identity became represented as that of a body. When this self-representation of society disappears in democracy society can accept diversity and opposition as normal parts of social life. Totalitarianism in its turn, maintains the image of power as social power but restores the representation of an incarnated power. By its force the image of power again „incorporates” society

Notre expérience quotidienne nous le prouve : nous prenons des décisions pour nous déplacer, pour penser, pour agir et réagir. Nous prenons ces décisions selon notre nature et notre environnement, mais aussi en fonction de notre volonté propre. C'est cette caractéristique essentielle qui confère à l'humain son libre arbitre. Toutefois, rien dans la science ne vient conforter cette formidable intuition. Au contraire, les modèles contemporains des neurosciences et des sciences cognitives tendent à faire de nous des machines imparfaites, et à reléguer la volonté au rang d'illusion. Dans ce court essai, Alain Van Kerckhoven démontre que le libre arbitre a toujours été instrumentalisé pour justifier des postures religieuses, philosophiques ou politiques. L'apparition de nouveaux outils de connaissance permet pour la première fois d'en faire un sujet d'étude rationnelle. Les conclusions nous entraînent aux frontières de la science et de la philosophie, au coeur de l'expérience humaine.

Precision Medicine is driven by the idea that the rapidly increasing range of relatively cheap and efficient self-tracking devices make it feasible to collect multiple kinds of phenotypic data. Advocates of N = 1 research emphasize the countless opportunities personal data provide for optimizing individual health. At the same time, using biomarker data for lifestyle interventions has shown to entail complex challenges. In this paper, we argue that researchers in the field of precision medicine need to address the performative dimension of collecting data. We propose the fun-house mirror as a metaphor for the use of personal health data; each health data source yields a particular type of image that can be regarded as a ‘data mirror’ that is by definition specific and skewed. This requires competence on the part of individuals to adequately interpret the images thus provided.

Researchers have emphasized the value of authenticity, but not much is known about what makes a person authentic in the eyes of others. Our research takes an interpersonal perspective to examine the determinants of followers’ perceptions of leader authenticity. Building on social identity theory, we propose that two fundamental self-identifications–a leader’s sense of uniqueness and sense of belongingness–interact to influence followers’ perceptions of a leader’s authenticity via perceptions of a leader’s self-concept consistency. In a field study conducted among leader–follower dyads and in a controlled laboratory experiment, we find that when a leader feels a low sense of belongingness, there is a positive relationship between a leader’s sense of uniqueness and perceptions of leader authenticity. When a leader feels a low sense of uniqueness, there is a positive relationship between a leader’s sense of belongingness and perceptions of leader authenticity. This is because followers perceive this leader as having high self-concept consistency.

In this study Rawls’ political liberalism is analysed against the background of the double legacy of liberalism: the idea of toleration of diversity and the idea of autonomy. Rawls’ thinking is understood as an attempt to prevent that the emphasis liberalism lays on autonomy would turn it into a comprehensive doctrine which would discriminate against those groups which cannot accept autonomy without loosing their identity. That is why Rawls in his interpretation limits the scope of liberalism to the political. After having analysed what this implies, the author shows that nevertheless the demands of the public conception of justice have important effects on the comprehensive doctrines in civil society. Indeed the overlapping consensus and the stability of a well-ordered society presuppose reasonable comprehensive doctrines and a reasonable pluralism. In particular there is argued that the political conception seems to privilege and presuppose so called pluralist conceptions of the good which at least distinguish between the political and the religious. Completely integrated comprehensive doctrines seem to be incompatible with a liberal state. In this sense political liberalism still reduces, although unintentionally, the diversity of conceptions of the good life and the tension between toleration and autonomy is not completely removed.

Studies in the behavioral ethics and moral psychology traditions have begun to reveal the important roles of self-related processes that underlie moral behavior. Unfortunately, this research has resulted in two distinct and opposing streams of findings that are usually referred to as moral consistency and moral compensation. Moral consistency research shows that a salient self-concept as a moral person promotes moral behavior. Conversely, moral compensation research reveals that a salient self-concept as an immoral person promotes moral behavior. This study’s aim was to integrate these two literatures. We argued that compensation forms a reactive, “damage control” response in social situations, whereas consistency derives from a more proactive approach to reputation building and maintenance. Two experiments supported this prediction in showing that cognitive depletion (i.e., resulting in a reactive approach) results in moral compensation whereas consistency results when cognitive resources are available (i.e., resulting in a proactive approach). Experiment 2 revealed that these processes originate from reputational (rather than moral) considerations by showing that they emerge only under conditions of accountability. It can thus be concluded that reputational concerns are important for both moral compensation and moral consistency processes, and that which of these two prevails depends on the perspective that people take: a reactive or a proactive approach.