Ancient writers, including philosophers such as Aristotle, often depict friendship as a source of pleasure; by contrast, in his Laelius de amicitia, Cicero describes such relationships as sweet and delightful, but never connects them with uoluptas, which for him is a largely negative term reserved for Epicurean doctrine. This paper argues that there is more to this pointed use of language than Cicero’s well-known dislike of Epicureanism. Considering first the Latin philosophical vocabulary of pleasure and then the vexed question of what exactly qualifies as pleasure according to the Epicurean system, the paper makes the case that Cicero believed (probably correctly) that the pleasures of friendship as conceived of by himself and many ordinary language-users would not in fact qualify as instances of Epicurean uoluptas. If, as Epicurus appears to have held, all pleasures are either bodily or mental, and all mental pleasures are derived from bodily ones, then many activities experienced as pleasurable in and of themselves—including many traditional elements of friendship—are not in fact Epicurean pleasures.

In the latest in our series reviewing archived copies of Legal Information Management and The Law Librarian – as the journal was once known – LIM's co-editors leaf through the four issues published in 2004.

Ventriloquism is marked by an antagonistic intimacy between the ventriloquist and dummy, an antagonism that is rooted in the mechanics of the form. British ventriloquist Nina Conti brings the inherent violence of the ventriloquial conceit to bear on scenes we typically do not think of as contests for naturalized animacy: therapy and pregnancy.

Le livre de Maurizio Isabella, Southern Europe in the Age of Revolutions, modifie notre compréhension des révolutions de 1820-1821. Cette date, selon lui, représente un moment de transformation dans une « ère des révolutions » de longue portée, qui laissa sa marque sur les pratiques politiques et sur les périphéries méridionales de l’Europe qui furent à l’initiative du mouvement révolutionnaire. Comme le remarque M. Isabella, cet espace « démontre le mieux l’interconnexion […] entre les soulèvements européens, ibéro-américains et asiatiques. À travers ses vastes recherches archivistiques et son accent sur la mobilité et l’implication populaire lors des mouvements qui survinrent en Europe méridionale, M. Isabella forge un nouveau récit et une nouvelle chronologie de l’âge des révolutions.

This pilot study is the first formal exploration of the concept of “Organizational Professionalism” (OP) among health system leaders in high-performing healthcare organizations. Semi-structured key informant interviews with 23 leaders from 8 healthcare organizations that were recipients of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award (MBNQA) or Baldrige-based state quality award programs explored conceptualization, operationalization, and measurement of OP. Further exploration and understanding of OP in healthcare organizations has the potential to establish and sustain professional and ethical organizational cultures that bolster trust through the sound implementation of laws, policies, and procedures to support the delivery of high-quality patient care.

The conventional approach to trade liberalization has been to liberalize trade through international agreement and address subsequent domestic fallout and spillovers through domestic policies. In consequence, international obligations in trade liberalization are not legally connected with ‘flanking’ measures to address their negative effects. We discuss the shortcomings of this conventional approach with respect to labor adjustment and environmental protection: for political reasons, trade liberalization requires today the simultaneous regulation of labor and environmental spillovers. We suggest a novel approach to trade liberalization that includes the necessary flanking policies as part of, or linked to, the international agreement itself. This novel approach seeks to achieve the best of both worlds: reaping the benefits of international trade while making sure that negative spillovers are effectively addressed. To illustrate the intricacies of this approach, we introduce a new conceptual framework covering the negative effects of trade liberalization and flanking or mitigating policies, and a proposed novel approach in the form of trade liberalization packages and package treaties. Trade liberalization packages and package treaties are currently emerging around the world (e.g. sustainable palm oil in EFTA–Indonesia) and deserve our close attention.

This article demonstrates the importance of the Seven Sages to the rhetorical projects of Xenophon and Plato. Though Aristotle represents Socrates as the first to turn philosophy towards ethics, Xenophon and Plato present us with a Socrates who inherited elements of earlier Greek moral thought, and particularly the thought of the Seven Sages. Xenophon’s Socrates shares important features with the Sages, such as his ‘usefulness’ to his friends. In a passage unparalleled in other Socratic literature, he reads and teaches with texts that, as this article proposes, were written by the Sages. The Xenophontic Socrates’ respect for (and affinity with) the Sages constitutes an attempt to vindicate Socrates from his reputation for strangeness. Plato, by contrast, fashions the Sages after Socrates. In defiance of traditions attesting their political involvement, Plato makes the Sages, like Socrates, apolitical. Elsewhere, he anachronistically likens their gnomic utterances to Socratic elenchus. In all Platonic passages that mention the Sages, Plato assimilates the Sages’ activity with Socrates’ methods against those of the sophists. For Plato, then, Socrates’ alignment with the Seven Sages places the weight of tradition on the side of philosophy and against sophistry.

There is a growing movement within contemporary medical ethics to blur the boundaries between clinical medicine and clinical research. Some writers now argue that the research-practice distinction is outdated and the importance of distinguishing between research and medicine is no longer as pressing as it once was or seemed to be. Instead, we are now urged to view the health-care system as a dynamic “learning health-care system” in which research components are embedded within standard clinical care. This essay defends the ethical significance of the research-practice distinction while acknowledging the reality and usefulness of integrated health care. A key claim that this essay advances is that the principle of clinical equipoise, which has largely been rejected by research ethicists, can be reinterpreted and repurposed to help distinguish medical practices that call for more demanding forms of informed consent from those that do not.

This article combines allegorical, symbolic and metaphorical readings with modern theoretical approaches (primarily, affect theory) to explore the representations of objects and bodies within Peristephanon 9. In Prudentius’ poem, the tortured body of Cassian overlaps with the tormented soul of the poet; the written text is both a co-actor in Cassian’s death and a vehicle for the perpetuation of his extra-textual memory. Figurative language provides words and concepts with new meanings so that a pen can transform into a sword, writing into torture. Through a process of materialization and resemantization, the physical objects become agents in the narrative construction.