In his Sermo 150, Augustine argues that the desire to attain the vita beata has been the motivation for all types of philosophy, and that it is also the reason that people would give if asked why they became Christians; the quest is common to all human beings, whether good or evil. Appetitio...beatae vitae philosophis Christianisque communis est.The truth of Augustine’s claims is illustrated in a variety of Latin Christian works from the fourth century, which take up the traditional philosophical (...) theme of happiness and the summum bonum. Lactantius relates the highest good to the immortality of the soul, and calls upon his readers to find their destiny by devoting themselves to the worship of the true God; the worship of God is the greatest virtue, and it wins the blessedness of eternal reward. (shrink)

The De Officiis of Ambrose, Bishop of Milan is a key text of early Christian literature. Based on a work by the Roman writer, Cicero, it presents the first systematic account of Christian ethics. Volume 1 of this edition offers an introduction, the Latin text, and translation, whilst Volume 2 gives a full commentary. It is the first full-length study of Ambrose's work written in English in modern times.

The De officiis of Ambrose of Milan is one of the most important texts of Latin Patristic literature. Modelled on the De Officiis of Cicero, it sets out Ambrose's ethical vision for his clergy, synthesizing ancient Stoic assumptions on virtue and expediency with Biblical patterns of humility, charity, and self-denial to present a paradigm of a church hierarchy capable of making the right impact on its social world. Ambrose aspires to demonstrate that the age of profound principles is now available.This (...) new edition constitutes the first Modern English translation of Ambrose's Latin. The Text and Translation in Volume 1 are accompanied by a detailed Commentary that concentrates on Ambrose's debts to Cicero and his attempts to renovate his philosophical inheritance. An extensive Introduction analyses his ethical ideals and sets them in their social context. (shrink)

The De officiis of Ambrose of Milan is one of the most important texts of Latin Patristic literature. Modelled on the De Officiis of Cicero, it sets out Ambrose's ethical vision for his clergy, synthesizing ancient Stoic assumptions on virtue and expediency with Biblical patterns of humility, charity, and self-denial to present a paradigm of a church hierarchy capable of making the right impact on its social world. Ambrose aspires to demonstrate that the age of profound principles is now available.This (...) new edition constitutes the first Modern English translation of Ambrose's Latin. The Text and Translation in Volume 1 are accompanied by a detailed Commentary that concentrates on Ambrose's debts to Cicero and his attempts to renovate his philosophical inheritance. An extensive Introduction analyses his ethical ideals and sets them in their social context. (shrink)

The past decade has witnessed escalating legal and ethical challenges to the diagnosis of death by neurologic criteria. The legal tactic of demanding consent for the apnea test, if successful, can halt the DNC. However, US law is currently unsettled and inconsistent in this matter. Consent has been required in several trial cases in Montana and Kansas but not in Virginia and Nevada. In this paper, we analyze and evaluate the legal and ethical bases for requiring consent before apnea testing (...) and defend such a requirement by appealing to ethical and legal principles of informed consent and battery and the right to refuse medical treatment. We conclude by considering and rebutting two major objections to a consent requirement for apnea testing: a justice-based objection to allocate scarce resources fairly and a social utility objection that halting the diagnosis of brain death will reduce the number of organ donors. (shrink)

What is the relation between a reason and an action when the reason explains the action by giving the agent's reason for doing what he did? We may call such explanations rationalizations, and say that the reason rationalizes the action. In this paper I want to defend the ancient - and common-sense - position that rationalization is a species of ordinary causal explanation. The defense no doubt requires some redeployment, but not more or less complete abandonment of the position, as (...) urged by many recent writers. (shrink)

"Davidson begins by harking back to an early interest in the classics, and an even earlier engagement with the workings of grammar. In the pleasures of diagramming sentences in grade school, he locates his first glimpse into the mechanics of how we conduct the most important activities in our life - such as declaring love, asking directions, issuing orders, and telling stories. Davidson connects these essential questions with the most basic and yet hard to understand mysteries of language (...) use - how we connect noun to verb. This is a problem that Plato and Aristotle wrestled with, and Davidson draws on their thinking to show how an understanding of linguistic behavior is critical to the formulating of a workable concept of truth. Against a whole army of contemporary philosophers, Davidson argues that the concept of truth is not ambiguous.". (shrink)

AMBIS is a complete identification system which includes (1) a highly reproducible electrophoresis unit; (2) a beta‐scanner with the ability to rapidly locate and measure beta particle emission data from a variety of isotopes and surfaces; and (3) an IBM computer with a massive data storage capacity for the emission data plus subsequent manipulation of that data. Hence it provides a rapid facility for (1) classification of all types of micro‐organisms, (2) examination of cells of multicellular plants and animals, (3) (...) routine determination of molecular weights of one or more proteins in a complex mixture, (4) quantification of single or mixed compounds in a band, (5) scanning and quantification of dot and other blots, immunodiffusion precipitates and probes, (6) direct counting of radioactive solutions from RIA, column fractions, etc., without the need of expensive scintillation fluids with their consequent hazards, (7) circumventing the need of much time‐consuming auto‐radiography, and (8) setting up databases plus exchange and transference of data between AMBIS systems in different locations via floppy disk, modem or other forms of rapid transmission. (shrink)

This article describes a logic of distinction and succession within the late-twentieth-century Leningrad-St. Petersburg cultural field, whereby consecutive intelligentsia mainstreams were replaced by their avant-garde peripheries. In this dynamic picture of socio-cultural transformations, I propose a working hypothesis of a repeated stratification of the field into an ‘official’, an ‘unofficial’, and a third ‘non-aligned’ intelligentsia. This hypothesis is tested in reference to the ‘non-aligned’ groups founded by the avant-garde artist and ideologue Timur Novikov (1958–2002). Three major shifts are described: from (...) the politicized late-Brezhnevite early 1980s to the apolitical radicalism of Novikov’s New Artists; from this anarchistic underground, through the perestroika era, to the playful ‘classicism’ of the New Academy of Fine Arts in the 1990s; and from this postmodern international orientation to an arch-reactionary, neo-imperial posturing at the turn of the 2000s. Lastly, this ‘non-aligned’ intelligentsia is suggested as a possible precedent, or, indeed, a model for understanding other historically significant avant-garde peripheries, which commonly seek to distinguish themselves from (often mutually-exclusive) centres. (shrink)

During his lifetime, Sir Ivor Jennings was well known as the author of several standard books on constitutional law. He acted as constitutional adviser to the governments of Ceylon and Pakistan and was Vice-Chancellor of the University of Ceylon. This 1956 book followed in the tradition of his earlier The British Constitution and is a clear statement by an expert with a characteristically practical point of view. It is principally concerned with a practical problem: what constitution shall be given (...) to a new country about to govern itself for the first time? Published at a time when colonial empires were moving more or less peaceably towards self-government, it was based on a series of broadcast talks originally commissioned by the BBC in the belief that the experiences gained in Asia were in principle applicable to other countries approaching self-government. (shrink)

Please see I. A. Richards (ISBN: 0415217318) for details or email [email protected].

Problems of Rationality is the eagerly awaited fourth volume of Donald Davidson 's philosophical writings. From the 1960s until his death in August 2003 Davidson was perhaps the most influential figure in English-language philosophy, and his work has had a profound effect upon the discipline. His unified theory of the interpretation of thought, meaning, and action holds that rationality is a necessary condition for both mind and interpretation. Davidson here develops this theory to illuminate value judgements and (...) how we understand them; to investigate what the conditions are for attributing mental states to an object or creature; and to grapple with the problems presented by thoughts and actions which seem to be irrational. Anyone working on knowledge, mind, and language will find these essays essential reading. (shrink)

This essay is a contribution to the field of institutional studies in that it treats the State as a substantial phenomenon, composed of institutions that require analysis in their own right. Here, the focus is on the political form of African states from the 1960s to the 1980s. On the one hand, I will follow Bourdieu here in insisting that the study of government demands that we know something of the history of political thought (la pensée politique). This simple observation (...) is seldomly applied when it comes to politics in postcolonial Africa. On the other, I use Peter Wagner´s concept of modernity to show that struggles against colonialism and Imperialism and the pursuit of self-determination for African and Asian peoples are unambiguously struggles against domination and for autonomy. The emergence of Third World nationalism (and the Non-Aligned Movement) is an event, therefore, firmly in modernity. So too is the phenomenon of the One-party state in Africa. (shrink)

This essay develops the relation, implicit in Essay 11, of intentional action to behaviour described in purely physical terms; Davidson repeats from Essay 3 that an action counts as intentional if the agent caused it, and asks to which degree a study of action thus conceived permits being scientific. Davidson stresses the central importance of a normative concept of rationality in attributing reasons to agents ; because this concept has no echo in physical theory, any explanatory schema governed (...) by the concept is irreducible to physical theory. Davidson adduces several facts that prevent us from giving strict laws connecting reasons and action: first, we cannot give conditions that are not only necessary but also sufficient for an action to be intentional, using only the concepts of belief, desire, and cause----for we cannot specify the ”right way’ in which beliefs and desires cause actions ; second, a certain holism of the mental pervades explanations of human behaviour: we cannot assign beliefs and desires independently of and prior to the actions they cause, a point Davidson takes Ramsey’s work on subjective probability to have shown. Davidson appends a set of replies to critics, which clarify his attitude to psychology as a science, his analysis of statements of law, the principle of causal interaction, and the relation between mutually irreducible explanatory schema. (shrink)

Repr. as Essay 14 in Davidson, Donald, _Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation_, 2nd ed. Oxford, UK (Clarendon, 2001). 215-226.

Ivor Hunt; II—Value-Concepts and Conceptual Truth, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 63, Issue 1, 1 June 1963, Pages 23–44, https://doi.org/10.109.

Originally published in 1970, this volume provides a survey of the wide field of the development of education since 1800. The book is structured as follows: Part One: The General Development of Popular Education English Elementary Education, the Development of Primary Education, English Secondary Education Part Two: Specific Topics in Education Independent, Private and Public Schools, Technical and Technological Education, The Universities, Teacher Training, Further and Adult Education, The Youth Services Part Three: Educational Thinkers Johann Friedrich Herbart, Friedrich Froebel, Froebelianism (...) and Montessori, John Dewey. (shrink)

George Boole (1815-1864) is well known to mathematicians for his research and textbooks on the calculus, but his name has spread world-wide for his innovations in symbolic logic and the development and applications made since his day. The utility of "Boolean algebra" in computing has greatly increased curiosity in the nature and extent of his achievements. His work is most accessible in his two books on logic, "A mathematical analysis of logic" (1947) and "An investigation of the laws of thought" (...) (1954). But at various times he wrote manuscript essays, especially after the publication of the second book; several were intended for a non-technical work, "The Philosophy of logic", which he was not able to complete. This volume contains an edited selection which not only relates them to Boole's publications and the historical context of his time, but also describes their strange history of family, followers and scholars have treid to confect an edition. The book will appeal to logicians, mathematicians and philosophers, and those interested in the histories of the corresponding subjects; and also students of the early Victorian Britain in which they were written. (shrink)

The problem of ‘individuals’ is an age-old philosophical concern, but from time to time in the history of thought it is a problem which becomes acute. In our day the far-reaching advances in science—in physics and chemistry, in biology and bio-chemistry, in neurology and psychology—have made the philosophical attention to the problem of ‘individuals’ a matter of urgency. Yet, with some notableexceptions, philosophers have so far been displaying singularly little interest in the problem.

This is an earlier version of a chapter from my book "Plato's Republic as a Philosophical Drama on Doing Well" (2014). The book analyses Plato’s Politeia (= Republic) as a philosophical drama in which the participants turn out to be models of various types of psychic constitution, and nothing is said by them which may be considered to be an opinion of Plato himself (with all that that entails for Platonism). The debate in Book I between Socrates and Thrasymachus serves (...) as a test case for the assumptions that the Socratic method involves searching for truth or examining the opinions of interlocutors and that Socrates is the mouthpiece of Plato. Socrates and Thrasymachus are usually assumed to be arguing about justice. In fact, they are going through the motions of an eristic debate, where the aim is not to discover the truth about the matter under discussion but to defeat the opponent by fair means or foul, but especially foul. The outrageous wordplay used by both men is not so obvious in translation, and in any case tends to be ignored or explained away by scholars who assume that Plato the philosopher was writing a philosophical treatise (an exposition of philosophical ideas) and not a philosophical drama (a presentation of philosophically interesting models, to be compared and contrasted by the reader). (shrink)

The Republic is widely recognized to be Plato’s masterpiece, but for centuries it has been the subject of much debate. Is it about the ideal state, or the soul, or art, or education, or something else altogether? Interpretations have been many and various, for two main reasons: studies have tended to concentrate on parts of this very long dialogue to the exclusion of other parts; and some of the opinions expressed in the dialogue are routinely regarded as being those of (...) Plato himself. This analysis treats the dialogue as a dialogue, a conversation between the characters presented in it, and examines the dialogue in its entirety. The result is a holistic interpretation making sense not only of the dialogue as a whole, but also its parts. Each character is a paradigm representing an aspect of the central theme of the dialogue (apparent good), and it is because of what they represent that the conversation takes the course that it does. (shrink)