This critique of papers by hartshorne, tracy and eslick seeks a possible rapport between process theology and thomistic natural theology. both schools seek a god who is love, intimately involved in daily human life. but a dipolar god is not sufficiently transcendent to be so immanent. hence only love which is purely actual being can satisfy process intentions. tracy's new "tensive analogical language" and eslick's teleological explanation of novelty are thus more feasible on thomistic than on process grounds.

SEARCHING and learning... are altogether recollection". A long and strong tradition in Platonic studies has taken this statement as a literal description of what happens when we come to know something that we had not known before. That literal interpretation is commonly linked to a similarly literal interpretation of Plato's statements about the soul's cycle of rebirths, and to a transcendent rather than a transcendental view of the Ideas, one which gives them an ontological status separate from sensible particulars. Sensibles (...) thus recall to our minds the Ideas which we saw in our earlier life in the other world, the world to which our disembodied souls will return as a reward for having pursued the philosophical life. (shrink)

Schmitz, whose insightful crudition matches that of his subject, traces the development of Wojtyla's project from the plays he wrote in the 1940s for the underground "theater of the living word," through his assimilation of the philosophical tradition as professor of ethics at the Catholic University of Lublin, then through the maturation of his own thought as Archbishop of Krakow and active participant in Vatican II, and into its flowering in the remarkable series of papal documents beginning with his Wednesday (...) talks on Genesis and first encyclical, The Redeemer of Man. Schmitz assesses the effort to integrate contemporary phenomenology into the metaphysical tradition as depending on several careful distinctions. The first is between a Husserlian bracketing of being and an algebraic one. Another is between phenomenology as a technique that presupposes a realistic metaphysics, and as an effort to establish realism that must fail because the intended object of consciousness is still consciousness itself, not an extramental world. A third is between value as a felt good and goodness as coincident with being. Only this latter allows for objective moral norms, for moral goodness that coincides with the existential fullness of human nature, and for moral obligation. The answer to the question "Why be moral?" thus has its solid answer in the potentiality of human nature for fuller, self-transcendent being. (shrink)

It is a truism that affectivity has been by and large neglected in Western philosophy in recent centuries, while analyses of knowledge, especially rational thought, abound. Classical American thought, which frequently takes community as a main theme, is something of an exception. But the fact remains that books with titles like this one's and Solomon's earlier The Passions raise hopes that a neglected and important philosophical topic is to receive some of the attention that it deserves. Solomon's Love: Emotion, Myth (...) and Metaphor, following a reverse order of the topics mentioned in its title, examines the metaphors and myths common to views of love in our culture, with a view to a philosophical reconstruction of the concept of romance. The main thesis continues that of his earlier book, viz., that emotions in general are actions. In Solomon's view, romantic love is not something that happens to us, that we undergo or "fall into," but something that we actively do. It is a free and conscious decision to give meaning to our experience by constructing, with a beloved, a "loveworld" in which we strive for a definable shared self. Choice, says Solomon, a feature of all emotions, is the most striking characteristic of love. Love has, like any choice, its reasons and conditions. It is a choice that our culture values highly because it enables us to achieve, in a society marked by public role-playing, individuality, and mobility, the stable identity of selves that would otherwise be impossible. Earlier societies provided these through stable family life and social order. (shrink)

This book is a brilliant and painstaking analysis, at once historical and systematic, of Plato's penology. The initial sinking of a philosopher's heart at the sight of philosophy done by a classicist is soon stopped and even reversed. For Mackenzie immediately displays a mastery of the philosophical issues involved in a critique of penal institutions. The book opens with five chapters that clearly set forth the basic incongruity: experience shows that penal institutions are inevitable in human societies, and yet punishment--because (...) it does harm to the punished-needs to be justified. But the major philosophical theories fail in that justification: retribution, deterrence, and reform are finally incompatible with each other, and yet none can stand alone without doing violence to the intuitions of common sense. Plato's theory, then--basically reformative, with a touch of deterrence--is finally unsatisfactory. As the author says in her introduction, "different theories of punishment cannot be held conjointly because they conflict. But they cannot be held separately, either, or they risk being violent or unintelligible. Violence is what theories of punishment guard against, and if a theory is incomprehensible, it is no theory at all". Plato's theory is then said to fail by being incomprehensible. (shrink)

Background The prioritization protocols for accessing adult critical care in the extreme pandemic context contain tiebreaker criteria to facilitate decision-making in the allocation of resources between patients with a similar survival prognosis. Besides being controversial, little is known about the public acceptability of these tiebreakers. In order to better understand the public opinion, Quebec and Ontario’s protocols were presented to the public in a democratic deliberation during the summer of 2022. Objectives (1) To explore the perspectives of Quebec and Ontario (...) citizens regarding tiebreakers, identifying the most acceptable ones and their underlying values. (2) To analyze these results considering other public consultations held during the pandemic on these criteria. Methods This was an exploratory qualitative study. The design involved an online democratic deliberation that took place over two days, simultaneously in Quebec and Ontario. Public participants were selected from a community sample which excluded healthcare workers. Participants were first presented the essential components of prioritization protocols and their related issues (training session day 1). They subsequently deliberated on the acceptability of these criteria (deliberation session day 2). The deliberation was then subject to thematic analysis. Results A total of 47 participants from the provinces of Quebec (n = 20) and Ontario (n = 27) took part in the online deliberation. A diverse audience participated excluding members of the healthcare workforce. Four themes were identified: (1) Priority to young patients - the life cycle - a preferred tiebreaker; (2) Randomization - a tiebreaker of last resort; (3) Multiplier effect of most exposed healthcare workers - a median acceptability tiebreaker, and (4) Social value – a less acceptable tiebreaker. Conclusion Life cycle was the preferred tiebreaker as this criterion respects intergenerational equity, which was considered relevant when allocating scarce resources to adult patients in a context of extreme pandemic. Priority to young patients is in line with other consultations conducted around the world. Additional studies are needed to further investigate the public acceptability of tiebreaker criteria. (shrink)

Functional diversity holds the promise of understanding ecosystems in ways unattainable by taxonomic diversity studies. Underlying this promise is the intuition that investigating the diversity of what organisms actually do—i.e. their functional traits—within ecosystems will generate more reliable insights into the ways these ecosystems behave, compared to considering only species diversity. But this promise also rests on several conceptual and methodological—i.e. epistemic—assumptions that cut across various theories and domains of ecology. These assumptions should be clearly addressed, notably for the sake (...) of an effective comparison and integration across domains, and for assessing whether or not to use functional diversity approaches for developing ecological management strategies. The objective of this contribution is to identify and critically analyze the most salient of these assumptions. To this aim, we provide an “epistemic roadmap” that pinpoints these assumptions along a set of historical, conceptual, empirical, theoretical, and normative dimensions. (shrink)

Definición del derecho natural -- Definición del derecho de gentes -- Diferencia de otras ciencias -- Del derecho público -- De la política -- Necesidad y utilidad del derecho natural y de gentes -- Origen y antiguedad de este derecho -- Formación de esta ciencia -- Progresos y escritores principales. Hugo Grotius -- John Selden -- Thomas Hobbes -- Samuel Pufendorf -- Christian Thomasius -- Johann Gottlieb Heineccius -- Christian Wolff -- Emer de Vattel -- Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui. Fortunato Bartolomeo De (...) Felice -- Otros escritores en com un -- Montesquieu -- Simon-Nicolas-Henri Linguet -- Jean-Jacques Rousseau -- Escritos modernos detestables -- Vicios y defectos de muchos modernos -- Modo para conocer los autores sospechosos -- Autores católicos con que se refutan -- Precaución para establecer las reglas del derecho natural -- Falsa preocupaci on de buscar un primer principio -- Métodos que se proponen -- No son necesarios -- Del método escolástico -- Universidades en que se enseña este derecho. (shrink)

Rousseau est certainement un des écrivains français qui interroge le plus car la multiplicité de son oeuvre reflète une ambiguïté. C'est en effet l'homme du discours logique et de la rêverie, de l'oeuvre philosophique, politique, lyrique et intime: un long itinéraire ‘de la marche de la raison au tragique de la recherche d'un salut individuel’.1 Ce qui nous intéresse ici, c'est l'aspect intime, c'est Rousseau intimiste dans son rapport avec la culture ou les cultures; sa démarche et son (...) interrogation sur le monde sont au coeur de sa vie.Nous voudrions cerner dans quelle mesure les diaristes du XIXé siècle sont les héritiers de la révolution intérieure de Rousseau, révolution qui met en cause les cultures. Constate-t-on entre Rousseau et les grands intimistes un parallélisme fortuit, une influence, une donnée spécifique, intrinsèque à toute écriture intime? (shrink)