There has been a great deal of interest in medieval action theory in recent years. Nonetheless, relatively little work has been done on figures prior to the so-called High Middle Ages, and much of what has been done has focused on better-known thinkers, such as Augustine and Anselm. By comparison, Bernard of Clairvaux's treatise, De gratia et libero arbitrio has been neglected. Yet his treatise is quoted widely by such important scholars as Philip the Chancellor, Alexander of Hales, (...) and Albertus Magnus. Some historians of philosophy argue that his writings inspired the voluntarist movement that developed in the 1270s. Thus, Bernard must be seen as an important influence upon later medieval theories of action. In this paper, I examine the basic structure of his interesting account of human action and its freedom and conclude by raising some further issues connected to his work. /// Nos últimos anos assistiu-se a uma retoma do interesse pela teoria medieval da acção. Apesar disso, poucos estudos têm versado sobre os pensadores anteriores à assim chamada Alta Idade Média, para além de que esses estudos se debruçam sobretudo sobre os filósofos mais conhecidos, como é o caso de Agostinho e de Anselmo. Comparativamente, o tratado de S. Bernardo de Claraval, De gratia et libero arbítrio, não tem suscitado muita atenção crítica. Contudo, numerosos pensadores citaram este tratado, entre eles Filipe o Chanceler, Alexandre de Hales, e Alberto Magno. Vários histonadores da filosofia têm avançado a tese de que os escritos de Bernardo influenciaram o movimento voluntarista que se desenvolveu nos anos 1270. Nesse sentido, as ideias de Bernardo de Claraval tiveram um certo impacto sobre as teorias da acção que haveriam de aparecer mais tarde. No presente artigo, a autora examina as ideias do pensador medieval sobre a acção humana e a sua liberdade, terminando com o levantar de algumas novas questões sobre o tratado de Bernardo de Claraval. (shrink)

This paper examines the thinking of Bernard of Clairvaux about love in relationship to the ideas of his two famous contemporaries, Peter Abelard and Héloise. It looks at Bernard's intellectual debt to William of Champeaux on issues of sin and grace, and to William of Saint-Thierry for ideas about how amor evolves into caritas. Bernard makes a stronger link between amor and dilectio, and introduces use of the Song of Songs, to explain how worldly love can (...) develop into spiritual love. The author also considers the evolution of the ideas about love of Peter Abelard, observing that he draws on the same definition of Cicero in the Sic et Non and Theologia as underpins a rather crude attempt to define love in the Epistolae duorum amantium, which the author of the article thinks to be a record of the early letters of Abelard and Héloise. Whereas Abelard always contrasts worldly and spiritual love, the effort of Heloise to connect amor and dilectio parallels that of Bernard. /// O presente artigo debruça-se sobre o pensamento de S. Bernardo de Claraval acerca do amor em relação com as ideias desenvolvidas pelos seus dois famosos contemporâneos, Pedro Abelardo e Heloísa. Além disso, o artigo toma também em consideração a dívida intelectual de S. Bernardo em relação a Guilherme de Champeaux a propósito de temas como o pecado e a graça, bem como a Guilherme de Saint-Thierry relativamente a ideias acerca de como amor se transforma em caritas. Bernardo estabelece um vínculo forte entre amor e dilectio, e introduz o uso do Cântico dos Cânticos para explicar de que modo o amor mundano se pode transformar em amor espiritual. O artigo toma também em considerçãdo a evolução das ideias acerca do amor de Pedro Abelardo, referindo o facto de que ele se inspira na definição do Cicero no Sic et Non e Theologia, sublinhando a sua tentativa de definição do amor nas Epistolae duorum amantium, as quais são aqui consideradas como um arquivo das primeiras cartas entre Abelardo e Heloísa. Finalmente, o artigo chama também a atenção para o facto de que Abelardo tende a contrasrar o amor mundano e o amor espiritual, ao passo que o esforço de Heloísa em conectar amor e dilectio paralela o próprio esforço de S. Bernardo. (shrink)

Bernard of Clairvaux emerges from these studies as a vibrant, challenging and illuminating representative of the monastic culture of the twelfth century. In taking on Peter Abelard and the new scholasticism he helped define the very world he opposed and thus contributed to the renaissance of the twelfth century.

This work will examine the concept of soul developed in mysticism of abbot Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153). For this, I will analyze extracts of five writings namely the Third Series of Sentences, three of his Liturgical Sermons, and the parabola The Three Children of the King.

The late eleventh and twelfth centuries were Europe's first age of pamphlet warfare, of invective and satire. The perceived failure, or at least hypocrisy, of its new institutions-the new monastic orders and the reformed papacy-gave rise to the phenomenon, and it was shaped by the study of grammar and rhetoric in the new Schools. The central figures in the texts in the present book are Bernard of Clairvaux, the powerful ostensible founder of the Cistercian order, and the popular (...) and influential teacher Peter Abelard, leader of the radical faction in the Schools of Paris. The event which sparked this controversy was the Church council at Sens in 1141 which had led to the condemnation of Abelard's doctrines. Abelard proposed to use reason to explain the mysteries of faith, and this had led him into all kinds of difficulties with established church doctrine. The leading light in the atttack on his ideas was Bernard, the famous abbot of Clairvaux, a group of whose letters, written to gather support for it before and after the Council, are presented here. A little while later Abelard was defended by the vituperative but otherwise unknown Berengar, who wrote an outrageous Apology attacking Bernard; we also edit his remaining polemical works: his Letter to the Carthusians, and his Letter to the Bishop of Mende. None of Berengar's works has been translated before. An extensive introductory essay describes the course of the debate and the personnel, and analyses the invective employed by both Bernard and Berengar. There is full annotation identifying the writers' sources and clarifying the issues."-- Back cover. (shrink)

In the mid twentieth century the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein famously asserted that games are indefinable; there are no common threads that link them all. "Nonsense," says the sensible Bernard Suits: "playing a game is a voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles." The short book Suits wrote demonstrating precisely that is as playful as it is insightful, as stimulating as it is delightful. Suits not only argues that games can be meaningfully defined; he also suggests that playing games is a (...) central part of the ideal of human existence, so games belong at the heart of any vision of Utopia. Originally published in 1978, The Grasshopper is now re-issued with a new introduction by Thomas Hurka and with additional material (much of it previously unpublished) by the author, in which he expands on the ideas put forward in The Grasshopper and answers some questions that have been raised by critics. (shrink)

The only complete study of Buber as a political thinker. Shed new light upon Buber's I Thou, while also attempting to understand Buber's Zionist thought and activity in a new and fresh manner.

Conscious experience is one of the most difficult and thorny problems in psychological science. Its study has been neglected for many years, either because it was thought to be too difficult, or because the relevant evidence was thought to be poor. Bernard Baars suggests a way to specify empirical constraints on a theory of consciousness by contrasting well-established conscious phenomena - such as stimulus representations known to be attended, perceptual, and informative - with closely comparable unconscious ones - such (...) as stimulus representations known to be preperceptual, unattended, or habituated. Adducing data to show that consciousness is associated with a kind of global workplace in the nervous system, and that several brain structures are known to behave in accordance with his theory, Baars helps to clarify many difficult problems. (shrink)

This new volume of philosophical papers by Bernard Williams is divided into three sections: the first Action, Freedom, Responsibility, the second Philosophy, Evolution and the Human Sciences; in which appears the essay which gives the collection its title; and the third Ethics, which contains essays closely related to his 1983 book Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. Like the two earlier volumes of Williams's papers published by Cambridge University Press, Problems of the Self and Moral Luck, this volume will (...) be welcomed by all readers with a serious interest in philosophy. It is published alongside a volume of essays on Williams's work, World, Mind, and Ethics: Essays on the Ethical Philosophy of Bernard Williams, edited by J. E. J. Altham and Ross Harrison, which provides a reappraisal of his work by other distinguished thinkers in the field. (shrink)

This book offers the fullest and most sophisticated account of Gert's influential moral theory, a model first articulated in the classic work The Moral Rules: A New Rational Foundation for Morality, published in 1970. In this final revision, Gert makes clear that the moral rules are only one part of an informal system that does not provide unique answers to every moral question but does always provide a range of morally acceptable options. A new chapter on reasons includes an account (...) of what makes one reason better than another and a second new chapter is devoted to the question of justifying violations of the rules. Moral impartiality, the moral ideals, and virtue and vice, are all treated in greater detail. Throughout, Gert attempts to answer all of the challenges that his work has provoked. (shrink)

An updated and expanded successor to Culver and Gert's Philosophy in Medicine, this book integrates moral philosophy with clinical medicine to present a comprehensive summary of the theory, concepts, and lines of reasoning underlying the ...

The basic principles of scientific research from the great French physiologist whose contributions in the 19th century included the discovery of vasomotor nerves; nature of curare and other poisons in human body; more.

Part I. Phenomenology -- Phenomenology and the return to beginnings -- Delimitations: phenomenology and the end of metaphysics -- Part II. Sallis's Plato interpretation -- Being and logos: reading the Platonic dialogues -- Chorology: on beginning in Plato's Timaeus -- Platonic legacies -- Part III. Art/Sallis -- Stone -- Shades-of painting at the limit -- Topographies -- Part IV. Sallis and other thinkers -- The gathering of reason -- Spacings-of reason and imagination in texts of Kant, Fichte, Hegel -- Echoes: (...) after Heidegger -- Crossings: Nietzsche and the space of tragedy -- Part V. Sallis speaks directly -- Double truth -- Force of imagination: the sense of the elemental -- On translation -- The Sallis/Derrida dialogue -- Derrida's "Tense" and Sallis's The verge of philosophy. (shrink)

A bold new interpretation of Aristotelian thought is central to Bernard Yack's provocative new book. He shows that for Aristotle, community is a conflict-ridden fact of everyday life, as well as an ideal of social harmony and integration. From political justice and the rule of law to class struggle and moral conflict, Yack maintains that Aristotle intended to explain the conditions of everyday political life, not just, as most commentators assume, to represent the hypothetical achievements of an idealistic "best (...) regime." By showing how Aristotelian ideas can provide new insight into our own political life, Yack makes a valuable contribution to contemporary discourse and debate. His work will excite interest among a wide range of social, moral, and political theorists. (shrink)

The problem of time involves an overlap between physics, philosophy, psychology and neuroscience. My talk will discuss the role of time in physics but also emphasize that physics may need to expand to address issues usually regarded as being in the other domains. I will first review the mainstream physics view of time, as it arises in Newtonian theory, relativity theory and quantum theory. I will then discuss the various arrows of time, the most fundamental of which is the passage (...) of time associated with consciousness. I will argue that this goes beyond both relativity theory and quantum theory, so that one needs some new physical paradigm to accommodate it. A new paradigm is required anyway to describe quantum gravity and this may elucidate the nature of both time and consciousness. (shrink)

Can we make progress exploring consciousness? Or is it forever beyond human reach? In science we never know the ultimate outcome of the journey. We can only take whatever steps our current knowledge affords. This paper explores today's evidence from the viewpoint of Global Workspace theory. First, we ask what kind of evidence has the most direct bearing on the question. The answer given here is ‘contrastive analysis’ -- a set of paired comparisons between similar conscious and unconscious processes. This (...) body of evidence is already quite large, and constrains any possible theory . Because it involves both conscious and unconscious events, it deals directly with our own subjective experience, as anyone can tell by trying the demonstrations in this article. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt is famous for her influential and innovative analysis of totalitarianism. However, her thinking on political systems and ideologies is far from limited to this theorization. Arendt also criti-cizes modern liberalism and its ideological framework. Indeed, Arendt’s thought reveals many of the political consequences of world-lessness, the loss of the world in contemporary times, particularly in terms of a sense of disempowerment and the advent of a technical vision of politics. This article looks at the political effects of world-lessness, (...) exploring the emerging opposition between liberal post-politics and conservative hyper-politics. This critique of Arendt’s thought can help us better understand the issues and questions raised by liberalism. (shrink)

A computable structure $\mathcal {A}$ is $\mathbf {x}$-computably categorical for some Turing degree $\mathbf {x}$ if for every computable structure $\mathcal {B}\cong\mathcal {A}$ there is an isomorphism $f:\mathcal {B}\to\mathcal {A}$ with $f\leq_{T}\mathbf {x}$. A degree $\mathbf {x}$ is a degree of categoricity if there is a computable structure $\mathcal {A}$ such that $\mathcal {A}$ is $\mathbf {x}$-computably categorical, and for all $\mathbf {y}$, if $\mathcal {A}$ is $\mathbf {y}$-computably categorical, then $\mathbf {x}\leq_{T}\mathbf {y}$. We construct a $\Sigma^{0}_{2}$ set whose degree (...) is not a degree of categoricity. We also demonstrate a large class of degrees that are not degrees of categoricity by showing that every degree of a set which is 2-generic relative to some perfect tree is not a degree of categoricity. Finally, we prove that every noncomputable hyperimmune-free degree is not a degree of categoricity. (shrink)

This paper explores a remarkable convergence of ideas and evidence, previously presented in separate places by its authors. That convergence has now become so persuasive that we believe we are working within substantially the same broad framework. Taylor's mathematical papers on neuronal systems involved in consciousness dovetail well with work by Newman and Baars on the thalamocortical system, suggesting a brain mechanism much like the global workspace architecture developed by Baars (see references below). This architecture is relational, in the sense (...) that it continuously mediates the interaction of input with memory. While our approaches overlap in a number of ways, each of us tends to focus on different areas of detail. What is most striking, and we believe significant, is the extent of consensus, which we believe to be consistent with other contemporary approaches by Weiskrantz, Gray, Crick and Koch, Edelman, Gazzaniga, Newell and colleagues, Posner, Baddeley, and a number of others. We suggest that cognitive neuroscience is moving toward a shared understanding of consciousness in the brain. (shrink)

This book contributes to current bioethical debates by providing a critical analysis of the philosophy of human death. Bernard N. Schumacher discusses contemporary philosophical perspectives on death, creating a dialogue between phenomenology, existentialism, and analytic philosophy. He also examines the ancient philosophies that have shaped our current ideas about death. His analysis focuses on three fundamental problems: (1) the definition of human death, (2) the knowledge of mortality and of human death as such, and (3) the question of whether (...) death is nothing to us or, on the contrary, whether it can be regarded as an absolute or relative evil. Drawing on scholarship published in four languages and from three distinct currents of thought, this volume represents a comprehensive and systematic study of the philosophy of death, one that provides a provocative basis for discussions of the bioethics of human mortality. (shrink)

In the case of an actual proper name such as ‘Aristotle’ opinions as to the Sinn may differ. It might, for instance, be taken to be the following: the pupil of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. Anybody who does this will attach another Sinn to the sentence ‘Aristotle was born in Stagira’ than will a man who takes as the Sinn of the name: the teacher of Alexander the Great who was born in Stagira. So long as the (...) Bedeutung remains the same, such variations of Sinn may be tolerated, although they are to be avoided.. (shrink)