Written by an emigrant French aristocrat turned farmer, the Letters from an American Farmer posed the famous question `What, then, is the American, this new man?', as the new nation took shape before the eyes of the world. Addressing some of American literature's most pressing concerns and issues of identity, the Letters celebrates personal determination, freedom from institutional oppression and the largeness and fertility of the land, and also raises darker and more symbolic elements, particularly slavery. This is the only (...) critical edition available of what is regarded as the first ever work of American literature. (shrink)

David Earl Over is a leading cognitive scientist and, with his firm grounding in philosophical logic, he also exerts a powerful influence on the psychology of reasoning. He is responsible for not only a large body of empirical work and accompanying theory, but for advancing a major shift in thinking about reasoning, commonly known as the 'new paradigm' in the psychology of human reasoning. Over's signature mix of philosophical logic and experimental psychology has inspired generations of researchers, psychologists, and philosophers (...) alike over more than a quarter of a century. The chapters in this volume, written by a leading group of contributors including a number who helped shape the psychology of reasoning as we know it today, each take their starting point from the key themes of Over's ground-breaking work. The essays in this collection explore a wide range of central topics--such as rationality, bias, dual processes, and dual systems--as well as contemporary psychological and philosophical theories of conditionals. It concludes with an engaging new chapter, authored by David Over himself, which details and analyses the new paradigm psychology of reasoning. This book is therefore important reading for scholars, researchers, and advanced students in psychology, philosophy, and the cognitive sciences, including those who are not familiar with Over's thought already. (shrink)

Imagine, if you can, St. Augustine convening a council in the year 430 and announcing, "Sorry, the eschaton has been cancelled. Moreover, the City of Man, with a little time and effort, will gradually transform itself into the City of God." Now imagine the dismay of certain French communists in 1976 when their party’s 22nd Congress dropped the goal of the dictatorship of the proletariat and proclaimed its dedication to a "democratic road to socialism." This imperfect analogy may allow us (...) to sense the passion that motivates Etienne Balibar’s attack on the PCF’s decision and his defense of an orthodox reading of Lenin on the dictatorship of the proletariat. (shrink)

In A Theory of Justice, John Rawls devised the method of reflective equilibrium in an attempt to broker consensus between ethical approaches emphasising individual moral judgements, and those emphasising moral principles, expanding this method in the later paper; “The Independence of Moral Theory”, to produce wide reflective equilibrium. In a number of essays compiled in Justice and Justification, Norman Daniels articulated a more comprehensive version of Rawls's methodology in response to something of a similar struggle within contemporary bioethics, between those (...) bioethical approaches emphasising individual moral judgements, those emphasising bioethical principles and those emphasising bioethical theory; the casuists, the principlists and the descriptivists respectively. In addition to the level of considered moral judgements and that of moral principles that comprise Rawls's reflective equilibrium, Daniels's model proposes a third level of interconnecting background theories in order to incorporate the three dominant strands of contemporary bioethics, to broker consensus between those whose considered moral judgements are in conflict, and to guard against the endpoint of the reflective equilibrium being overly determined by these judgements. However, it is unclear whether his method aids the objectives he set, or whether it in fact hinders them. (shrink)

The ability to reason independently from one's own goals or beliefs has long been recognised as a key characteristic of the development of formal operational thought. In this article we present the results of a study that examined the correlates of this ability in a group of 10-year-old children ( N = 61). Participants were presented with conditional and relational reasoning items, where the content was manipulated such that the conclusion to the arguments were either congruent, neutral, or incongruent with (...) beliefs, and either logically valid or logically invalid. Participants also received a measure of working memory capacity (the counting span task) and a measure of inhibitory control (the stop signal task). Indices of belief bias and logical reasoning on belief-based problems were predicted independently by both measures. In contrast logical reasoning on belief neutral problems was predicted by working memory alone. The findings suggest that executive functions play a key role in the development of children's ability to decontextualise their thinking. (shrink)

In the academic year 1920-1921 at the University of Freiburg, Martin Heidegger gave a series of extraordinary lectures on the phenomenological significance of the religious thought of St. Paul and St. Augustine. The publication of these lectures in 1995 settled a long disputed question, the decisive role played by Christian theology in the development of Heidegger’s philosophy. The lectures present a special challenge to readers of Heidegger and theology alike. Experimenting with language and drawing upon a wide range of now (...) obscure authors, Heidegger is finding his way to Being and Time through the labyrinth of his Catholic past and his increasing fascination with Protestant theology. A Companion to Heidegger's Phenomenology of Religious Life is written by an international team of Heidegger specialists. (shrink)

Stanovich & West distinguish between evolutionary rationality and normative rationality, and System 1 and System 2 mental processes. They hold that the main function of System 2 has to do with normative and not evolutionary rationality. We ask how System 2 could then be an adaptation, especially given S&W's own work on individual differences.

Dr Robert Chambers has recently argued that a loan on Quistclose terms does not actually create a trust, but rather the borrower receives the entire beneficial ownership of the funds subject only to a contractual right (enforceable by an injunction) on the part of the lender to prevent the loan being employed other than for the specified purpose. Chambers' approach, or at least something broadly similar, has received some obiter support from Potter LJ in Twinsectra Ltd v. Yardley. This article (...) maintains that Chambers' analysis leaves unresolved a number of significant issues. It does not explain Potter LJ's emphasis on the requirement to segregate the Quistclose funds from the borrower's general assets. Similarly, it seems not applicable outside the typical Quistclose scenario; for instance, where the funds are wrongfully transferred to a third party before the failure of the specified purpose, where the Quistclose arrangement arises outside a contractual setting, and where the dispute involves a third party holding a (pre‐existing) charge. Accordingly, it is suggested that it would be quite premature to conclude that more orthodox explanations of the Quistclose trust should now be jettisoned. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Introduction VIOLENCE AND INSTITUTION IN CHRISTIANITY Robert J. Daly, SJ. Boston College We need both to define our terms and to indicate whether we are using them in a normative or descriptive sense. Thus the question: "Is Christianity"—or, if you will—"Are the institutions of Christianity violent or nonviolent?" can be answered with either a Yes, or a No, or with anything in between, depending on the meaning we attach (...) to theterms "violence," "institution," and "Christianity" (Daly 1997, 321-43). When we speak normatively, or take Christianity and its institutions accordingto its best ideals, Christianity isessentially nonviolent. But when we speak descriptively, i.e., take Christianity according to what the institutions ofChristianity have actually done, and according to how those who call themselves Christian have actually acted, we can make the argument that Christianity is violent, ffanalogous distinctions can be made from within the other four traditions, this might offer a good starting point for discussion. Adapting to my purpose standard dictionary definitions, I understand violence to include in a broad way the justified or unjustified human exertion of internal or external power or force in order to achieve an injurious or abusive end, i.e., an end that is against the will, the good, or the interests of those who suffer it. (This includes all war and avoids, at least at the outset, arguments about whether a war is or can be a "just war.") I understand institution in its ordinary meaning of: any significant or established practice, relationship, structure, system, or organization in a society or culture. I understand Christianity also in its ordinary sense: the Roberti. Daly, SJ.5 religion which, derived from Jesus Christ, and based on the Bible, is professed by Eastern, Roman Catholic, and Protestant bodies. Now, to help set the background for our discussion, I will try to list and briefly describe, relative to this theme, some of the major aspects or "moments" of Christianity (or Christian History), and do this in an approximately diachronic or chronological order. Much of this will be descriptive, but I will not go out of my way to dissociate the descriptions from the effects of all normative claims. I.Violence and Institution in the History of Christianity [1] The biblical foundation of Christianity in the Hebrew Scriptures. [2]The pervasiveness of violence in the Bible. [3]The Christian Scriptures present themselves as a gospel of peace. [4]Jesus and nonviolence. [5]Early Christians and nonviolence. [6]The early Christians and the military. [7]The "Constantinian turn." [8]Caesaro-papism. [9]The relegation ofChristian pacifism to religious and monastic life. [10]The just war theory. [11]The medieval Christian taken-for-grantedness of violence. [12]The Crusades. [13]Medieval Christian peace movements [14]Christians and heretics. The Inquisition. See [11] above. [1 5]Christianity and the witches. See [U] above. [16]The Reformation. [17]The Radical Reformation and the Peace Churches. [18]St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre (August 1572). [19]The religious wars. [20]Absolutism. [21]Modernity. [22]The Quakers—Religious Society of Friends. [23]The Enlightenment and Modernity. [24]Christianity and world mission; Christianity and colonialism. [25]Slavery. [26]Christianity and the "war" against native cultures. [27]Christianity and the First World War. [28]The Second World War. [29]The Holocaust. 6 Violence and Institution in Christianity [30]Christianity and the modern peace movement. [31]Christians and the "seamless ethic of life." [32]Christianity and International Communism. [33]Liberation theology. [34]The liberation of women. [35]Christianity and the resurgence of tribal and nationalist violence. [36]Christianity and human rights. [1] The biblical foundation of Christianity in the Hebrew Scriptures. Christians and Jews have the same family origins. Since believing Christians no less than believing Jews accept and revere the Hebrew Scriptures as the inspired word of God, Christians and Jews are indeed, to paraphrase Pope John XXIII, siblings. There is, beyond this, fromJudaism to Christianity, a significant parent-child relationship. In recent years (but not early enough to have prevented the Holocaust), the main line churches ofChristianity have rejected the supersessionism (the doctrine that the Old Testament has been abrogated by the New Testament) that used to characterize Christian attitudes towards the Jews and that... (shrink)

Gaston Fessard employs Hegel’s dialectical logic to clarify how St. Ignatius’s _Spiritual Exercises_ envisage and prepare the decisions and choices between contrasting options or major turning points in spiritual life, in moments of what Ignatius would call _Election_.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:"A Unity of Order":Aquinas on the End of PoliticsWilliam McCormick S.J.Nonspecialists are often surprised to learn that Aquinas's thought on Church and state is a matter of obscurity. After all, Aquinas is the most famous medieval thinker in the West, and the question of Church and state is one of the best-known medieval political questions. And yet his thought on that polemical topic remains obscure. As John Watt puts (...) it: "There are too many ambiguities in his doctrine and too many unanswerable questions about what he did or did not hold."1Why is his view not better understood? Part of its obscurity is the relative infrequency with which he writes on politics.2 Another is the relative lack of interest in medieval political thought among political scientists and historians of political thought, an obscurity dating back to the Renaissance.3 Those who do study Aquinas's thought, moreover, have been mired in a controversy over two key texts: one from book II of his Scriptum or commentary on Peter Lombard's Sentences (d. 44, q. 2, a. 3, exp. text.), and the other in book II of De regno (On kingship), chapter 3 (no. 110). For brevity, I will use S for the Scriptum passage and R for the De regno passage.4 These two [End Page 1019] appear to contradict each other, and with respect to fundamental political questions. The debate over these two texts points to what most contributes to the obscurity of Aquinas's teaching on Church and state: confusion about his vision of politics in human life. As I will show in this paper, Aquinas transcends modern categories of the "secular" and "belief" in his treatment of politics. Aquinas valorizes the integrity of political activity: that autonomy is not just a concession to the modern condition. It is in fact when Aquinas is most theological that he is most open to that integrity. The integrity of the political speaks to the intrinsic goodness of that order: it mirrors God's unity in its complex and ordered diversity.In this paper I examine R and S to show their concordance. I argue that they are complementary in what they prescribe for relations between Church and state, and indeed grounded in the same account of the origins of political authority. Through this investigation we will uncover key principles of Aquinas's political thinking that show him to have a capacious vision of politics where humans achieve the actualization of their full beings as human.A key notion will be unitas ordinis, or unity of order: the form of human cooperation in political life. As we will see, that form strikes a middle path between the simple unity of the individual person and the orderless collectivity of a crowd. For Aquinas, that order is itself a common good of politics, and an intrinsic one at that, before any "extrinsic" common good achieved by the people through that order. Part of why this seemingly secular consideration is good is its theological importance: it mirrors God.Further, if Aquinas does not elaborate on political arrangements as much as one would like, nevertheless he offers sure guidance for the principles which ought to guide the prudent development of those arrangements in a particular time and place. Ultimately Aquinas shows that medieval political thought is in key respects not as alien and hostile to us as we might imagine, but in its own way equally concerned about the integrity of the political life.5The Teaching of SAquinas's teaching on Church and state in S is widely accepted as his mature "two powers" teaching. Aquinas's most famous work, the Summa theologiae [ST], would eventually replace Lombard's Sentences, but in Thomas's own thirteenth century it was that compendium of quotations and arguments [End Page 1020] from Christian sources compiled by the twelfth-century theologian-bishop Lombard that was the standard theology textbook in the Latin West—the Ur-text for theological teaching and scholarship.6The Sentences is perhaps the most important Western book no one has heard of. It was so influential not only because it collected a rich trove of... (shrink)

St. Augustine tells us that he worked on the De Trinitate on and off between 400 and 416. The aim of this work is basically twofold: to examine both how the absolute monotheism of Christianity can speak of three divine persons as well as to examine how humanity images this triune God. A rare treasure of theology and psychology, the DT has shaped most of the West’s talk about the Trinity. For how we read Scripture’s often oblique references to the (...) Trinity, how we understand the Trinitarian relations within God as well as what it means that the human person is created in this divine image, have been largely determined by Augustine. Given the importance and influence of the DT, it is curious that an English edition did not appear until the late nineteenth century when Philip Schaff included Arthur West Haddan’s translation in the 1887 Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers series. Since then only two more full English translations have appeared: Stephen McKenna’s in 1963 and Edmund Hill’s in 1991. (shrink)

Despite an enormous amount of literature on St Augustine of Hippo, this work provides the first examination of what he taught about the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Augustine expounded Christ's resurrection in his sermons, letters, Answer to Faustus the Manichean, the City of God, Expositions of the Psalms, and the Trinity. Saint Augustine on the Resurrection of Christ: Teaching, Rhetoric, and Reception explores what Augustine held about the centrality of Christ's resurrection from the dead, the agency of Christ's resurrection, and (...) the nature of his risen existence. Leading scholar, Gerald O'Collins, investigates the impact of his resurrection on others and his mediatory role as the risen High Priest. O'Collins then unpicks Augustine's rhetorical justification for the resurrection of Christ: evidence from creation, human history, and the desires of all human beings. This groundbreaking study illustrates the enduring significance of Augustine's teaching on and apologetic for the resurrection, and updates, augments, and corrects what Augustine held. (shrink)

There is something appropriate about Lyotard’s last printed work being his most intimate and revealing. Best known for The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Lyotard died in the April of 1998, leaving his Confession d’Augustin, as Dolorès Lyotard tells us in her “Forewarning,” “scarcely half” finished. Although his New York Times obituary claimed that “awaiting publication is his final book about the ‘Confessions’ of St. Augustine”, this work is less a book about the Confessions as it is an insight (...) into a twentieth century philosopher at the end of his life. Revealed here is a philosopher struggling with the perennial themes of Augustine’s own odyssey: confession as praise and contrition. Perhaps it was Lyotard’s own battle with leukemia and his growing sense of mortality that gave him such insights into Augustine’s early fallacy of thinking of God as encircling and filling all things throughout space that he is able to write, “Such is flesh visited, co-penetrated by your space-time, disturbed and confused with this blow, but steeped in infinity, impregnated and pregnant with your overabundant liquid: the waters of the heavens” ; and regarding the relationship between time and immunity, Lyotard understands that, “God only sees himself in God. Compared with the incomparable brightness, all is night, and speech is noise after the silence of lauds. In the sky of skies, the heaven of heavens, wisdom celebrates its glory. The intelligence with which the angelic creatures are infused is not co-eternal with their creator, but it is exempt from becoming”. Passages like these not only present Augustine in a new light, but invite readers to see themselves in this light as well. (shrink)

This article considers the theme of discernment in the tradition of Ignatian spirituality emanating from the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Society of Jesus. After a brief introduction which addresses the central problematic of bad influences that manifest themselves as good, the article turns to the life and work of two Jesuits, the 16th C English missionary to India, Thomas Stephens and the 20th C French historian and cultural critic, Michel de Certeau. Both kept (...) up a constant dialogue with local culture in which they sought authenticity in their response to ‘events’, whether a hideous massacre which shaped the pastoral commitment and writing of Stephens in the south of the Portuguese enclave of Goa or the 1968 student-led protests in Paris that so much affected the thinking of de Certeau. Very different in terms of personal background and contemporary experience, they both share in a tradition of discernment as a virtuous response to what both would understand as the ‘wisdom of the Spirit’ revealed in their personal interactions with ‘the other’. (shrink)

« La vie s’est transformée en une suite intemporelle de chocs », écrivait Adorno, dans ses Minima Moralia, pour décrire l’expérience du front lors de la Seconde Guerre mondiale. À partir de la notion de choc, qui ponctue l’ensemble de l’oeuvre d’Adorno, se dégage en fait une problématique plus générale d’une crise de l’expérience moderne. En mettant en évidence certains parallèles entre les thèmes de la philosophie d’Adorno et la théorie psychanalytique du choc traumatique, j’entends cerner avec plus de précision (...) la teneur de la crise dont il est question, ses conséquences, ainsi que les possibilités qu’entrevoit le philosophe pour y mettre un terme.Reflecting upon the experience of the battle line during the Second World War, Adorno claimed that “life has changed into a timeless succession of shocks”. From this concept of shock, which punctuates the whole of Adorno’s work, emerges the more general problem of the crisis of modern experience. By drawing parallels between aspects of Adorno’s philosophy and of the psychoanalytic theory of traumatic shock, I intend to define more precisely the content of this crisis, its consequences, and the possibilities for its resolution glimpsed by the philosopher. (shrink)

New trends in the economic systems management in the context of modern global challenges: collective monograph / scientific edited by M. Bezpartochnyi, in 2 Vol. // VUZF University of Finance, Business and Entrepreneurship. – Sofia: VUZF Publishing House “St. Grigorii Bogoslov”, 2020. – Vol. 1. – 309 p.

This paper is based on the concept of environmental political philosophy and from its perspective, it highlights the weaknesses and contradictions of contemporary, existing democracies. It aims to formulate an outline of the concept of environmental democracy, following the accounts of M. Bookchin, R. Morrison and H. Skolimowski, as well as international environmental law enshrined in United Nations documents and resolutions. It is based on the hypothesis that the preservation of a democratic political system in a situation of a collapsing (...) planetary system (the Anthropocene) requires improving the foundations of democratic theory with the insights of the Earth system sciences, particularly of political ecology and critical environmentalism. Through philosophical analysis, explanation and interpretation, this paper explores an environmental democracy that would, on the one hand, preserve the basic constitutional principles of current democratic constitutional regimes, and, on the other hand, reconcile them with the current state of understanding in the Earth sciences concerning the vulnerability of the planetary system. In a sense, J. Habermas’s understanding of human rights characterizes the concept of environmental democracy as a realistic utopia. The author concludes by drawing up the imperative of sustainability, which he sees as a guiding organizing principle of institutions and public policies for the climatic, demographic and economic regime of the Anthropocene. -------------------------- Received: 16/12/2022. Reviewed: 09/03/2023. Accepted: 30/03/2023. (shrink)