Zur Zeit des Hl. Thomas von Aquin war es nicht leicht andere Religionen zu verstehen. Besonders auch deswegen nicht, weil die Verbreitung der Religion mit Macht und Krieg verbunden war. Aber gerade Thomas hat die sogenannte „Heidnische Lehre“ des Aristoteles in das Christentum eingeführt. In den Augen vieler orthodoxen Christen war dies ein unverzeihlicher Fehler. Mit dieser Lehre ist auch das Naturrecht (moralisch natürliche Gesetz) in die katholische Theologie eingeführt worden. Aber die Aristotelische Wiedereinführung (wenn nicht Revolution) in die christliche (...) Philosophie ist bis heute nicht ohne Hindernisse geschehen. Chesterton meint, dass Thomas korrigiert Platon mit Aristoteles, der die Dinge so genommen hat, wie er sie vorgefunden hat. Thomas nimmt die Dinge so, wie sie Gott geschaff en hat. Trotz allem ist es sehr wertvoll zu denken, dass die Wahrheit und der Glaube nicht im Widerspruch stehen können, und alles was die Wissenschaft ans Licht der Welt bringt, kann nicht im Widerspruch gegenüber dem Glauben sein. In den Werken des Hl. Thomas ist immer die Welt der positiven Schöpfung gegenwärtig. In dieser Arbeit möchten wir die Bedingungen der Zeit des Dialogs mit dem Islam und dem Judentum als Hintergrund für die Zusammenfassung der Summa contra Gentiles analysieren nach den Gedanken von M.-D. Chenu, O. H. Pesch, J. Weisheipl, K. G. Chesterton und anderen, die uns ein Bild über die nicht einfache aber trotzdem erreichbare Begegnung mit anderen Religionen zeigen und auch die Gefahr aufzeigen, die sich in einer nicht konsequenten Philosophie birgt. (shrink)

Benedikt Stattler was born on January 30, 1728 in Kötzting in Bavaria. In 1745 he entered the Society of Jesus, to which he remained loyal in spirit and in deed until his death, in spite of its suppression in 1773 by Clement XIV From 1760 until 1781 he taught philosophy and theology in Staubing, Solothurn, Innsbruck and Ingolstadt, where the famous J. M. Sailer, Bishop of Regensburg, was his pupil. He died in Munich in 1797. Stattler, then, lived and worked (...) at the very height of the so-called Aufklarungszeit, a fact which had the deepest repercussions on his whole career. He was a zealous man and truly apostolic. Perhaps, if anything he was over-zealous and was in fact carried much too far in his spirit of accommodation and flexibility when faced with the rationalist enemies of the Church and Christianity. He was filled with the idea that they should be met on their own ground in order to win them for the Church. And in order to do that he decided that he must break with tradition. Modern modes of thinking must be used if there is to be even the possibility of discussion with present-day thinkers, was his principle. Accordingly he brushed aside Aristotle, St. Thomas and all the Scholastics and made his own the philosophy of Christian Wolff. For him that was the only way of preserving the Christian and Catholic faith and of safeguarding Christian morality, the Christian way of life. Filled with that idea he wrote indefatigably. Many of his works, however, very early fell foul of the Roman authorities and were put on the Index of forbidden books. And in fact, as Dr. Scholz rightly points out over and over again, Stattler became a victim of the Aufklärung which he sought to Christianize and he himself became a rationalist and, in morals, and out-and-out subjectivist. (shrink)

The spatial dynamics of the optical emission from an array of 50 times 50 individual microcavity plasma devices is investigated. The array is operated in argon and argon-neon mixtures close to atmospheric pressure with an ac voltage. The optical emission is analysed with phase and space resolution. It has been found that the emission is not continuous over the entire ac period, but occurs once per half period. Each of the observed emission phases shows a self-pulsing of the discharge, with (...) several bursts of emission of fixed width and repetition rate. The number of emission bursts depends on applied voltage and frequency. Spatially resolved measurements prove that the emission bursts are formed by overlapping emission pulses from single discharge cavities. Intensity differences between positive and negative half-wave can be interpreted through spatially resolved measurements of single discharge cavities. (shrink)

Cet ouvrage est une critique sévère de la philosophie politique d'Aristote. Sans entrer dans les détails (il faut le lire pour se faire sa propre idée), ce qui est très significatif, c'est précisément qu'on a choisi de l'ignorer du côté des études aristotéliciennes: tel est le sort réservé aux critiques qui ne se contentent pas de soulever des problèmes d'interprétation en circuit fermé, et qui osent soulever des problèmes fondamentaux remettant en cause la pensée d'Aristote.

Evaluating the role and opportunities of state correction of the functions of religious organizations, it must be recognized that the state is not able to administratively change those trends and forms of activity that express the social purpose of religious associations and organizations.

In his celebrated_ Essay on Population_, Thomas Malthus raised the puzzle of why a benevolent Creator would permit material scarcity in human existence. Albino Barrera revisits this question using Thomas Aquinas’s metaphysics of participation and Sacred Scripture’s invitation to covenant fidelity and kingdom discipleship as analytical lenses with which to examine the seeming incongruity of scarcity in God’s providence. Barrera concludes that scarcity turns out to be a signal opportunity for economic agency to receive, internalize, and communicate God’s goodness and (...) righteousness within the human community. Written for theologians, philosophers, social scientists, and policymakers interested in the theological and philosophical foundations of economics, this study argues that precarious, subsistence living is not an immutable law of nature. Rather, such a chronic, dismal condition reflects personal and collective moral failure. In this carefully researched study, Barrera argues that scarcity serves as an occasion for God to provide for us through each other and that there are strong metaphysical and scriptural warrants for enacting progressive social policies for a better sharing of the goods of the earth. "This is a very big, very important work that takes up a large and urgent issue and follows it through with vigorous, meticulous study." —_Walter Brueggemann, Columbia Theological Seminary_ "Professor Barrera addresses an important theological question: 'Why would a benevolent God create a world of material scarcity with all the suffering accompanying this fact?' He goes beyond answering this question by showing that the sacrifices demanded to deal with the challenge of scarcity create virtues and situations that are deeply Christian. Barrera's well-written, jargon-free book will capture the attention of anyone interested in this topic." —_Wilfried Ver Eecke, Georgetown University_. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Other Side of Nothingness: Toward a Theology of Radical OpennessPaul O. IngramThe Other Side of Nothingness: Toward a Theology of Radical Openness. By Beverly J. Lanzetta. Albany: State University of New York, 2001. 182 pp.The central thesis of The Other Side of Nothingness is that apophatic mystical experience offers Christians a theology of humility sensitive to religious pluralism, which in turn is a means of overcoming the (...) "pains of spiritual oppression" caused by religious intolerance and doctrinal imperialism. The book's argument is that "mystical consciousness" overturns the dogmatic truth claims of "conventional theology" by preparing the self for the experience of radical openness to "divinity," however "divinity" is theologically named in the "conventional theology" of humanity's religious traditions. The book's author, Beverly J.Lanzetta, draws on a variety of Christian mystical texts to support her claims: Meister Eckhart, Gregory of Nyssa, Pseudo-Dionysius, Teresa of Avila, Bonaventure, and the anonymous author of the Cloud of Unknowing. She also makes comparative references to Hindu, Buddhist, and Sufi traditions, along with contemporary writers such as Abraham Joshua Heschel, Mahatma Gandhi, Thomas Merton, Howard Thurman, and Dorothy Day to illustrate her claim that apophatic mystical experience—the experience of the utter [End Page 306] annihilation of the self—draws the mystic to a place beyond a tradition's historical and normative self-understanding to new dimensions of the Sacred and, sometimes, to new "revelatory paradigms." The revelatory paradigm Lanzetta believes she has discovered in the evidence she cites is that "the divine nature itself is pluralistic, non-absolute, and is continually the source of new religious traditions," by which she means something similar to what John Cobb calls "creative transformation." For her, this is the antidote to religious imperialism and the exclusivism of conventional theology, meaning "non-mystical theology," which she argues is the source of religions fanaticism in all religions traditions, particularly in Christianity.There is much to admire about Lanzetta's take on mysticism and its importance for undercutting theological absolutism of the sort one encounters in the Christian Right or in certain radical movements within contemporary Islam. Her analyses of the mystical texts she cites to support her arguments are carefully crafted and accurately express the theologies of the Christian mystics who are the foci of her own theological reflection. Her writing style is elegant and clearly expresses the passion with which she embraces her views. I especially liked her focus on kenotic Christology in her description of the "Apophatic Christ" who "bears the generosity of speech and teaches an ethic of radical openness," which Lanzetta claims is also an openness to truths found outside Christian tradition. "All are called not to his name, his ministry, or even to his person, but are called to sustain the tension between the saying and the unsaying, and between the living and the dying, in which God's nonviolent heart yearns for unconcealment" (p. 90). Indeed, this is the heart of Christian mystical experience of Christ, particularly attested to in the writings of Maguerite Porete and Hildegard von Bingen. Yet kenotic Christologies are also found in nonmystical theology, which Lanzetta tends to lump together pejoratively under her category "conventional theology." Consequently, as much as I admire this book and agree with its essential conclusions—but for different reasons—my trouble with this work originates in Lanzetta's assertion of a hard dualism between mystical theology and "ordinary theology," a dualism that undermines her arguments and conclusions. My concern is threefold.First, mystical experience is primarily a matter of consciousness in the sense that something previously unknown and unexperienced is suddenly "there." This unanticipated presence is as real to the mystic's perspective as everyday experiences are, which is why mystics so often speak of being empowered to "see" or "touch" or "taste" what has been up to now imperceptible. If the experience is apophatic in structure—a usually brief moment of awareness in which all subject-object duality is overcome so that the mystic isn't aware of a self separated from what the self experiences or even that there is an "experience happening"—the mystic is neither thinking, feeling, or interpreting. That is... (shrink)

All our ancient sources agree on the basic sequence of events after the battle of Pydna on 22 June 168: the consul L. Aemilius Paullus advanced to take possession of the whole of Macedonia and finally managed to capture Perseus, the defeated king, who had taken refuge on Samothrace. Once in complete control of the situation he sent his troops into winter quarters and himself set off on a trip that was to take him round the most famous sights of (...) Greece. Only when he heard of the arrival of the customary senatorial commission did he return to Macedon, settle its affairs, hold magnificent games, and finally return to Italy. Thus far there is little cause for concern, but what most of these events lack is a properly established date. Livy, our only ancient source venturing to date them, places everything up to sending the troops into winter quarters in the same consular year as Pydna and assigns the remaining events to autumn and winter 167 . He thereby creates an awkward gap of somewhat more than a year between the battle of Pydna and the subsequent actions of Aemilius Paullus. A majority of scholars either seem to have ignored this point altogether or silently corrected Livy's chronology by simply shifting the events in question back to 168/ . Others, ranging from Miiller and Weissenborn to Hammond and Walbank in their magisterial History of Macedonia, have kept Livy's date,4 while only one scholar has actually attempted to argue for a correction of Livy. (shrink)

At the end of the Middle Ages, the friar Dominican Peter Schwarz wrote The shield of the Thomists. It is a handly book of philosophy in which he presents the main thesis of thomist school, between them is the theory of active intellect.

The relevance of the research topic is that various approaches are analyzed on the essence of globalization, which is represented as an objective, qualitatively new process of internationalization and integration of all fields of activity of the modern civilizational structure. Analysis of the literature. The works of A. Appadarui, Z. Bauman, U. Beck, Z. Bzezhinski, F. Braudel, I. Wallerstein, E. Giddens, P. Drucker, M. Castells, T. Levitt, I. Tirikyan, K. Waite, F. Fernandez-Armestro, S. Huntington. In the post-Soviet space, the ideas (...) of globalization were developed in the works of V. Inozemtsev, V. Stepin, A. Chumakov, P. Vodopyanova, V. Voronkova, O. Punchenko, A. Zelenkova, C. Kirvel, A. Lazarevich, V. Nikitenko, A. Sosnin, A.Utkin and many others. The aim of the article is to concretize the concept of “globalization”, and also through the analysis of tectonic shifts in the world sociological system, to represent the main socio-political, cultural and civilizational dimensions of this concept. Research objectives - in the context of the stated goal, the essence of the social dynamics of a globalizing world is revealed. Research Methodology. The methodology is based on an integrated approach, due to its interdisciplinary nature. The result of the study. Sociodynamics is revealed as the process of its deployment in time and space in conjunction with the social organization of social organization, as well as with social changes and upheavals affecting the progressive course of its development. The contradictory nature of globalization has been proved, its brilliance and poverty are revealed with specific examples. The whole range of problems of globalization as a multidimensional phenomenon is actualized. The reasons that prevented the implementation of the concept of Western ideologists about building a unipolar world and the creation of a single governing body under the auspices of the United States are revealed. Sociodynamics of the global world, in the context of the goal set, is reflected through the prism of the financial and economic dimension; through the formation of frontiers, fraught with the charge of aggravation, instability, risks, dynamic chaos. Conclusions. The mechanisms of regulation of the emerging chaos in social relations - threats, sanctions, crisis fluctuations, the use of “soft power”, conflicts, etc. are substantiated. Such dimensions of sociodynamics as environmental and demographic are described, the negativity of their development at the present stage is revealed. (shrink)

Many of the most serious crimes that fall within the justificatory scope of the harm principle do so constitutively. They do so in the sense that the harm that the crime is designed to prevent is a...

OBJECTIVE: This article describes a method for investigating attitudes towards prioritisation in medicine. SETTING: University of Kuopio, Finland. DESIGN: The method consisted of a set of 24 paired scenarios, which were imaginary patient cases, each containing three different ethical indicators randomly selected from a list of indicators (for example, child, rich patient, severe disease etc.). The scenarios were grouped into 12 random pairs and the procedure was repeated four times, resulting in 12 scenario pairs arranged randomly in five different sets. (...) SURVEY: This method was tested with four groups of subjects (n = 8, n = 47, n = 104 and n = 36). RESULTS: Children and patients with a severe disease were prioritised in all groups. The aged, patients with a mild disease and patients with a self-acquired disease were negatively prioritised in all groups. Poor or rich patients were prioritised in some groups but negatively prioritised in others. CONCLUSIONS: The validity and reliability of this method are good and it is suitable for investigating attitudes towards medical prioritisation. (shrink)