Over the past forty years, the health humanities, previously called the medical humanities, has emerged as one of the most exciting fields for interdisciplinary scholarship, advancing humanistic inquiry into bioethics, human rights, health care, and the uses of technology. It has also helped inspire medical practitioners to engage in deeper reflection about the human elements of their practice. In _Health Humanities Reader_, editors Therese Jones, Delese Wear, and Lester D. Friedman have assembled fifty-four leading scholars, educators, artists, and clinicians to (...) survey the rich body of work that has already emerged from the field—and to imagine fresh approaches to the health humanities in these original essays. The collection’s contributors reflect the extraordinary diversity of the field, including scholars from the disciplines of disability studies, history, literature, nursing, religion, narrative medicine, philosophy, bioethics, medicine, and the social sciences. With warmth and humor, critical acumen and ethical insight, _Health Humanities Reader_ truly humanizes the field of medicine. Its accessible language and broad scope offers something for everyone from the experienced medical professional to a reader interested in health and illness. (shrink)

As for Avicenna the human soul is a complete substance which does not inhere in the body nor is imprinted in it, asserting its survival after the death of the body seems easy. Yet, he needs the body to explain its individuation. The paper analyzes Avicenna's arguments in the De anima sections, V, 3 & 4, of the Shifā ' in order to explore the exact causal relation there is between the human soul and its body and confronts these arguments (...) with relevant passages in the Metaphysics. It argues that the causal relation between body and soul remains obscure and that, though Avicenna claims that there is a personal immortality and that the disembodied soul remains individuated, he does not provide a satisfactory ontological account for it. (shrink)

In this Second Edition of her best-selling ethics paperback text, renowned paralegal educator Therese Cannon clearly addresses pertinent case law, rules changes, and other developments involving this important area of the law. Organized in 10 concise chapters, Ethics and Professional Responsibility for Legal Assistants, Second Edition, covers key concepts, including unauthorized practice of law; confidentiality; conflicts of interest; fees; trends in legal malpractice; discovery abuse and other advocacy issues; pro bono work; and more. to help your students grasp the material, (...) the pedagogy features: chapter reviews discussion questions cases for further analysis helpful appendices, including the Model Guidelines, standards, and codes for ABA, NALA, and NFPA. Ideal for use in your next ethics class, this flexible paperback can also easily be used to add an ethics component to your Introduction to Law course, student internship program, or other courses in your curriculum. This superb book is also accompanied by a valuable Instructor's Guide, which provides answers to every discussion question in the text and the specific page numbers to find answers to all review questions. It also contains sample syllabi and references to additional source materials to help you adapt this book to your course. (shrink)

The eleventh-century philosopher and physician Abu Ali ibn Sina (d. A.D. 1037) was known in the West by his Latinized name Avicenna. An analysis of the sources and evolution of Avicenna's metaphysics, this book focuses on the answers he and his predecessors gave to two fundamental pairs of questions: what is the soul and how does it cause the body; and what is God and how does He cause the world? To respond to these challenges, Avicenna invented new concepts and (...) distinctions and reinterpreted old ones. The author concludes that Avicenna's innovations are a turning point in the history of metaphysics. Avicenna's metaphysics is the culmination of a period of synthesis during which philosophers fused together a Neoplatonic project (reconciling Plato with Aristotle) with a Peripatetic project (reconciling Aristotle with himself). Avicenna also stands at the beginning of a period during which philosophers sought to integrate the Arabic version of the earlier synthesis with Islamic doctrinal theology (kalam). Avicenna's metaphysics significantly influenced European scholastic thought, but it had an even more profound impact on Islamic intellectual history--the philosophical problems and opportunities associated with the Avicennian synthesis continued to be debated up to the end of the nineteenth century. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Wisdom Calls: The Moral Story of the Hebrew Bible by Paul LewisTherese LysaughtWisdom Calls: The Moral Story of the Hebrew Bible Paul Lewis MACON, GA: NURTURING FAITH, 2017. 99 pp. $18.00Paul Lewis invites us into a thought experiment: What can we discern about moral development from a "naive" reading of the Hebrew Scriptures as narrative, starting at Genesis and working our way through to Chronicles? If we remove (...) our presuppositions and eisegesis, ossified through centuries of familiarity, and read the stories at face value, what can we discern about character, virtue, and moral development via the human protagonists as well as God? In this book aimed at undergraduates and faith-seeking adults, Lewis provides an accessible introduction to both scripture and ethics, as well as a creative endeavor at the interface.Using an eclectic hermeneutical approach, Lewis offers a fresh reading of the Hebrew Scriptures. Fundamental to his thesis are two points. First, even though the Hebrew Scriptures are made up of a variety of texts in different genres written by different authors over almost a millennium, at some point, they were collated into the canonical, three-part sequence (Law, Prophets, and Writings—the Tanakh, TNK) by redactors who shaped the collection with a particular directionality. Pivotal to this process was the Babylonian Exile, which Lewis considers a crucial lens for reading a narrative arc across the collection. Second, he reminds Christian readers that the structure and sequence of texts in the Christian "Old Testament" differs from that of the Jewish TNK. As a result, "TNK and Old Testament, by the way they order the documents that make them up, thus tell different stories" (9).Lewis walks the reader through a series of ordered reflections on the three main sections of the Hebrew Scriptures. From Genesis to Chronicles, he charts a shift toward increasing moral complexity, finding in this narrative "a story of moral development" that begins with the need for and establishment of rules or laws (Torah—chap. 2), moves to the discernment of principles at the heart of the laws (Prophets—chap. 3), and culminates with a vision of wisdom captured in the multifaceted and sometimes conflicting texts in the Writings (chap. 4), complete with a controversial yet intriguing interpretation of Job. Wisdom, in his reading of these texts, is the practical skill needed to interpret the laws, rules, and principles of the tradition with the nuance necessary for the ever-changing sociocultural context of the "hard, cruel world" in which the Jews of ancient Palestine found themselves. [End Page 204]The book culminates with chapter 5, titled "Wisdom Calls," where he brings the multilayered Wisdom tradition (chochmah, in Hebrew) into conversation with the Aristotelian tradition of virtue and practical wisdom (phronesis), finding the analog for Aristotle's endpoint of eudaimonia in the Hebraic vision of shalom. Shalom is "the goal toward which wisdom strives and the good that it seeks to achieve" (p. 73). In a short appendix, he also brings chochmah into conversation with contemporary developments in the moral psychology of wisdom, drawing on the work of Darcia Narvaez and scholars at the Max Planck Institute, among others.Lewis's reading brings the Hebrew Scriptures alive, reminding us how wonderfully messy, interesting, and complicated its characters and stories are. By way of critique, one might ask: Can one read a scriptural text too naively? At points, this reader wished for a bit more historical-critical interpretation as a way of enhancing the conclusions being drawn. Integration of the material on the moral psychology of wisdom into the final chapter, rather than as an appendix, would also have been welcome. In the end, Wisdom Calls provides an engaging starting point for students and congregations.Therese LysaughtLoyola University ChicagoCopyright © 2018 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

Buck, Therese This article explores some of the factors that led to Vatican II's teaching that marriage is a covenant [foedus] in Gaudium et spes when, in the 1917 Code of Canon Law marriage is referred to as a contract [contractus]. As a background to the developments in Gaudium et spes, I will first outline the teaching on marriage in the 1917 Code and in Pius XI's 1930 encyclical Casti connubii. This will be followed by the inclusion of marriage as (...) covenant in Gaudium et spes and finally, this article will consider the significance of the concept of marriage covenant in continuity with tradition and developments since Vatican II in the theology of marriage. (shrink)

This paper investigates the origins of the Oral Theory as formulated by Milman Parry in Paris during the late 1920s by reexamining the scholarship on which it rests. Parry's Oral Theory compared the texts of oral performances in Yugoslavia with the Homeric texts in order to shed light on the presumed oral origins of the latter. His work integrated the work of the linguist and Indo-Europeanist Antoine Meillet, the linguist and scholar of oral poetics Matthias Murko, and the anthropologists Lucien (...) Lévy-Bruhl and Marcel Jousse. (shrink)

Este artículo pretende dilucidar la expresión utilizada por Tomás de Aquino “vuelta al fantasma”, con la intención de esclarecer lo que entiende por “vuelta”. Se argumenta que el marco conceptual subyacente al “giro intelectual” se encuentra en dos fuentes islámicas que fueron ampliamente influyentes en la psicología filosófica latina del siglo XIII, y que presentan conceptos técnicos específicos de la “vuelta” como un tipo de dependencia. Las obras son: Liber de Causis, de autor anónimo; y Liber de anima, del filósofo (...) persa Avicena. Así, este artículo busca recuperar este marco histórico subyacente, examinando cómo estas dos fuentes clave conciben la “vuelta” y cómo Tomás de Aquino incorpora estas fuentes en su concepción de la “vuelta al fantasma”. (shrink)

What does it mean to be an embodied thinker of abstract concepts? Does embodiment shape the character and quality of our understanding of universals such as 'dog' and 'beauty', and would a non-embodied mind understand such concepts differently? I examine these questions through the lens of Thomas Aquinas’s remarks on the differences between embodied (human) intellects and non-embodied (angelic) intellects. In Aquinas, I argue, the difference between embodied and non-embodied intellection of extramental realities is rooted in the fact that embodied (...) and non-embodied intellects grasp different kinds of universals by means of different kinds of intelligible species (intellectual likenesses), which elicit in them different “modes” of understanding. By spelling out what exactly it means to be an embodied knower, on Aquinas’s account, I argue, we can also shed new light on his mysterious claim that the embodied intellect “turns to phantasms”—the imagination’s likenesses of individuals—in its acts of understanding. (shrink)

“One of the great mysteries … is why some people stand up for what is right while others do not”. So ends Bioethics in Action. The greater mystery, called out by this book, is why many of th...

Self-knowledge is commonly thought to have become a topic of serious philosophical inquiry during the early modern period. Already in the thirteenth century, however, the medieval thinker Thomas Aquinas developed a sophisticated theory of self-knowledge, which Therese Scarpelli Cory presents as a project of reconciling the conflicting phenomena of self-opacity and privileged self-access. Situating Aquinas's theory within the mid-thirteenth-century debate and his own maturing thought on human nature, Cory investigates the kinds of self-knowledge that Aquinas describes and the questions they (...) raise. She shows that to a degree remarkable in a medieval thinker, self-knowledge turns out to be central to Aquinas's account of cognition and personhood, and that his theory provides tools for considering intentionality, reflexivity and selfhood. Her engaging account of this neglected aspect of medieval philosophy will interest readers studying Aquinas and the history of medieval philosophy more generally. (shrink)

_The Consulting Room and Beyond _is not a typical example of clinical writing in the field of psychoanalysis. Therese Ragen, pushing the boundaries of the genre, thoughtfully explores in a very immediate way the intersubjective nature of psychoanalysis, particularly looking at the role of the psychoanalyst’s subjectivity, both how it influences and is influenced by the psychoanalytic relationship. The profound ways in which analyst and patient affect each other are captured as the author moves from a moment with a patient, (...) to one of her own memories, to a dream, to a professional consultation and back to the session with the patient. Ragen’s detailed descriptions of her subjective experiences and clinical skill help to weave the anecdotes into a compelling narrative, worthy of the attention of theorists, academics and clinicians alike. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Avicenna's Theory of Science: Logic, Metaphysics, Epistemology by Riccardo StrobinoThérèse-Anne DruartRiccardo Strobino. Avicenna's Theory of Science: Logic, Metaphysics, Epistemology. Oakland: University of California Press, 2021. Pp. xvi + 428. Hardback, $95.00.Strobino's remarkable book does not simply present Avicenna's theory of science; it also highlights the importance of demonstration not only for logic but also for metaphysics and epistemology. Hence, Strobino's work is essential to appreciate and better understand (...) Avicenna's philosophy as a whole.Strobino grounds his research on Avicenna's theory of science in his Book of Demonstration in the Shifā', which focuses on Aristotle's Posterior Analytics. Taking into account the lack of any translation into English or any other main modern language as well as the lack of a full medieval Latin translation (only chapter 7 of book 3 exists in a medieval Latin version) of Avicenna's text, Strobino kindly provides in appendix C (357–71) a detailed "map" of this text, useful not only to readers who cannot handle Arabic but even to those who can, as the [End Page 326] text is so rich and complex. A simple but careful look at this map confirms what Strobino makes clear and insists upon: Avicenna greatly develops, enriches, completes, and even outgrows some of Aristotle's views. The Book of Demonstration is far more than a commentary on the Posterior Analytics; it is a complete reworking of it.Strobino shows that Avicenna grounds his theory of demonstration and science on two basic notions—conception (tasawwur) and assertion (tasdīq, which some other scholars translate as "assent")—and so gives a unified approach to his theory. Scientific conceptions require better understanding of definition and description. Avicenna builds definitions and descriptions on essentialism and, therefore, grounds them in metaphysics. As for scientific assertions, in contradistinction to nonscientific ones, they must be necessary and give the cause. Therefore, Avicenna places great importance on modality and develops modal syllogisms, whereas Aristotle focused on categorical syllogisms and neglected hypothetical and disjunctive syllogisms. Avicenna also elaborates a sophisticated account of modality and its metaphysical implications. Furthermore, he broadens and enriches the appreciation of causality and explanation. These developments, according to Strobino, lead Avicenna to set forth an intricate division and hierarchy of the sciences under metaphysics, which provides their ultimate principles and allows for a unified understanding of the sciences while respecting their particularities.According to Strobino, Avicenna is keen to develop a theory of science that gives a good account of science as it is practiced. Strobino carefully shows how Avicenna's theory better reflects this practice than does Aristotle's.Strobino does not simply highlight how much Avicenna distances himself from Aristotle and goes far beyond what the Posterior Analytics yields, but also shows how much Avicenna relies on points adumbrated by his predecessor al-Fārābī in his own Book of Demonstration.The way Strobino through his analysis of demonstration links Avicenna's understanding of logic, epistemology, and metaphysics underscores the coherence and unity of Avicenna's philosophy. Scholars were aware of the importance of demonstration for Avicenna in various philosophical fields, but until the release of this book, they seemed not to have fully grasped the centrality and essential role played by the Avicennian understanding and focus on demonstration.Of course, Strobino does not limit himself to an analysis of passages in the Book of Demonstration. He has an encompassing knowledge of Avicenna's texts and uses them well to flesh out and enrich what remains terse in the Book of Demonstration. He even takes into account the way one of his successors, al-Tūsī, reads him. He also shows an extensive and wide-ranging knowledge of Aristotle's texts and of Aristotelian scholarship, as well as an interest in the Greek commentators and Galen and their relevance for interpreting Avicenna.Avicenna's Theory of Science is not an easy book to read, as it is often very technical, particularly when dealing with purely logical points or issues, but reading it is rewarding if one does so slowly and meditatively. The author, in fact, illuminates difficult matters but does not waste words. From... (shrink)

This paper explores the important role of critical science, and in particular of post-colonial and decolonial theories, in understanding and shaping the ongoing advances in artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence is viewed as amongst the technological advances that will reshape modern societies and their relations. While the design and deployment of systems that continually adapt holds the promise of far-reaching positive change, they simultaneously pose significant risks, especially to already vulnerable peoples. Values and power are central to this discussion. Decolonial theories (...) use historical hindsight to explain patterns of power that shape our intellectual, political, economic, and social world. By embedding a decolonial critical approach within its technical practice, AI communities can develop foresight and tactics that can better align research and technology development with established ethical principles, centring vulnerable peoples who continue to bear the brunt of negative impacts of innovation and scientific progress. We highlight problematic applications that are instances of coloniality, and using a decolonial lens, submit three tactics that can form a decolonial field of artificial intelligence: creating a critical technical practice of AI, seeking reverse tutelage and reverse pedagogies, and the renewal of affective and political communities. The years ahead will usher in a wave of new scientific breakthroughs and technologies driven by AI research, making it incumbent upon AI communities to strengthen the social contract through ethical foresight and the multiplicity of intellectual perspectives available to us, ultimately supporting future technologies that enable greater well-being, with the goal of beneficence and justice for all. (shrink)

This volume explores how 'the market'continues to affect and redefine health professionals as moral beings and impact on the care they provide. By reflecting on the meaning of the market and the medical profession, this ground-breaking volume identifies a variety of ways to help preserve healthcare workers' integrity and ensure compassionate care.

"Der vorliegende Band hebt sich aus der wachsenden Zahl der Publikationen zur Spatantike und namentlich zur spatantiken Philosophie schon durch die Originalitat des behandelten Themas hervor, das eine Forschungsluecke schlieat. Die Beitrage von Wissenschaftlern verschiedener europaischer Nationen, die als Spezialisten fuer die Spatantike gelten konnen, bieten sowohl einzeln als auch in der Zusammenstellung einen echten Forschungsfortschritt." Plekos "a a valuable contribution. The volume also shows, as the product of predominantly young scholars, that the future of scholarship in the area of (...) ancient and Patristic philosophy is in good hands." Vigiliae Chritianae Inhalt: S. Follinger: Philosophische Theorien in Arnobius' apologetischer Argumentation J. Althoff: Zur Epikurrezeption bei Laktanz C. Riedweg: Philosophische Argumentationsstrukturen in Julians Contra Galilaeos D. J. O'Meara: Epicurus Neoplatonicus R. Thiel: Stoische Ethik im neuplatonischen System (Simplikios' Kommentar zu Epiktets Enchiridion) M. Erler: Hellenistische Philosophie im Platonismus der Spatantike M. Bettetini: Ai limiti della materia, tra neoplatonismo e cristianesimo K. Schlapbach: Ciceronisches und Neuplatonisches in den Proomien von Augustin, Contra Academicos 1 und 2 S. Harwardt: Die Gluecksfrage der Stoa in Augustins De beata vita C. Horn: Augustinus ueber Tugend, Moralitat und das hochste Gut T. Fuhrer: Zum wahrnehmungstheoretischen Hintergrund von Augustins Glaubensbegriff C. Oser-Grote: Virtus Romana und Virtus Christiana - ein romischer Wertbegriff bei Prudentius J. Opsomer / C. Steel: Proclus' Doctrine on the Origin of Evil K. Pollmann: Fiktionalitat in der Philosophie des Hellenismus und in der Spatantike U. Eigler: Strukturen und Voraussetzungen zum Erhalt von philosophischem Wissen in der Spatantike Stellenregister. (shrink)

« Charlotte, fais donc un gâteau! » avait murmuré nuitamment sa mère. Mais cela n’avait pu être, puisque madame de Corday d’Armont était partie en quatre-vingt-deux avec petite sœur, abandonnant Charlotte et Jacqueline-Éléonore. Robes noires et longs silences, l’hiver à Mesnil-Imbert avait paru trop long. Puis, le procès paternel perdu, toute la famille était revenue de Caen, ville maudite où une femme avait mangé cru le cœur du major Belzunce. Alors le manoir avait presque retrouvé ses sen...

This essay begins with a discussion of the primacy of the nuclear family in American drama. Our best playwrights have been strikingly preoccupied with domestic life, consistently portraying the family as a dream of solidarity and a nightmare of enmeshment. Daytime serial dramas are also stories about American domestic life, privileging a conservatively defined nuclear family and imaging conflicting hopes and fears around it. In serious as well as popular drama, illness is frequently the catalyst for familial destruction and restoration. (...) The middle portion of the essay is devoted to a definition and history of American soap opera, providing readers with a knowledge base for the final portion, a descriptive survey of the representation of medical and social issues on daytime drama. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Classical Islamic Philosophy: A Thematic Introduction by Luis Xavier López-FarjeatThérèse-Anne DruartLuis Xavier López-Farjeat. Classical Islamic Philosophy: A Thematic Introduction. New York: Routledge, 2022. Pp. 368. Paperback, $34.36.Interest in classical Islamic philosophy has grown and recently given rise to several presentations of the field: The Routledge Companion to Islamic Philosophy, edited by Richard C. Taylor and Luis Xavier López-Farjeat (New York: Routledge, 2016); Islamische Philosophie im Mittelalter. Ein Handbuch, (...) edited by Heidrun Eichner, Matthias Perkams, and Christian Schäfer (Darmstadt: WBG, 2017); and The Oxford Handbook of Islamic Philosophy, edited by Khaled El-Rouayheb and Sabine Schmidtke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). One may, therefore, wonder whether López-Farjeat should have provided another one. My answer is a resounding "yes." The Oxford Handbook presents specific texts, The Routledge [End Page 320] Companion gives brief overviews of specific themes, and Islamische Philosophie provides a sketch of the development of Arabic-Islamic philosophy as well as an introduction to some of the major philosophers' most significant themes or works. By contrast, López-Farjeat offers a detailed picture of lively philosophical debates between philosophers, theologians, and other intellectuals, showing how philosophy pervaded thinking in the Islamic lands and was itself enriched by serious thinking in theology and other fields.After presenting the Islamic context and the translation movement from Greek into Arabic, López-Farjeat focuses on six main themes: (1) Theologians and Philosophers on Islamic Revelation; (2) The Classification of the Sciences, Logic, and Language; (3) Philosophy and the Natural Science; (4) Metaphysics in the Islamic Philosophical Context; (5) Psychology and Theories of Cognition; and (6) Ethics and Political Philosophy. In each case, he focuses on various much-debated philosophical issues, reconstructing their evolution. He begins by highlighting the Greek background, then moves to show chronologically how and why those debates evolved. When needed, he indicates in which other section of the book the context for a particular philosopher's or theologian's specific position on a debated issue can be found. Finally, after each chapter, he gives an excellent list of further readings (mostly in English) for the reader who wishes to delve more deeply into the topic.López-Farjeat's approach highlights the liveliness and the nuances of the debates between intellectuals of various religious persuasions in a way rarely done before. Such a detailed attention to specific contexts also means that his book does not allow for a quick, easy read. It provides all the information that even someone unfamiliar with Islamic studies or ancient philosophy may need to appreciate the richness and depth of Islamic-Arabic thinking, but this amount of information requires close and slow reading. López-Farjeat's frequent references to scholarly disagreement about specific issues could make this book at times challenging for nonspecialists. This means, however, that even seasoned scholars might find something to learn from López-Farjeat's treatments of the aspects of Islamic thought they might be less familiar with. And while beginners will need some time to absorb the vast amount of information López-Farjeat provides, they will be grateful for the clear way he has organized it.Too often and for too long have historians of Islamic philosophy focused on thinkers who saw themselves as mainly Aristotelians and neglected what philosophers learned from other disciplines, in particular from theology, be it Islamic or Christian. This book shows how Christians in the Islamic world had already integrated some Greek philosophy into their thinking from an early time, when they first entered into dialogue with Islamic theologians. In turn, Islamic theologians integrated philosophical elements in their works. López-Farjeat's knowledge of Islamic theology and Eastern Christian theology allows him to show that this process of integration was not a one-way street. The Islamic milieu and its theological developments raised new questions and issues that philosophers under Greek influences had to take into account. One does not philosophize in a vacuum: new questions raised in a different cultural and linguistic environment led to a refinement and enrichment in the understanding of philosophical issues.As an example, let us consider chapter... (shrink)

I argue that Thomas Aquinas’s Identity Formula—the statement that the “intellect in act is the intelligible in act”—does not, as is usually supposed, express his position on how the intellect accesses extramental realities (responding to the so-called “mind-world gap”). Instead, it should be understood as a claim about the metaphysics of intellection, according to which the perfection requisite for performing the act of understanding is what could be called “intellectual-intelligible being.” In reinterpreting Aquinas’s Identity Formula, I explore the notion of (...) being “in act” as an intellect or intelligible (intelligibile actu, intellectus actu), his curious comments about an “order” or “genus” of intelligibles, and the relationship of understanding and being-understood. (shrink)

The thesis of this paper is that Thomas Aquinas offers an alternative model of abstraction (the Active Principle Model) that overcomes the standard objections to abstractionism and expands our view of what an abstractionist theory might look like. I contend that this alternative model of abstraction has been invisible in plain sight, in Aquinas’s references to the mind’s abstractive mechanism as an “intellectual light.” Such language is not metaphorical but rather technical, signaling that intellectual abstraction is to be modeled on (...) the activity of physical light as he understood it from theories proposed by Avicenna and Averroes. The Active Principle Model requires us to rethink Aquinas’s account of how we come to know essences—a process that turns out to be much more tentative and incremental than previously thought. (shrink)

Medieval accounts of diachronically unified consciousness have been overlooked by contemporary readers, because medieval thinkers have a unique and unexpected way of setting up the problem. This paper examines the approach to diachronically unified consciousness that is found in Augustine’s and Aquinas’s treatments of memory. For Augustine, although the mind is “distended” by time, it remains resilient, stretching across disparate moments to unify past, present, and future in a single personal present. Despite deceptively different phrasing, Aquinas develops a remarkably similar (...) view when, in order to accommodate Aristotle’s view of memory to Augustine’s, he insists that an implicit self-awareness “time-stamps” all intellectual acts. According to their shared approach, diachronic unified consciousness is the result of the curious way in which the mind is both drawn into and transcends the temporal succession of its own acts. (shrink)

Mankind's constant struggle with physical as well as mental weaknesses is omnipresent in ancient literature: misconduct, wrongdoing, failure and experiences of contingency are anthropological phenomena. Ancient ethics, epistemology, and natural philosophy have developed different theoretical approaches and guidelines on how to act and how to overcome all kinds of problems. Christian theology, on the other hand, has explained moral failure as a symptom of original sin, comparing decline and destruction to a burden from which mankind is relieved only at the (...) end. The contributions explore how ancient philosophical texts, both pagan and Christian, explain, conceptualize and integrate the myriad manifestations of human fallibility into the different philosophical schools. The focus is on anthropological, ontological and theological concepts that analyse and reflect human fallibility, as well as on the textual and linguistic representation of the phenomenon in ancient literature. Several contributions in the volume explore literary texts that discuss or illustrate the philosophical dimension of fallibility, such as satire's or tragedy's (often exaggerated) depiction of human weakness. (shrink)