Departing from the fact that László Moholy-Nagy’s Von Material zu Architektur (1929), had been an important source of inspiration for Alvar Aalto, this article examines the affinities between László Moholy-Nagy and Alvar Aalto’s intellectual positions. The article places emphasis on two particular ideas: how Aalto and Moholy-Nagy conceived the connection of biology with standardization and technology and its relationship to light and perception. Special attention is paid to the notions of “flexible standardisation” and rationalisation (...) in Aalto’s thought, as well as to his belief that nature and standardization should be conceived are closely interconnected. In regard to their shared intellectual development, the article sheds light on the first encounters of the two men including: their meeting at the second Congrès International de l’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) in 1929; the June 1931 Finish meeting of Aino Marsio-Aalto, Alvar Aalto, Moholy-Nagy and Ellen Frank; the June 1931 exchanges between Aalto and Moholy-Nagy during the inner circle CIAM meeting in Berlin; and the common stay of the Aaltos and Moholy-Nagy in London in 1933 are discussed. Particular emphasis is placed on Aalto’s “The Reconstruction of Europe is the Key Problem for the Architecture of Our Time”, in which he argued that standardization in architecture should draw upon biological models. (shrink)

In this paper, we introduce the variety of |$I$|-modal ririgs. We characterize the congruence lattice of its members by means of |$I$|-filters, and we provide a description of |$I$|-filter generation. We also provide an axiomatic presentation for the variety generated by chains of the subvariety of contractive |$I$|-modal ririgs. Finally, we introduce a Hilbert-style calculus for a logic with |$I$|-modal ririgs as an equivalent algebraic semantics and we prove that such a logic has the parametrized local deduction-detachment theorem.

ArgumentI propose that both Moholy-Nagy's suggestions that products of applied, particularly scientific, photography be employed as exemplars for art photography, and his practice of integrating such applied photographs with art photographs in his publications and exhibitions, laid the groundwork for an aestheticization of scientific photography within the twentieth-century artistic avant-garde. This photographic “New Vision,” formulated in the 1920s, also effected a kind of “scientization” of art photography. Rather than Positivist mechanism, however, I argue that the science at play (...) was “biocentrism,” the early twentieth-century worldview that can be described as Naturromantik updated by biologism. His key inspiration in this regard was one of the most important figures of biocentrism, the biologist and popular scientific writer Raoul Heinrich Francé, and his conception of Biotechnik [bionics], in which he proposed that all human technologies are based in natural technologies.The biological, pure and simple, taken as the guide.– Moholy-Nagy. (shrink)

In this paper we describe the basics of the measurement of human dignity at the individual level, as well as within social contexts such as teams and organizations. In accordance with the prevailing literature, we define human dignity as the unconditional belief in the intrinsic value of life. Based on this, we established a model that understands dignity as a latent construct by evaluating personal sense of worth as well as behaviors that either violate or honor such an intrinsic value (...) in social contexts. We developed and tested a 3-factor measure of dignity. The first factor assessed a personal sense of dignity (individual level), the second the extent to which leadership honors dignity and how work teams themselves express dignity to their members. The third factor assessed the extent to which the organizational culture honors and protects the dignity of its members. We examined the internal reliability, temporal stability, convergent, divergent, and predictive validity of our scales and presented a psychometrically sound assessment tool of intrinsic value for organizations, teams, and individuals. (shrink)

In Focus: Laszlo Moholy-Nagy reproduces almost fifty of the artist's photographs, with commentaries on each by katherine Ware, an Assistant Curator in the Musuem's Department of Photographs. Included as well is an edited transcript of a colloquim on Moholy-Nagy's work, with comments by Thomas Barrow, Jeannine Fiedler, Charles Hagen, Hattula Moholy-Nagy, Weston Naef, Leland Rice, and Katherine Ware. A chronology of significant events in the artist's life is also provided.

Three volumes from the Getty Museum's popular In Focus series are packaged together here, offering a handsome set of books on these important photographers: André Kertész, László Moholy-Nagy, and Man Ray. All born in Europe, each photographer journeyed to the United States and made important contributions to the medium. The volume on Kertész presents the Getty Museum's holdings of his work from his Budapest, Paris, and New York periods, while the images in the book on Bauhaus teacher (...) class='Hi'>Moholy-Nagy include his pioneering photomontages and camera-less "photograms." The Man Ray volume presents his inventive photographs taken in New York, Paris, and Los Angeles, including portraits and nudes, and his experimental work with Rayographs and solarization. Each volume in the In Focus series contains approximately fifty photographs, with commentaries, an introduction, a chronology, and a transcription of a colloquium on the photographer's life and work. (shrink)

Cet article entend examiner l’iconographie d’un bas-relief qui se trouve à Budapest et provient probablement de Naples. Il a été sculpté en lychnites de Paros vers la fin de l’époque hellénistique ou aux tout débuts de l’époque impériale. Il représente une scène unique : Éros se posant sur une roue en train de tourner. Cette scène n’est pas le cliché instantané d’un quelconque jeu d’équilibre, et il n’existe pas non plus de mythe auquel l’associer. Il faut donc l’interpréter de manière (...) métaphorique, pour lui-même. Cette image d’Éros peut évoquer différents types de champs sémantiques, dénués de véritables rapports les uns avec les autres, voire se contredisant. Si l’on passe en revue les multiples significations des motifs composant l’image dans la culture gréco-romaine à partir de sources iconographiques, archéologiques et textuelles, il existe cinq thématiques différentes qui peuvent être rapprochées de la scène du relief. De plus, cet Éros représenté dans une situation d’équilibre précaire est lié au Kairos, le « Moment opportun ». L’objet, œuvre unique d’un sculptor doctus anonyme, montre donc les traits essentiels du dieu. (shrink)

La courte réflexion qui suit est suscitée par un numéro spécial de cette revue indienne interdisciplinaire, publiée par une maison d’édition dont le nom dit bien la raison sociale : Women’s Initiative, à Thiruvananthapuram, au Kerala. À l’origine de la collection, un séminaire international qui eut lieu en novembre 2015, avec pour titre Decolonizing Theories of Affect, organisé par le centre d’études des femmes de l’Université du Kerala. Il convient de noter que le terme adopté par ce séminai...

L'oeuvre d'Alain Boureau, multiple et dense, se deploie sur les quarante dernieres annees en abordant de nombreux domaines de l'histoire du Moyen Age et du christianisme latin. Elle suit les peregrinations personnelles et professionnelles d'un chercheur a travers un monde peuple de silhouettes incertaines : figures de l'hagiographie, faux-semblants de l'Etat moderne, anges, demons, cadavres et somnambules, vagues individus scolastiques qui eux-memes parlent de creatures etranges. Autant de fantomes d'un passe persistant qu'il a suivis avec tenacite tout au long de (...) sa carriere, et qui nous embarquent a leur tour a travers l'histoire. Ce volume entend garder la trace vivante des deux journees qui furent organisees a Paris en mai 2015 autour de l'oeuvre d'Alain Boureau. Ce Liber amicorum d'un genre un peu particulier, production scolastique en quelque sorte, donne a voir les membres d'un studium, ce qu'etait le seminaire d'Alain Boureau : les amis, les collegues, les proches, celles et ceux qui l'ont accompagne au cours de ses annees passees a l'EHESS. Les textes rassembles rendent compte de trajectoires et de realisations, ils en montrent les apports scientifiques et les enjeux intellectuels. Ils racontent, aussi. Ainsi se manifeste la richesse d'une oeuvre singuliere, construite aux croisements de differentes pratiques des sciences sociales dans une demarche souvent collective, toujours originale et novatrice. (shrink)

Ce livre est le premier en hongrois à s'intéresser au rôle des femmes dans les arts et la société avant la Deuxième Guerre mondiale. Il reprend les communications présentées lors du colloque « Rôle et Création » organisé par le Petöfi Museum of Literature à Budapest en mars 1996. Ce colloque rassemblait pour la première fois des spécialistes d'histoire et d'histoire de l'art travaillant sur les femmes (27 auteurs, dont 6 hommes). Dans sa première partie, l'ouvrage explore le rôle des (...) .. (shrink)

Ce livre est le premier en hongrois à s'intéresser au rôle des femmes dans les arts et la société avant la Deuxième Guerre mondiale. Il reprend les communications présentées lors du colloque « Rôle et Création » organisé par le Petöfi Museum of Literature à Budapest en mars 1996. Ce colloque rassemblait pour la première fois des spécialistes d'histoire et d'histoire de l'art travaillant sur les femmes (27 auteurs, dont 6 hommes). Dans sa première partie, l'ouvrage explore le rôle des...

What is photography? Is it primarily a source of knowledge about the world or an art? Many have said the former, because it records the world automatically, others the latter because it embodies human subjectivity. Can it photography be both or must we choose? In _On Photography: A Philosophical Inquiry_ Diarmuid Costello examines these fascinating questions and more. In so doing he introduces some of the fundamental topics and debates about the nature of photography, with the help of photographic images (...) from Paul Strand, Lee Friedlander, James Welling, Jeff Wall, and Gerhard Richter, among others. Tracing the roots of thinking about photography from its discovery, through nineteenth-century debates about its standing as art, to twentieth-century Modernism and post-War cultural criticism, Costello identifies the emergence of a powerful "orthodox" view of photography. The features that make photographs compelling documents are precisely those that put pressure on its standing as art; though they provide a wealth of empirical information, they cannot have the unifying vision we look for in art. He draws on the reflections of photographers and theorists, including Paul Strand, Edward Weston, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Siegfried Kracauer, Andre Bazin and Stanley Cavell to illustrate this fundamental tension. The view comes to fruition in the work of Roger Scruton and Kendall Walton. Whether pure photography is capable of representing fictions, or always presents a transparent window onto the real world becomes the key question. Recently, the orthodox view has come under increasing pressure from a new generation of philosophers who reject the contrast between machine and hand made images that underwrites it. He concludes by examining photographic agency in a digital age. Written in a clear and engaging style, _On Photography: A Philosophical Inquiry_ is essential reading for anyone interested in the philosophy of photography, aesthetics, art, and visual studies. (shrink)

Often presented as a new form of materialism, theories of media have been repeatedly fascinated by the idea of dematerialization—more precisely, by a vision of the history of technical media as a process teleologically oriented toward a future characterized by the overcoming of the weight, the opaqueness, and the resistance of materiality and by the advent of new, pervasive forms of instantaneous communication. Light, be it natural or artificial, has often played a key role in this historical narrative. With its (...) diffused presence, limitless plasticity, ultimate speed, ambiguous status between infinitely small particles and electromagnetic waves, and crucial role in the transmission of images and signals, light has often raised the question of the materiality of media itself, pointing to the possibility of immediacy—of an immediate, instantaneous, immaterial transmission. In this article I analyze the presence of this idea of dematerialization as the end point of media history in the writings of László Moholy-Nagy and Marshall McLuhan, whose thinking about media is centered on the assumption that light is the most fundamental medium, one that leads the entire range of technical media to gradually dematerialize and merge within the environment or even dissolve into the atmosphere. (shrink)

One of Chicago's great cultural achievements, the Institute of Design was among the most important schools of photography in twentieth-century America. It began as an outpost of experimental Bauhaus education and was home to an astonishing group of influential teachers and students, including Lázló Moholy-Nagy, Harry Callahan, and Aaron Siskind. To date, however, the ID's enormous contributions to the art and practice of photography have gone largely unexplored. Taken by Design is the first publication to examine thoroughly this (...) remarkable institution and its lasting impact. With nearly 300 illustrations, including many never-before published photographs, Taken by Design examines the changing nature of photography over this critical period in America's midcentury. It starts by documenting the experimental nature of Moholy's Bauhaus approach and photography's new and enhanced role in training the "complete designer." Next it traces the formal and abstract camera experiments under Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind, which aimed at achieving a new kind of photographic subjectivity. Finally, it highlights the ID's focus on conscious references to the processes of the photographic medium itself. In addition to photographs by Moholy, Callahan, and Siskind, the book showcases works by Barbara Crane, Yasuhiro Ishimoto, Joseph Jachna, Kenneth Josephson, Gyorgy Kepes, Nathan Lerner, Ray K. Metzker, Richard Nickel, Arthur Siegel, Art Sinsabaugh, and many others. Major essays from experts in the field, biographies, a chronology, and reprints of critical essays are also included, making Taken by Design an essential work for anyone interested in the history of American photography. Contributors include: Keith Davis, Lloyd Engelbrecht, John Grimes, Nathan Lyons, Hattula Moholy-Nagy, Elizabeth Siegel, David Travis, Larry Viskochil, James N. Wood. (shrink)

This article proposes to reconceptualize the Hungarian photographer, artist and educator László Moholy-Nagy’s (1895–1946) inter-war call for a ‘new vision’ in order to grasp how artists presently experiment with photography and adjacent new technologies to explore the environmental, ecological and elemental dimension of media themselves. For Moholy-Nagy, photography represented a new way of seeing and experiencing the increasingly industrialized and automated world and a means of expanding our sensory perception. Drawing on recent scholarship of elemental media (...) theory, I adapt Moholy-Nagy’s interest in the materiality of photography and the atmospheric and medial dimensions of light itself to an environmentally attuned notion of ‘new visions’. Exemplified with discussion of recent works by Emilija Škarnulytė, Lesia Vasylchenko and Istvan Virag, I show how a number of contemporary artists likewise scrutinize photography’s (understood in an expanded way) material basis and atmospheric qualities to explore new forms of image-making, including CGI and synthetic aperture radar images, fitted to reflect the accelerated automation and ecological precarity that mark the early twenty-first century. (shrink)

What is photography? Is it primarily a source of knowledge about the world or an art? Many have said the former, because it records the world automatically, others the latter because it embodies human subjectivity. Can it photography be both or must we choose? In On Photography: A Philosophical Inquiry Diarmuid Costello examines these fascinating questions and more. In so doing he introduces some of the fundamental topics and debates about the nature of photography, with the help of photographic images (...) from Paul Strand, Lee Friedlander, James Welling, Jeff Wall, and Gerhard Richter, among others. Tracing the roots of thinking about photography from its discovery, through Nineteenth Century debates about its standing as art, to Twentieth Century Modernism and post-War cultural criticism, Costello identifies the emergence of a powerful "orthodox" view of photography. The features that make photographs compelling documents are precisely those that put pressure on its standing as art; though they provide a wealth of empirical information, they cannot have the unifying vision we look for in art. He draws on the reflections of photographers and theorists, including Paul Strand, Edward Weston, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Siegfried Kracauer, Andre Bazin and Stanley Cavell to illustrate this fundamental tension. The view comes to fruition in the work of Roger Scruton and Kendall Walton. Whether pure photography is capable of representing fictions, or always presents a transparent window onto the real world becomes the key question. Recently, the orthodox view has come under increasing pressure from a new generation of philosophers who reject the contrast between machine and hand made images that underwrites it. He concludes by examining photographic agency in a digital age. Written in a clear and engaging style, On Photography: A Philosophical Inquiry is essential reading for anyone interested in the philosophy of photography, aesthetics, art, and visual studies. (shrink)

"Eva Besnyö was not only an exceptionally gifted photographer but was also politically active during her lifetime: she acquired her photographic skills in the studio of József Pécsi in Budapest, became aware of the aesthetics of modern photography in the early 1930s in Berlin and became a respected master photographer in Amsterdam. Eva Besnyö's life and work were not only influenced by Modernism the arts but also by the dramatic political movements and events of 20th century Europe such as Fascism, (...) National Socialism, immigration and persecution. By the time the Hungarian-Jewish photographer arrived Berlin in 1930, she had made the two most momentous decisions of life: to make photography her profession and to leave Fascist Hungary forever. Modern art was a passion for her. She produced true masterpieces with her Rolleiflex during her expeditions around Berlin. When Besnyö immigrated to Amsterdam in 1932, she was one of the outstanding representatives of "New Photography" together with László Moholy-Nagy and Erwin Blumenfeld: her portraits, architectural views and landscapes have retained their intensity to this day. She worked as a photographer until the 1980s, and among her other roles as a chronicler of the "Dolle Mina" feminist movement. In the 1990s she won prestigious awards Germany and The Netherlands for her outstanding body of work."--Publisher's website. (shrink)

Marshall McLuhan understood television as a tactile medium. This understanding implied what Bruno Latour might call a ‘symmetrical’ conception of tactility. According to McLuhan, not only human actors are endowed with the sense of touch. In addition, TV, digital computers and other ‘electric media’ use light beams and similar scanning techniques for ceaselessly ‘caressing the contours’ of their surroundings. This notion of tactility was crucially shaped by the holistic aesthetics of the early Bauhaus. To get at the specific features of (...) the TV image, McLuhan relied on the writings of László Moholy-Nagy and Sigfried Giedion, in particular their use of photography for capturing and highlighting the ‘texture’ of surfaces. However, he hardly reflected the social and political factors that, in the age of electric media, contribute to the ‘symmetricization’ of touch. (shrink)

"The article presents an in-depth analysis of Benjamin’s use of the German term Medium, in order to show how his entire media theory may be interpreted as centered on the interaction between the historically changing realm of the technical and material Apparate, and what he calls in the artwork essay the »Medium of perception«: the spatially extended environment, the atmosphere, the milieu, the Umwelt in which sensory experience occurs. This notion of »Medium of perception« is then located within the long, (...) post-Aristotelian tradition of the media diaphana, whose traces can be found in the 1920s and 1930s in the writings of authors such as Béla Balázs, Fritz Heider, and László Moholy-Nagy. Der Artikel präsentiert eine eingehende Analyse von Benjamins Gebrauch des deutschen Begriffs »Medium«, um zu zeigen, dass seine gesamte Medientheorie fokussiert ist auf die Interaktion zwischen dem historisch veränderlichen Bereich der technischen und materiellen Apparate einerseits und dem, was er in dem Kunstwerkaufsatz das »Medium der Wahrnehmung« nennt: die räumlich ausgedehnte Umgebung, die Atmosphäre, das Milieu, die Umwelt, in der sinnliche Wahrnehmung erfolgt. Dieser Begriff des »Mediums der Wahrnehmung« wird dann innerhalb der langen, nacharistotelischen Tradition der media diaphana verortet, deren Spuren in den 1920er und 1930er Jahren in den Schriften von Autoren wie Béla Balázs, Fritz Heider und László Moholy-Nagy zu finden sind.". (shrink)

Throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, artists and scholars have pursued connections between modern art movements and scientific exploration and expertise. Particularly in discussions of Cubism and Futurism, artists and historians have employed the terms ‘fourth dimension’, ‘simultaneity’, and ‘space-time’ in their artistic theories. Select scholars have connected the use of these terms with Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity. This paper presents brief notes on this perceived intersection between Western science and art during the early to mid-twentieth century. It focuses (...) on the Bauhaus master Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, for whom ideas of “space-time” offered new and dynamic possibilities for art and perception. Rather than solely trying to interpret or represent Einstein’s theories in art, Moholy-Nagy considered the artistic implications of a theory that challenged the notion of absolute time and space. His writing on technology and the use of projected light to produce spatial modulation greatly impacted subsequent generations of artists. Moholy-Nagy also viewed greater collaboration within the disciplines of science and art as necessary. He argued that in order to best respond to the twentieth century a new generation of artists must be equipped with both technical and scientific expertise. (shrink)

Key writings by artists and theorists chart the shifting relationship between film and photography and how the rise of cinema forced photography to make a virtue of its stillness. The cinematic has been a springboard for the work of many influential artists, including Victor Burgin, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Stan Douglas, Nan Goldin, Douglas Gordon, Cindy Sherman, and Jeff Wall, among others. Much recent cinema, meanwhile, is rich with references to contemporary photography. Video art has taken a photographic turn into pensive slowness; (...) photography now has at its disposal the budgets and scale of cinema. This addition to Whitechapel's Documents of Contemporary Art series surveys the rich history of creative interaction between the moving and the still photograph, tracing their ever-changing relationship since early modernism. Still photography—cinema's ghostly parent—was eclipsed by the medium of film, but also set free. The rise of cinema obliged photography to make a virtue of its own stillness. Film, on the other hand, envied the simplicity, the lightness, and the precision of photography. Russian Constructivist filmmakers considered avant-garde cinema as a sequence of graphic "shots"; their Bauhaus, Constructivist and Futurist photographer contemporaries assembled photographs into a form of cinema on the page. In response to the rise of popular cinema, Henri Cartier-Bresson exalted the "decisive moment" of the still photograph. In the 1950s, reportage photography began to explore the possibility of snatching filmic fragments. Since the 1960s, conceptual and postconceptual artists have explored the narrative enigmas of the found film still. The Cinematic assembles key writings by artists and theorists from the 1920s on—including László Moholy-Nagy, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Victor Burgin, Jeff Wall, and Catherine David—documenting the photography-film dialogue that has enriched both media. (shrink)

Gustave Caillebotte not only depicted the 19th-century Paris of Haussmann, but also painted landscapes, still lifes, portraits and interiors. Today, he has taken his place as one of the most outstanding French Impressionists. His avant-garde approach to perspective and composition anticipated pictorial forms of 20th-century photography. The work of Caillebotte added a new dimension to French Impressionist painting. His radical and modern designs with a photographic quality inspired a new kind of perception and anticipated the dynamism and abstraction of photography (...) which was in the process of being developed. Selected photographs by André Kertész, Wols and László Moholy-Nagy, among others, demonstrate a strong affinity with the work of Caillebotte. (shrink)

From the earliest silver-chloride calotypes of inventor of photography William Henry Fox-Talbot to developments in digital photography and the tiny but surprisingly capable cameras that are a component of every smartphone today, photography has changed dramatically over the past 150 years. As technology has advanced, so too has photography as a living, dynamic art form, as evidenced by the innovative techniques and compositions of contemporary photographic artists. Drawing on a diverse collection of historical and contemporary photographs held by Bank Austria (...) and on display at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg, Focus on Photography provides a rich visual record of the history of photography. The photographs reproduced here date from the 1840s to the 1970s and include works by Julia Margaret Cameron, Lewis Carroll, André Kertész, Josef Sudek, Eadweard Muybridge, Alexander Rodchenko, Lászlo Moholy-Nagy, Man Ray, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Diane Arbus, and Arnulf Rainer, among others, and range from landscapes and portraits to cutting-edge modern compositions. Together, they offer readers a series of invaluable reference points for thinking about of the important trends and developments throughout the history of photography. A stunning, kaleidoscopic portfolio featuring nearly two centuries of photographic art with representation from among many major movements and figures, Focus on Photography will be welcomed by all with an interest in this powerful medium. (shrink)

Sous le titre quelque peu énigmatique de Mythologizing Performance, Richard P. Martin (R.M.) a réuni dix-sept essais publiés à différentes occasions. D’une manière ou d’une autre ces essais, plus originaux les uns que les autres, font tous suite à l’ouvrage fondamental paru en 1989, dans la même belle collection « Myth & Poetics » dirigée par Gregory Nagy à Cornell University Press, soit The Language of Heroes: Speech and Performance in the ‘Iliad’. Assurément, le recenseur ne dispose pas des...

Humans encounter and use animals in a stunning number of ways. The nature of these animals and the justifiability or unjustifiabilitly of human uses of them are the subject matter of this volume.Philosophers have long been intrigued by animal minds and vegetarianism, but only around the last quarter of the twentieth century did a significant philosophical literature begin to be developed on both the scientific study of animals and the ethics of human uses of animals. This literature had a primary (...) focus on discussion of animal psychology, the moral status of animals, the nature and significance of species, and a number of practical problems. This Oxford Handbook is designed to capture the nature of the questions as they stand today and to propose solutions to many of the major problems. Several chapters in this volume explore matters that have never previously been examined by philosophers.The authors of the thirty-five chapters come from a diverse set of philosophical interests in the History of Philosophy, the Philosophy of Mind, the Philosophy of Biology, the Philosophy of Cognitive Science, the Philosophy of Language, Ethical Theory, and Practical Ethics. They explore many theoretical issues about animal minds and an array of practical concerns about animal products, farm animals, hunting, circuses, zoos, the entertainment industry, safety-testing on animals, the status and moral significance of species, environmental ethics, the nature and significance of the minds of animals, and so on. They also investigate what the future may be expected to bring in the way of new scientific developments and new moral problems.This book of original essays is the most comprehensive single volume ever published on animal minds and the ethics of our use of animals. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Theology of Play and the Play of Theology in Thomas AquinasDavid L. Whidden IIISTUDENTS OF THOMAS AQUINAS have argued over many issues in the last 150 years or so; in fact, it is nearly impossible to get out of the very first question of the Summa Theologiae without entering into a century-long debate about the status of sacred doctrine as an Aristotelian science. We ponder whether theology meets (...) the requirements of a scientia and argue about just how to understand the task of theology in the face of Aquinas’s concern about theology as a scientia. Part of this ongoing argument is shaped by the philosophical and epistemological needs of theologians attempting to justify their positions in an academic world driven by the secular and scientific norms of the Enlightenment. Additionally, some interest in theology as a scientia is driven by the desire to provide a philosophically acceptable alternative to secular forms of reason—thus Leo’s XIII’s promotion of Thomistic philosophy.The interest in theology as a science was shaped by the historical work of Chenu in his influential articles on the topic and then by almost every other important Thomist in the last fifty years.1 Theology as a scientia is such a pressing topic that it would almost be fair to say that Thomists have developed their own scientia of theology as a scientia. [End Page 273]Beyond the modern and, perhaps, postmodern concerns driving this interest, there are good reasons to pay attention to Aquinas on the status of theology. If we focus on theology as a scientia, it is because Aquinas invites us to do so by taking up this question in one form or another at the beginning of his major theological syntheses. We are, after all, only following his lead and pondering with him just what we are thinking about, and how we are thinking, when we think about God.Within the Thomistic corpus there is, however, a minority report with regard to the status of theology. In his prologue to his commentary on Boethius’s Hebdomads, Aquinas looks at theology in a very different way, one that can supplement our understanding of sacred doctrine in its role as both an intellectual and an affective enterprise. In this commentary Aquinas journeys into a different territory and explores theology, not as a scientia, but as a kind of play—a play that evokes delight and pleasure in the one who pursues wisdom.My approach will be first to describe Aquinas’s theology with regard to regular play—the kind of recreational activities we all engage in, whether they are physical or verbal. He takes up the question of the morality of play in several places and in a way that will inform our understanding of what he means when he describes theology as play. With this understanding of regular play in place, we will then explore theology as play, based on the supposition that there is something analogical between regular play and theology as play. I will finish with some reflections on how this might contribute to our present understanding of theological work.IWhile he scatters comments about play across his corpus and mentions it in all of his theological syntheses, Aquinas gives sustained attention to play in two places: first, in his commentary on Aristotle’s Ethics, and second, in question 168 of the Secunda secundae (in the treatise on temperance) of the Summa theologiae. From the outset one will notice that one of [End Page 274] the difficulties in thinking about play with Aquinas is that the Latin word for play, ludo, is multivalent, difficult to translate, and so can sometimes mean recreational games, sometimes word play, and sometimes making fun of or deriding someone.2 Even the context does not always make it clear exactly how Aquinas is talking about play.In these two sustained treatments of play Aquinas is concerned with two main issues: first, the purpose of play; second, the morality of games and how they can be approached virtuously—with proper order. That is, he is concerned with the why and the how of games.Aquinas pursues these issues in his commentary... (shrink)

This book presents three of the works of Abdu'l-Bahá, son of the founder of the Bahá'i Faith, dealing with social and political issues.00In 'The Secret of Divine Civilization' (1875) Abdu'l-Bahá supports the administrative and broader social reforms of Mirzá Hosayn Khán, but looks mainly for organic reform through the efforts of Iranian intellectuals to waken and educate the masses. In this work, Abdu'l-Bahá gives virtuous and progressive Islamic clerics a leading role among these intellectuals, indeed most of his appeals are (...) directed specifically to them. 'A Traveller's Narrative' (1889/90) is an authoritative statement of the broad lines of Bahá'i social and political thinking. 'The Art of Governance' (1892/93) was written as Iran entered a pre-revolutionary phase, and ideas that we recognise today as the precursors of political Islam were spreading. It sets out the principles underlying the ideal relationship between religion and politics and between the government and the people.00In addition to presenting the first parallel text translations of these works, the Persian texts incorporate notes on variants in the early published sources. An introduction outlines the intellectual and political landscape from which Abdu'l-Bahá wrote, and in which his expected readers lived. (shrink)

Organ donation after the circulatory determination of death requires the permanent cessation of circulation while organ donation after the brain determination of death requires the irreversible cessation of brain functions. The unified brain-based determination of death connects the brain and circulatory death criteria for circulatory death determination in organ donation as follows: permanent cessation of systemic circulation causes permanent cessation of brain circulation which causes permanent cessation of brain perfusion which causes permanent cessation of brain function. The relevant circulation that (...) must cease in circulatory death determination is that to the brain. Eliminating brain circulation from the donor ECMO organ perfusion circuit in thoracoabdominal NRP protocols satisfies the unified brain-based determination of death but only if the complete cessation of brain circulation can be proved. Despite its medical and physiologic rationale, the unified brain-based determination of death remains inconsistent with the Uniform Determination of Death Act. (shrink)