In November 2010, the Library of the Peace Palace in The Hague acquired a copy of Hugo Grotius’s seminal study on the law of war, De iure belli ac pacis (Paris: Nicolas Buon, 1625). The purchase represents the very rare first state (issue or printing) of the first edition, item no. 565-I in the well-known bibliography of Grotius’s works by Jacob Ter Meulen and P.J.J. Diermanse. This article is an adapted version of a speech held in the Peace Palace on (...) 21 February 2011, when the copy of De iure belli ac pacis was presented to the public. After a short survey of the genesis, printing history and early reception, the article goes into the differences between the three states of the first edition and their significance for the interpretation of Grotius’s work. A provisional checklist of copies in public libraries is added in an appendix. (shrink)

The 7725 letters of Hugo Grotius's correspondence of the years 1594 to 1645 reflect the highlights and drawbacks of an eventful career. Some important gradual developments and abiding features in the letters will be pointed out. In this way Grotius's political and scholarly activities can be analysed from the perspective of the correspondence.

The 7725 letters of Hugo Grotius's correspondence of the years 1594 to 1645 reflect the highlights and drawbacks of an eventful career. Some important gradual developments and abiding features in the letters will be pointed out. In this way Grotius's political and scholarly activities can be analysed from the perspective of the correspondence.

This article goes into the intentions and motives behind De Veritate (1627), famous apologetic work by the Dutch humanist and jurisconsult Hugo Grotius (1583-1645). De Veritate will be compared with two other seminal works written by Grotius, De iure belli ac pacis (1625) and the Annotationes in Novum Testamentum (1641-1650). The focus will be on one particular aspect that comes to the fore in all three works: the way Grotius reduced the Christian faith to a minimal religion by singling out (...) the essential tenets this faith had in common with other religions. The core of Grotius’s argumentation consists in the idea that believers and, in particular, civil authorities have to distinguish between a few essential religious tenets that could be made rationally acceptable, and a set of supernatural dogmas, derived from divine revelation, that did not pass a certain, albeit very high degree of probability. As far as the second category was concerned, civil tolerance was called for. As becomes clear from contemporary correspondences, Grotius did not develop these rather controversial ideas in an intellectual vacuum. During his exile in Paris, he fostered contacts with members of the circle that formed around the French monk Marin Mersenne (1588-1648). This circle functioned as a kind of hothouse for the development of a minimal Christian creed. Members of this group saw promotion of a minimal creed as a solution to current religious controversies and the ensuing political turmoil and (civil) war, which were abhorred for their detrimental effects on the advancement of learning in the first place. On the other hand, it is also apparent that overt adherence to such an ideal was considered to be dangerous, because it would at least evoke the embarrassing and even repressive attention of the authorities in Church and government. An additional problem was that by defending such a religious stance, members of Mersenne’s circle laid themselves open to accusations of endorsing ‘rational beliefs’ like Socinianism, generally considered to be the worst heresy among all Christian denominations. (shrink)

The 7725 letters of Hugo Grotius's correspondence of the years 1594 to 1645 reflect the highlights and drawbacks of an eventful career. Some important gradual developments and abiding features in the letters will be pointed out. In this way Grotius's political and scholarly activities can be analysed from the perspective of the correspondence.

The 7725 letters of Hugo Grotius's correspondence of the years 1594 to 1645 reflect the highlights and drawbacks of an eventful career. Some important gradual developments and abiding features in the letters will be pointed out. In this way Grotius's political and scholarly activities can be analysed from the perspective of the correspondence.

The 7725 letters of Hugo Grotius's correspondence of the years 1594 to 1645 reflect the highlights and drawbacks of an eventful career. Some important gradual developments and abiding features in the letters will be pointed out. In this way Grotius's political and scholarly activities can be analysed from the perspective of the correspondence.

_ Source: _Volume 36, Issue 1, pp 40 - 61 In this review article of Henk Nellen, _Hugo Grotius. A lifelong struggle for Peace in Church and State, 1583–1645_ the story of Grotius’s life is outlined and issues of interpretation are discussed. It is argued that this biography supports the argument that Grotius towards the end of his life was close to becoming a Catholic. It seems plausible that Grotius’s principled refusal to request permission to return to the (...) Republic may have been connected to his disappointment about his own less principled behaviour in 1618. (shrink)

Three experiments examined whether the mere priming of potential action effects enhances people’s feeling of causing these effects when they occur. In a computer task, participants and the computer independently moved a rapidly moving square on a display. Participants had to press a key, thereby stopping the movement. However, the participant or the computer could have caused the square to stop on the observed position, and accordingly, the stopped position of the square could be conceived of as the potential effect (...) resulting from participants’ action of pressing the stop key. The location of this position was primed or not just before participants had to stop the movement. Results showed that priming of the position enhanced experienced authorship of stopping the square. Additional experimentation demonstrated that this priming of agency was not mediated by the goal or intention to produce the effect. (shrink)

The first aim of the paper is to show that under certain conditions generative syntax can be made suitable for Montague semantics, based on his type logic. One of the conditions is to make branching in the so-called X-bar syntax strictly binary, This makes it possible to provide an adequate semantics for Noun Phrases by taking them as referring to sets of collections of sets of entities ( type <ett,t>) rather than to sets of sets of entities (ett).

An Interview with Klaus Nellen by Jakub Homolka about the rescued manuscripts of Jan Patočka and the establishment of the Patočka archive at the Institute of Human Sciences in Vienna.

Producers, traders, and consumers oforganic food regularly use the concept of thenatural (naturalness) to characterize organicagriculture and or organic food, in contrast tothe unnaturalness of conventional agriculture.Critics sometimes argue that such use lacks anyrational (scientific) basis and only refers tosentiment. In our project, we made an attemptto clarify the content and the use of theconcepts of nature and naturalness in organicagriculture, to relate this conception todiscussions within bioethical literature, andto draw the implications for agriculturalpractice and policy.Qualitative interviews were executed with (...) arange of people in the field of organicagriculture and with consumers of organicproducts, on the basis of a list of statementsabout the meaning of the concept of naturalnessformulated by the authors. Based on the resultsof the interviews, we distinguished 3 aspectsof the concept of naturalness: natural as theorganic (life processes), natural as theecological, and natural as referring to thecharacteristic nature of an entity. We relatedthese conceptual aspects to three mainapproaches within the field of organicagriculture: the no chemicals approach, theagro-ecological approach, and the integrityapproach. It became clear that these approachescan also be recognized in the change ofattitude of farmers as they convert fromconventional to organic agriculture, and in theattitudes of consumers of organic foodproducts. (shrink)

Global society is facing formidable current and future problems that threaten the prospects for justice and peace, sustainability, and the well-being of humanity both now and in the future. Many of these problems are related to science and technology and to how they function in the world. If the social responsibility of scientists and engineers implies a duty to safeguard or promote a peaceful, just and sustainable world society, then science and engineering education should empower students to fulfil this responsibility. (...) The contributions to this special issue present European examples of teaching social responsibility to students in science and engineering, and provide examples and discussion of how this teaching can be promoted, and of obstacles that are encountered. Speaking generally, education aimed at preparing future scientists and engineers for social responsibility is presently very limited and seemingly insufficient in view of the enormous ethical and social problems that are associated with current science and technology. Although many social, political and professional organisations have expressed the need for the provision of teaching for social responsibility, important and persistent barriers stand in the way of its sustained development. What is needed are both bottom-up teaching initiatives from individuals or groups of academic teachers, and top-down support to secure appropriate embedding in the university. Often the latter is lacking or inadequate. Educational policies at the national or international level, such as the Bologna agreements in Europe, can be an opportunity for introducing teaching for social responsibility. However, frequently no or only limited positive effect of such policies can be discerned. Existing accreditation and evaluation mechanisms do not guarantee appropriate attention to teaching for social responsibility, because, in their current form, they provide no guarantee that the curricula pay sufficient attention to teaching goals that are desirable for society as a whole. (shrink)

Verslag van de ervaringen van een tweetal journalisten die vanuit een pseudo-consultant bureau met diverse personen zaken deden.

In this review essay, I discuss how Lambert Zuidervaart relates to the philosophy of Herman Dooyeweerd in two of his books. He himself calls his work in this regard a critical retrieval. To answer the question as to how far this characterization is justified, we will look at Zuidervaart’s discussion of the religious antithesis and the transcendental critique, his idea of macrostructures and societal evil, and his view of truth and knowledge.

The rise of the mechanistic worldview in the seventeenth century had a major impact on views of biological generation. Many seventeenth century naturalists rejected the old animist thesis. However, the alternative view of gradual mechanistic formation in embryology didn’t convince either. How to articulate the peculiarity of life? Researchers in the seventeenth century proposed both “animist” and mechanistic theories of life. In the eighteenth century again a controversy in biology arose regarding the explanation of generation. Some adhered to the view (...) that life is a physical property of matter (e.g. Buffon), others saw living entities as the result of the development of pre-existing germs (e.g. Bonnet). Naturalists, lacked a convincing account that could guide their research. In interaction with leading naturalists of his time Immanuel Kant articulated an approach to explaining generation. Kant’s account, delineated in his Kritik der Urteilskraft (Critique of the power of judgment) (1790), is a combination of Newtonian non-reductionist mechanism in explanation, and a concept of natural end comparable to Stahl’s formal conception of organic bodies. It consists of two claims: a) in biology only mechanical explanation is explanatory, and b) living entities contain some original organisation, which is mechanically unexplainable. In the nineteenth century this approach influenced naturalists as Müller, Virchow, and Von Baer, in their physiological research. Dissatisfied with a sheer mechanistic or, on the other hand, a sheer teleological approach, they appreciated the Kantian account of mechanical explanation of natural ends. In Germany, in the second halve of the nineteenth century, Ernst Haeckel reopened the debate about abiogenesis, which still continuous. (shrink)

This paper discusses two possible formal approaches to the semantic/pragmatic characterisation of a subclass of the modal particles. It may well be that the approaches can be applied to other particles or that they can be applied to certain intonational patterns (e.g. contrastive stress), to morphemes (past tense, agreement) or to words (pronouns), constructions (some uses of definite descriptions, clefts), but I will not try to to show that here. The first approach is based on the optimality theoretic reconstruction of (...) Blutner & J¨ ager (2000) of the theory of presupposition that has become fairly standard, the Heim (1983) and van der Sandt (1992) view of presuppositions as anaphora (see Zeevat (1992) for an introduction and comparison). The first half of the paper critically reviews my earlier views on the treatment of particles in this setting, the second part introduces a novel view, again based on optimality theory, which takes as a starting point the marking constraints that are a necessary ingredient of my earlier treatment. (shrink)

This paper approaches the scientific realism question from a naturalistic perspective. On the basis of a historical case study of the work of James Clerk Maxwell and Ludwig Boltzmann on the kinetic theory of gases, it shows that scientists’ views about the epistemological status of theories and models typically interact with their scientific results. Subsequently, the implications of this result for the current realism debate are analysed. The case study supports Giere’s moderately realist view of scientific models and theories, based (...) on the notion of similarity, and it highlights the crucial role of model users. The paper concludes with a discussion of Boltzmann’s Bildtheorie, the sophisticated form of realism that he developed in response to the scientific problems of kinetic theory. (shrink)

In the first part of the paper, factual information is given about developments in European business ethics since it started on a more or less institutionalized basis, five or six years ago. In the second part some comments are presented on the meaning of the developments and the possible causes. Attention is given to resemblances and differences between American and European business ethics. In the short last part some suggestions are proposed about tasks business ethics will face in the next (...) decade. (shrink)

This article examines the role of philosophy in the development of the kinetic theory of gases. Two opposing accounts of this role, by Peter Clark and John Nyhof, are discussed and criticized. Contrary to both accounts, it is argued that philosophical views of scientists can fundamentally influence the results of their scientific work. This claim is supported by a detailed analysis of the philosophical views of Maxwell and Boltzmann, and of their work on the kinetic theory, especially concerning the so-called (...) specific heat anomaly. It leads to the conclusion that the scientific development of the kinetic theory cannot be understood without taking into account the role of philosophy. (shrink)

From the nineteen sixties onwards a branch of philosophy of science has come to development, called history-oriented philosophy of science. This development constitutes a reaction on the then prevailing logical empiricist conception of scientific knowledge. The latter was increasingly seen as suffering from insurmountable internal problems, like e. g. the problems with the particular "observational-theoretical distinction" on which it drew. In addition the logical empiricists' general approach was increasingly criticized for two external shortcomings. Firstly, the examples of scientific knowledge that (...) the logical empiricists were focusing on were con sidered as too simplistic to be informative on the nature of real life science. Secondly, it was felt that the attention of these philosophers of science was restricted to the static aspects of scientific knowledge, while neglecting its developmental aspects. History-oriented philosophy of science has taken up the challenge implicit in the latter two criticisms, i. e. to develop accounts of science that would be more adequate for understanding the development 1 of real life science. One of the more successful products of this branch of philosophy of science is Lakatos's theory of scientific development, sometimes called the "methodology of scientific research programmes". This theory conceives science as consisting of so called research program mes developing in time, and competing with each other over the issue which one generates the best explan~tions of the phenomena that they address. (shrink)

One of the career options Ede Christian University for higher professional education offers is nursing. As a Christian professional school, the ECU provides learning environments for nursing students to become professionals who are to exhibit a Christian life style, values and professional ethics. Nursing graduates of our school in general may have a Christian disposition regarding major issues in health care like displaying respect for patients, having a correct attitude, practising informed consent, displaying confidentiality, and avoiding euthanasia etc. A worrying (...) development for educators, though, is that often within a year after their graduation these young nursing professionals may adopt the secularized behaviour predominant in their workplace, even when that behaviour in some respects contrasts with the values they internalized during their nursing education. . Apparently, the shaping force of the social context of a professional practice can be stronger than the personal beliefs young professionals adopt before their graduation. (shrink)

Achieving understanding of nature is one of the aims of science. In this paper we offer an analysis of the nature of scientific understanding that accords with actual scientific practice and accommodates the historical diversity of conceptions of understanding. Its core idea is a general criterion for the intelligibility of scientific theories that is essentially contextual: which theories conform to this criterion depends on contextual factors, and can change in the course of time. Our analysis provides a general account of (...) how understanding is provided by scientific explanations of diverse types. In this way, it reconciles conflicting views of explanatory understanding, such as the causal-mechanical and the unificationist conceptions. (shrink)

The articles by Henk Bodewitz collected in this volume, published between 1969 and 2013, deal with Vedic cosmology and ethics on basis of a systematic philological study of early Vedic texts, from the Ṛgveda to various Brāhmaṇas, Āraṇyakas and Upaniṣads.

In der Geschichte des Wiener Kreises lässt sich eine private und eine öffentliche Phase unterscheiden. Die private Phase ist 1929 zu Ende. Im Sommer dieses Jahres beschliessen die Mitglieder mit ihrer Philosophie der wissenschaftlichen Weltauffassung vor die Öffentlichkeit zu treten.

One of the most important contributions of A. Church to logic is his invention of the lambda calculus. We present the genesis of this theory and its two major areas of application: the representation of computations and the resulting functional programming languages on the one hand and the representation of reasoning and the resulting systems of computer mathematics on the other hand.

Children’s readiness for school is often threatened by the occurrence of both externalizing and internalizing problems. Previous research has shown that Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports is particularly effective for fostering children’s behavioral skills and reducing externalizing problems. However, whether PBIS can enhance children’s emotional skills and reduce internalizing problems is less clear. Therefore, TIME-IN was developed, which extends PBIS by also including emotional support systems. It was tested whether TIME-IN was effective for improving emotion regulation and reducing depressive symptoms. (...) Furthermore, it was tentatively explored whether TIME-IN is accompanied by more than natural fluctuations in both children’s externalizing and internalizing problems. The effectiveness of TIME-IN was evaluated in a non-randomized study, in which an intervention group was compared with a matched control group. Both research questions were addressed in a sample consisting of 81 children between 8 and 12 years of age with special educational needs. Questionnaires for teachers, children, and their parents were administered at the beginning and the end of the school year using multi-informant assessment. Only indicative evidence was found for the hypothesis that TIME-IN improved children’s emotion regulation. Practical implications, strengths, and limitations were discussed.Clinical Trial Registration: This work was retrospectively registered at International Standard Registered Clinical/soCial sTudy Number registry ISRCTN54456609. Registered 28 March 2017. (shrink)

How should belief in creation affect our theoretical understanding of knowledge? In this essay I argue that traditional views of knowledge, illustrated by Plato and Descartes, cannot do justice to the integral meaning of reality as God’s creation. Making use of two metaphors, the visual metaphor for theoretical knowledge and the biblical one of hearing the divine promise-command to be, I sketch the outlines of a theoretical framework that takes belief in creation as its starting point. My approach is based (...) upon insights of Reformational philosophy and leads to a view in which beliefs and propositions concerning isolated states of affairs are replaced by an emphasis on the concrete situations in which knowing occurs. Important notions like rationality and objectivity lose their central place to responsibility and acknowledgement. I claim that in this way the biblical understanding of reality as God’s creation can be better appreciated than in approaches that take their starting point in Greek and modern philosophical conceptions. (shrink)