This chapter contains sections titled: Mill on Liberty Khomeini v. Rushdie Fukuyama Giving Up on the Arab World The Limits of Free Speech The Deontological and Utilitarian Justifications for Free Speech Clifford on the Duty to Critique Freedom of Speech and Philosophers on the Index Intolerance not Restricted to Islam Giniewski v. France Freethought under Fire People Are not Being Insulted for Having a Religion Racism without Race Social Criticism not Identical with the Urge to Provoke Flemming Rose on Why (...) He Published the Danish Cartoons The Theory of Evolution: Too Controversial to Defend? Is There Another Way to Discover the Truth than by Free Discussion? (shrink)

The purpose of the study is to reveal the influence of articles about the spontaneous renewal of icons and church domes on the formation of the concept of a miracle among the population of Ukraine on the basis of publications in the Ukrainian press of the early 20s of the XX century. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the fact that for the first time a layer of poorly accessible newspaper publications was analyzed, on the basis (...) of which it was established what information background was formed around rumors about miracles that occurred in 1920-1925, and how it could influence the emergence of the corresponding narratives. As a result, it was revealed that stories about miracles in Ukraine during this period were characteristic of both rural and urban environments, and affected almost all layers of society, including the emergence of a stratum of the population that ironically laughed at miracles. It is shown that miracles very quickly entered into everyday reality, and they ceased to see supernatural features. Concrete examples demonstrate that miracles in this period increasingly began to be left to the mercy of science and technology. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 149 Thomas Aquinas and Gabriel Biel: Interpretations of St. Thomas Aquinas in German Nominalism on the Eve of the Reformation. By JOHN L. FARTHING. Duke Monographs in Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 9. Durham: Duke University Press, 1988. Pp. x +265. $22.50 (cloth). In this hook, John Farthing examines the use made by the fifteenth· century theologian Gabriel Biel of the thought of Thomas Aquinas. Contemplating the various (...) aspects of what he calls the ' dialogue ' between Biel and Aquinas {see e.g., pp. ix, 58, 191), Farthing wants to determine the extent and quality of Biel's knowledge and appropriation of Thomas's thought. Biel was a major shaper of contemporary theological opinion, who stood in the Occamist tradition in theology. Yet, although he himself shared Occamist presuppositions in theology and usually came out in various theological disputes on the Occamist side (pp. 5, 6, 8, 13-14, 16, 28, 33, 56, 122), as has long been recognized Biel often made a determined effort in his analyses to become acquainted with, and to repor·t, the thought of significant non-Occamist theologians, including Thomas Aquinas. Farthing thus justifies the present study by asking how precisely Thomas figures in the ' theological enterprise' of Gabriel Biel: Farthing wants to know how Biel used Aquinas and what Biel learned from his reading of Aquinas (pp. ix, 68 ). While Biel's significance for late fifteenth-century thought in itself justifies a study of his theological project and method, Farthing also believes that this hook on Biel and Aquinas is warranted on other grounds as well. Martin Luther learned much about scholasticism through his mastery of Biel's corpus. Hence, by establishing the quality of Biel's study and reporting of Aquinas on various theological questions, Farthing prepares the way for a future study of Luther's knowledge of Aquinas, a task however that he will leave to others (pp. x, 5, 7). Thomas Aquinas and Gabriel Biel is divided into ten chapters. After a brief Preface in which he provides the rationale for this study and an opening chapter on Thomas Aquinas and the via moderna, Farthing looks in turn at Biel's reading of Aquinas in the subject areas "God and Creatures," "Christ and Mary," "The Human Condition," "Ethics," "Church, Ministry, and Worship," "Sacraments," "Justification," and "Eschatology; " the tenth chapter, entitled "Post Thomam," summarizes the principal results of Farthing's research. After listing in an early footnote the hooks on Aquinas which he has found especially useful on each subject, Farthing in each chapter examines Biel's citations of Aquinas on the topic at hand. As he pro- 150 BOOK REVIEWS ceeds through each chapter, Farthing is careful to indicate when Biel has misread or misquoted Aquinas, offering in these instances possible reasons for Biel's errors. The longest chapters are on ethics and on sacraments (Chapters Five and Seven), reflecting Biel's own greater interest in these aspects of Thomistic theology (pp. 103, 191). On the basis of this close study, Farthing offers the following general conclusions about Biel's reading of Thomas Aquinas. On the whole, Biel is accurate in his reporting of Thomas's thought on various questions : Farthing claims that " statistically speaking, it is exceedingly rare for Biel to lay himself open to the change of infidelity to Thomas's intention" (p. 193). Second, Biel exploits Thomas's expertise more on ' practical ' than on ' speculative ' matters; the greater number of Thomas citations in Biel have to do with ethics and practical issues associated with the sacraments (pp. 58, 94, 191, 195-96). Third, Biel holds Aquinas in esteem because he sees in Thomas a thinker who shares his interest in summarizing and reporting fairly the thought of other theologians. In this regard, Biel often uses Aquinas as one today would use a' theological encyclopedia' (the term, in fact, is Farthing's; see pp. 26, 132). Biel wants to provide for his own time as extensive as possible a spectrum of opinions on a given question ; to this end he takes over Aquinas's characterizations of different theological opinions on the question at hand. Fourth, while Aquinas's thought is usually fairly reported, Biel does occasionally misrepresent Thomas... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 317 On the Nature and Existence of God. By RICHARD M. GALE. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Pp. 422 + viii. $44.50 (hardbound). Is there a rational justification for believing that God, as understood by traditional Western theism, exists? Richard M. Gale uses the tools of analytic philosophy to address some aspects of this question. He intentionally avoids any discussion of inductive arguments which (...) would try to show that the existence of God is the " only possible explanation " of some observable feature of the universe, and concentrates instead on arguments which more generally discuss whether or not belief in God is rationally justified (pp. 3, 241). His book is in some ways a response,to philosophers such as William Alston and Alvin Plantinga who have used analytic philosophy in defense of the theistic claim that God exists. Gale offers a more sbptical account of the ability of reason to justify belief in God. He views his work as beneficial to theism, however, in that it may lead believers to adopt a conception of God which is " more adequate " for inspiring worship and obedience than the traditional notion (p. 3). Before considering " theological arguments " in favor of the existence of God, Gale analyses a number of " atheological " arguments against it. The arguments fall into two categories, epistemological and pragmatic. Epistemological arguments are concerned with justifying any claim to knowledge that God does or does not exist. Pragmatic arguments try to show that belief (or disbelief) in the existence of God is justified by the moral benefits that accrue from it. With the exception of the last chapter, the entire book is devoted to epistemological arguments. Gale views his atheological arguments as " thought experiments " which test the internal consistency of the traditional understanding of various divine attributes and so lead us to improve the logical consistency of our understanding of God. When the traditional under· standing of some divine attribute is shown to involve logical incongruities, the theist is invited to go " back to the drawing board and redesign the particular divine attribute that is the focus of the argument " (p. 3). Atheological arguments are presented first so that the redesigned divine attributes can inform the subsequent analysis of theological arguments in favor of God's existence. Gale is willing to redesign a good number of divine attributes on the basis of often familiar and sometimes rather shaky atheological arguments. The traditional understanding of divine omnipotence, for in· stance, is tested in Chapter 1, using Gale's version of the well known 318 BOOK REVIEWS dilemma of whether an omnipotent God could create a stone so heavy that God could not lift it. Since it is necessary that God ls omnipotent and since it is necessary that an omnipotent being can do anything, it is necessary that God can do anything. Thus, " it is necessary that God can create a stone so heavy that God cannot lift it." But if it is necessary that God can create a stone so heavy that God cannot lift it, then it is possible that there is something that God cannot do. So it is not necessary that God can do anything. Thus we come to the contradiction that it is both necessary and not necessary that God can do anything (p. 18). Gale sees that his premise, " it is necessary that God can create a stone so heavy that God cannot lift it," itself involves a self-contradiction and is equivalent to saying that the omnipotent God can act in such a way that the omnipotent God is simultaneously not the omnipotent God (20). What he fails to see is that attributing to God any action that falls short of perfect activity (e.g., immoral action) involves the same self-contradiction. Nor does he seem to realize that self-contradictory statements of this sort are simply nonsensical. Being devoid of meaning, they can tell us nothing about what God can or cannot do, and so in no way require us to restrict or qualify God's omnipotence. Not seeing the senselessness of self-contradictory statements, Gale embarks on a program of reforming or qualifying the traditional notion of divine omnipotence... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Theology for Liberal Protestants: God the Creator by Douglas F. OttatiRubén Rosario RodríguezTheology for Liberal Protestants: God the Creator Douglas F. Ottati GRAND RAPIDS, MI: EERDMANS, 2013. 377 PP. $38.00Douglas Ottati offers the first volume of a two-volume systematic theology that is firmly and unapologetically grounded in the nineteenth-century liberal Protestant tradition. To paraphrase Gary Dorrien, Ottati's work can be categorized as among those contributors to the discipline (...) of theology, like Kathryn Tanner, seeking to bridge the longstanding gap between Yale postliberalism and Chicago liberalism. In other words, the absolute rejection of Friedrich Schleiermacher, Adolf von Harnack, and Ernst Troeltsch by neo-orthodox theologians early in the twentieth century no longer serves as an adequate typology, thus necessitating the need for a different narrative—one that sees greater continuity between Protestant liberalism, its neo-orthodox opponents, and the narrative and postliberal theologies that have sprouted from the fertile soil of this supposed discontinuity.Ottati defends and reclaims use of the term "liberal" through an appeal to the Reformed theological tradition within which he stands (along with supposedly irreconcilable rivals Schleiermacher and Karl Barth) by recognizing the place of John Calvin as an advocate for compassionate civil discourse and cooperation grounded in distinctly Christian piety and praxis. Accordingly, "A liberal Protestant is one whose piety and sensibility join Protestant convictions about Bible, tradition, church, history and truth with sustained attention to critical argument and scientific inquiries, a developed historical consciousness, and a commitment to social criticism and reform" (14). He then reconceptualizes the discipline of Christian theology through a series of axiomatic propositions that locates the theologian within a particular faith community yet in continuous dialogue with the surrounding culture; confronts the radical plurality of our current age by pursuing comparative theological discourse; and is receptive to scientific, literary, and philosophical world views (even when these world views prove hostile to a Christian perspective) as naturally flowing from the Christian's pious submission "to God as Creator, Judge, and Redeemer" of all humanity in its many varied manifestations. In other words, Ottati presents diversity, tolerance, and cooperation as distinctly Christian virtues that can and ought to help Christians build bridges with differing religious and philosophical perspectives on the basis of a shared humanistic foundation that is nevertheless biblically and theologically grounded.This systematic theology intentionally follows Calvin's organizing schema in the Institutes of the Christian Religion (1559) of the twofold knowledge of God as [End Page 214] Creator and Redeemer; it greatly admires and respects its theological ancestors, including Augustine, Martin Luther, and Schleiermacher, yet offers a critical evaluation—and, when needed, rejection—of these same forebears. Like Katherine Sonderegger's recent Systematic Theology (a projected three-volume work), Ottati's contribution stands as a corrective against the twentieth century emphasis on a Trinitarian doctrine of God that often excludes classical reflection on the attributes of God. Whether or not he is avoiding classical Trinitarian language because he wants to avoid idle speculation about the Triune God (à la Calvin) will become more evident in the second volume when (if?) he addresses the work of the Spirit as part of God's act of reconciliation in Christ. This first volume is the work of a brilliant thinker who is guided by a pastoral sensibility that will find an audience in the church, in the seminary, and—perhaps most surprisingly—in the university classroom in great part because it takes very seriously the call to make the Christian faith intelligible and relevant in the face of external criticism of Christian piety and practice. In the end, what it offers is a rediscovery of the concept of wonder at the Creation and its infinitely mysterious source to a radically pluralistic and increasingly agnostic culture.Rubén Rosario RodríguezSaint Louis UniversityCopyright © 2017 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Aquinas on the Beginning and End of Human Life by Fabrizio AmeriniJohn LanganReview: Fabrizio Amerini, Aquinas on the Beginning and End of Human Life, trans. Mark Henninger, Harvard University Press, 2013The ongoing and apparently interminable debate over the moral and legal status of abortion has come over the years to resemble the Western front in World War I, with two contending armies facing each other with limited maneuvering (...) room, familiar and overused weapons, periodic artillery barrages, increasing casualties, not much new to report, and a deadly ‘no man’s land’ between them in which virtually nothing survives. Against the gloomy monotony of the abortion wars, in which reductivist accounts of the opponents’ views and repetitious restatements of familiar and cherished views predominate, this book by Fabrizio Amerini, a professor of philosophy at the University of Parma, appears as a refreshing surprise. It is surprising for a number of reasons, which I shall present later. But its refreshing character comes primarily from its moderate tone and the care with which its arguments are presented. Amerini is clearly familiar with the Catholic tradition on abortion and euthanasia; he is respectful of this tradition, which he does not directly challenge, but his sense of scholarly integrity prevents him from simply presenting Aquinas as a defender and synthesizer of all the positions championed in that tradition or by its papal custodians. He has an impressive command of the relevant texts in Aquinas and the Fathers of the Church, which he joins with a scrupulous style of [End Page E-103] philosophical argument which has an affinity with the clarifying labors of G. E. Moore in the early days of analytic moral philosophy. The result is not easy reading, but the reader can be confident that the desire to score rhetorical points and political victories will not distort the philosophical and historical analysis. The book is intended primarily for those who can benefit from careful scholarship, but it should be instructive for all who regard the questions of abortion and euthanasia as genuinely difficult and as deserving our best intellectual efforts.The most important surprise is Amerini’s focus on the issue of delayed versus immediate hominization in the development from embryo to complete human being. Since Pius IX in 1867, the Vatican has insisted that from the moment of conception the embryo becomes a human person whose life is sacred and deserves full protection. This view is ordinarily discussed as ‘immediate hominization’. In Amerini’s view, the embryo lacks the development and differentiation of organs which would enable it to have a sustainable potentiality to perform the acts which are proper to a human person, particularly reasoning and choosing. In the Vatican’s view, the soul is immediately infused by God, though it obviously requires many years of development before it is able to function as a complete and distinct human person. Amerini regards this position as untenable within Aquinas’s metaphysical system and finds in Aquinas’s own texts evidence that he teaches a discontinuous process in fetal life. Amerini regards the insistence on immediate hominization as an arbitrary effort to maintain an absolute uniformity of moral status in all the stages of embryonic and fetal life. He sees the Vatican’s position as leading to an equation of abortion and homicide which he regards as unjustified. He does, however, affirm that there is an identity of subject running from the embryo to the developed person and also that this grounds an ethic of respect for life in all of its stages. The practical conclusions in bioethics he would draw from this position “could allow space for a judicious and discriminating ethical evaluation of individual cases,” as he puts the matter in the concluding sentence of the book.Other surprises are the author’s discovering from a careful reading of Aquinas’s texts that he taught a progressive plurality of substantial forms in the development of the embryo. For Aquinas, it is the substantial form which answers the question about what sort of being the object of our inquiry is. In the case of human persons, the substantial form is the soul, which includes the intellectual properties of... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:IN THE REALM OF THE SENSES: SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS ON SENSORY LOVE, DESIRE, AND DELIGHT MARK P. DROST University of Rochester Rochester, New York Introduction SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS characterizes delight (delectatio ) as a state in which we are in " union with some good" (I-II, 35, 1).1 Further on he augments this description of delight : " we are not without the good we love, but are at (...) rest in its possession" (35, 6). Concerning love (amor) 2 Aquinas says, "love remains whether the object is present or absent " (28, 1). But Aquinas also says that when we love an obl Unless otherwise indicated all references (ordered by number of question and article) refer to the Blackfriars edition of Aquinas's Summa Theologiae (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company) V. 19-21 (in the Prima Secundae Questions 22-48), trans. Eric D'Arcy (Questions 22-30, 1967; 31-39, 1975) and John Reid (Questions 40-48, 1965) and V. 11-12 (in the Prima Pars Questions 75-89), trans. Timothy Sutter (Questions 75-83, 1970) and Paul T. Durbin (Questions 84-89, 1968). 2 " There will be as many kinds of love as there are kinds of orexis and wanting" (26, 1). The notion of love (amor sensitivus) that is under scrutiny here is an event in the sensory orexis and occurs in the body-soul composite. It is not a case of intellectual or spiritual love (which is an act of the will and occurs in the soul alone). We are not dealing with the following notions of love: dilectio (which adds to love the property of election), caritas (charity, which is an act of will), or amicitia (friendship) which is more than love. (With respect to amicitia, unrequited friendship is not possible in principle, but unrequited love is factually real ; hence amicitia requires something more than love, viz. reciprocity.) Surely one is capable of experiencing more than one of these sentiments at a moment. One might be attracted on the basis of one's sensory orexis to someone and simultaneously love that person as a friend. Although these are not simultaneously incompatible affections, I will exclusively focus on the notion of amor sensitivus. 47 48 MARK P. DROST ject, " we are already in some kind of communion with it. Love therefore involves union" (25, 2). These statements are prima facie inconsistent unless Aquinas acknowledges that there are unions in which the object is not possessed. I contend that love is a case of being intentionally directed to a good, but it is not identical to the union which is a result of possessing a good. Although Aquinas describes love as a condition of union, love in fact is a condition of union which is ontologically prior to the union which is exhibited in delight. A consequence of Aquinas's thesis is the ontological possibility of loving something without taking delight in it or desiring it. We cannot, however, take delight in something or desire it unless we love it. I. MOVEMENT AND REST IN THE DESCRIPTION OF EMOTIONS The metaphors of motion, rest, approach, and retreat play a significant role in Aquinas's descriptions of the intentionality in various emotional states. As appetitive powers whose principle of operation is in the body-soul composite,8 Aquinas often describes the emotions through metaphors that suggest a similarity to the movement of physical objects (37, 2). The emotions are instances of orectic movement, and orectic movement is analogous to the movement of the inanimate orexis : Now orectic movement is, in the operations of the soul, what physical movement is in the physical world. Compare the physical movements of approach and withdrawal: approach is, of itself, directed towards something in harmony with nature; withdrawal is, of itself, directed towards something discordant with nature: thus a heavy body by its nature draws away from a higher place and towards a lower one (36, 2). The analogy between motion in the physical world and orectic movement of the soul is a teleological one: just as a light or heavy a Emotions, like perception (e.g. seeing, hearing), are powers whose principle of operation range in the body-soul composite. However, " some of the soul... (shrink)

_The purpose _of the article is to introduce into scientific circulation works by Ukrainian scholar Taras Zakydalsky on the philosophy of Hryhorii Skovoroda. Taras Zakydalsky is a representative of the Ukrainian diaspora, philosopher, and member of Canadian NTSh (Shevchenko Scientific Society of Canada). _Theoretical basis._ We consider the uniqueness of H. Skovoroda’s philosophy, which stimulates not only intellectually but also spiritually enlightens the reader. The reasons for the complex perception and interpretation of Hryhorii Skovoroda’s philosophy are highlighted. We have (...) verified the main methods of its interpretation given in the works by Dmytro Chyzhevskyi. The influence of philosophical thought of thinkers of Antiquity and the Middle Ages: Aristotle, Epicurus, the Church Fathers, and Tertullian has been studied. We have comprehended H. Skovoroda’s interpretation of the Bible as a two-layer existence, the symbolic world that makes the foundation of his philosophy. The peculiarity of the thinker’s division of the heart into "internal" and "external" is analyzed. Hryhorii Skovoroda’s position on the Good and the evil is stated. The Good is identified with God, and the evil – with the real world, the man can choose between the two. Much attention is paid to the understanding of man as a microcosm – rational thinking, and thought is the fundamental cause of human activity, which generates all existence. Hryhorii Skovoroda’s philosophy of metaphysics as the existence of three worlds is highlighted: the first is the macrocosm (the whole surrounding world), the second is the microcosm (the man), and the third is the symbolic world (the Bible). "Monodualism" as a characteristic feature of H. Skovoroda’s work is analyzed. We have highlighted H. Skovoroda’s attitude to the transcendence of God, which is not separated from the world but is present in it directly. The understanding of faith as a forced act of self-love is analyzed because by loving ourselves we love God. The criteria for true and false faith have been clarified. The significance of H. Skovoroda’s aphorism that _what is necessary is useful, and not useful is unnecessary_ is considered. Examples of ethical principles in H. Skovoroda’s philosophy are considered. Peculiarities of the concept HAPPINESS are revealed. This concept is a universal means of existence of the Good, its source is gratitude to God. _Originality_ of the article is in the systematic presentation of the philosophy of the heart by Hryhorii Skovoroda and the analysis of the integrity of the "inner man", the true meaning of life as interpreted by Taras Zakydalsky. _Conclusions_ summarize the "anthropological pragmatism" of the philosopher, whose main idea is to apply practical skills for the benefit of society. (shrink)

Notice that this paper has not claimed that all natural languages are CFL's. What it has shown is that every published argument purporting to demonstrate the non-context-freeness of some natural language is invalid, either formally or empirically or both.18 Whether non-context-free characteristics can be found in the stringset of some natural language remains an open question, just as it was a quarter century ago.Whether the question is ultimately answered in the negative or the affirmative, there will be interesting further (...) questions to ask. If it turns out that natural languages are indeed always CFL's, it will be reasonable to ask whether this helps to explain why speakers apparently recognize so quickly whether a presented utterance corresponds to a grammatical sentence or not, and to associate structural and semantic details with it. It might also be reasonable to speculate about the explanation for the universally context-free character of the languages used by humans, and to wonder whether evolutionary biological factors are implicated in some way (Sampson (1979) could be read in this light). And naturally, it will be reasonable to pursue the program put forward by Gazdar (1981, in press) to see to what extent CFL-inducing grammatical devices can be exploited to yield insightful descriptions of natural languages that capture generalizations in revealing ways.If a human language that is not a CFL is proved to exist, on the other hand, a different question will be raised: give the non-context-free character of human languages in general, why has this property been so hard to demonstrate that it has taken over twenty-five years to bring it to light since the issue was first explicitly posed? If human languages do not have to be CFL's, why do so many (most?) of them come so close to having the property of context-freeness? And, since the CFL's certainly constitute a very broad class of mathematically natural and computationally tractable languages, what property of human beings or their communicative or cognitive needs is it that has caused some linguistic communities to reach beyond the boundaries of this class in the course of evolving a linguistic system?Either way, we shall be interested to see our initial question resolved, and further questions raised. One cautionary word should be said, however, about the implications (or lack of them) that the answer will have for grammatical studies. Chomsky has repeatedly stated that he does not see weak generative capacity as a theme of central importance in the theory of grammar, and we agree. It is very far from being the case that the recent resurgence of interest in exploring the potential of CF-PSG or equivalent systems will, or should, be halted dead in its tracks by the discovery (if it is ever forthcoming) that some natural language is not a CFL. In the area of parsing, for instance, it seems possible that natural languages are not only parsed on the basis of constituent structure such as a CF-PSG would assign, but are parsed as if they were finite state languages (see Langendoen (1975) and Church (1980) for discussion along these lines). That is, precisely those construction-types that figure in the various proofs that English is not an FSL appear to cause massive difficulty in the human processing system; the sentences crucial to the proofs are for the most part unprocessable unless they are extremely short (yet the arguments for English not being and FSL only go through if length is not an issue). This means that in practice properties of finite state grammars are still of great potential importance to linguistic theory despite the fact that they do not provide the framework for defining the total class of grammatical sentences. The same would almost certannly be true of CF-PSG's if they were shown to be inadequate in a similar sense. It is highly unlikely that the advances made so far in far in phrase structure description could be nullified by a discovery about weak generative capacity. Moreover, there are known to be numerous ways in which the power of CF-PSG's can be marginally enhanced to permit, for example, xx languages to be generated without allowing anything like the full class of recursively enumerable or even context-sensitive languages (see Hopcroft and Ullmann (1979), Chapter 14) for an introduction to this topic, noting especially Figure 14.7 on p. 393. The obvious thing to do if natural languages were ever shown not to be CFL's in the general case would be to start exploring such minimal enhancements of expressive power to determine exactly what natural languages call for in this regard and how it could be effectively but parsimoniously provided in a way that closely modelled human linguistic capacities.In the meantime, it seems reasonable to assume that the natural languages are a proper subset of the infinite-cardinality CFL's until such time as they are validly shown not to be. (shrink)

This paper deals with the philosophical questions which gave rise to the traditional realist theories of universals. The main thesis is that these same questions may also be interpreted as scientific-empirical questions. The study of these problems has begun only very recently and the relevance of the results for the traditional problem of intensional entities has only been remarked by few workers aware of the philosophical problem. The approach adopted here is that of regarding man as a perceptual system situated (...) in an environment and showing certain capacities like perception of universals. The possible ways of access to these entities is discussed on the basis of some recent empirical findings related to perception. One conclusion is that in order to answer the basic philosophical question of how properties, particulars and propositions are perceived may be answered within the domains of science, accepting only the usual presuppositions used in it. Basically, such an approach sees the root of the problem in the great complexity of information processing involved in the actual perception of properties, particulars and propositions. (shrink)

If the discourse of manners and customs aspires to a stable fixing of subjects and systems of differences, however, its project is not and never can be complete. This is true if only for the seemingly trivial reason that manners-and-customs descriptions seldom occur on their own as discrete texts. They usually appear embedded in or appended to a superordinate genre, whether a narrative, as in travel books and much ethnography, or an assemblage, as in anthologies and magazines.6 In the case (...) of travel writing, which is the main focus of this essay, manners-and-customs description is always in play with other sorts of representation that also bespeak difference and position subjects in their own ways. Sometimes these other positioning complement the ideological project of normalizing description, and sometime they do not.In what follows, I propose to examine this interplay of discourses in some nineteenth-century travel writing chiefly about Africa. While Barrow’s work is not prominent on anybody’s mental bookshelves these days, readers will recognize such names as David Livingstone, John Speke, James Grant, Richard Burton, Mungo Park, or Paul Du Chaillu. During the co-called opening up of central and southern Africa to European capitalism in the first half of the nineteenth century, such explorer-writers were the principal producers of Africa for European imaginations—producers, that is, of ideology in connection with the European expansionist project there. What I hope to underscore in these writings is not their tendency towards single, fixed subject positions or single, fixed systems of difference. Rather, I wish to emphasize the multiplicity of ways of codifying the Other, the variety of fixed positions and the variety of given sets of differences that they posit. European penetration and appropriation is semanticized in numerous ways that can be quite distinct, even mutually contradictory. In the course of examining discursive polyphony in these travel writings, I hope to stress the need to consider ideology not only in terms of reductive simplification but also in terms of the proliferation of meanings. 6. Ethnographies would seem to be a counterexample to this claim, but in fact one can fairly easily show that ethnographic writing is inextricably tied to personal narrative. Indeed this tie is a symptom of a serious contradiction between ethnographic methods and ethnographic discourse. See my “Fieldwork in Common Places,” in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George Marcus . Mary Louise Pratt is an associate professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the Program in Comparative Literature at Stanford University. She is author of Toward a Speech-Act Theory of Literary Discourse and is a member of the editorial boards of Poetics, Signs Tabloid, and Cultural Anthropology. (shrink)

Translated by Drew S. Burk and Anthony Paul Smith. Excerpted from Struggle and Utopia at the End Times of Philosophy , (Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing, 2012). THE END TIMES OF PHILOSOPHY The phrase “end times of philosophy” is not a new version of the “end of philosophy” or the “end of history,” themes which have become quite vulgar and nourish all hopes of revenge and powerlessness. Moreover, philosophy itself does not stop proclaiming its own death, admitting itself to be half dead (...) and doing nothing but providing ammunition for its adversaries. With our sights set on clearing up this nuance, we differentiate philosophy as an institutional entity, and the philosophizability of the World and History, of “thought-world,” which universalizes the narrow concept of philosophy and that of “capital.” We also give an eschatological and apocalyptical cause to this end, of “times” or “ages” rather than those of philosophical practice. Last but not least, it is the Future itself in the performativity of its ultimatum that determines this end times, reversing these times from the Identity the Future accorded to it, withdrawing the thought-world from the lie of its death. Why this style of axioms and oracles, these more or less subtle distinctions, old and debased, with an appeal to the ultimata , to end times and last words? We fight to give, parallel to the concept of Hell, its new theoretical position, for its philosophical return and its non-philosophical transformation. No more so than any other word, Hell is not a metaphor here, just the Principle of Sufficient World. Every man, no doubt, has his “hell” readily available, connivance, control, conformism, domestication, schooling, alienation, extermination, exploitation, oppression, anxiety, etc. We have our little list that the Contemporaries established in the previous century in the same way one used to construct lists of virtues and vices or honors and wealth. They invented it for us without knowing it, for us-the-Futures who have as our responsibility to invent its use. In the Christian and Gnostic tradition, the struggle of the End Times takes place “on earth.” The most sophisticated of believers have it taking place in Heaven as well, above all in Heaven. The various kinds of gnosis imagine infinite falls and vertiginous highs, the vertigo of salvation. On Earth as in Heaven, a hell is available. The Marxists have the law of profit and the control of production, the class struggle Capital imposes on man. The Nietzscheans, the dull grumble of the struggle in the foundations of World and History, the domestication of man, the society of control. The phenomenologists, the capture of being, the most superficial amongst them, the age of suspicion. But all of these “hells” are taken from World, History, Society, and Religion. What we call Hell is no longer of the order of these specific and total intra-worldly generalities, it is both more singular and more universal, no longer being at all of the same order, it is the determinant Identity of these small hells strung out through history but unified here in the name of the last Humaneity. It is even found within the French idiom for hell [ enfer ], en-fer literally means “in-irons.” We are as much “in-irons” as we are “alive” [ en-Vie ]. We believe in Hell but as non-philosophers and it is even because we are non-philosophers that we can believe in it outside of any sort of religion. Hell is less mythological than ideological, it combines philosophizability with universal capital. Under what form? A single term could work for them without being a metaphor or something they would participate in by analogy, a more innovative and conjectural term than control, more universal than profit. It would denote the growing and permanent extortion of a surplus-value of communication, of speed and of urgency in change, in productivity and in work, in the pressure of images and slogans. It would be worse than solicitation, more tenacious than capture, more active and persecutory than control, softer and more insidious than a frontal attack, just as perverse as questioning and accusation, less brutal and offensive than extermination, less ritualized than inquisition, it would be soft and dispersed, instantaneous and vicious, it would be a crime without declared violence. Collusion and conformism, it would be afraid to show itself. Related to rumor, from which it borrows its infinite and tortuous ways. It is harassment. As a modernized form of Hell, perhaps harassment has a long future in front of it, of innocent torture, slow assassination, in short the fall, but radical with no way of recovering and which tolerates only salvation. THE PHILOSOPHICAL PAST OF NON-PHILOSOPHY Non-philosophy is thus Man as the utopian identity of the philosophical form of the World, a utopia destined to transform it. We still have to understand these equations, in particular that of the being-uni-versed from Man, and this book adheres to this by re-exposing non-philosophy in a different way via one of its new possibilities. It uses this opportunity to once again take up formulations that lead to objections answering certain external critics, as well as revisiting diverging interpretations specific to non-philosophers. A portion of this book is devoted to going through these theories via a strict or “lengthy” presentation of non-philosophy, and its defense against more expeditious solutions. This work of rectification is the occasion, merely the occasion, for refocusing non-philosophy on Man (the “Man-in-person,” “Humaneity”), and in a more innovative manner, on its utopian vocation established since the book Future Christ . As for this “occasion,” it is quite obvious. A school of posture, not to say a school of thought, supposes a minimum of closure from the most liberating of knowledge, a heritage, its utilization, and its no less certain dispersal. Within its development, a variety of interpretations will no doubt appear, deviations that are as much normalizations, and a struggle against this multiplication of divergent tendencies. These are perhaps not inevitable evils, especially here, merely a normal development according to the twisting paths of history. But the problem is made worse by the fact that this school of non-philosophers is that of utopia. Not the former attempts devoted to commenting on the worst authoritarian and criminal forms of the past and the present, but utopia as the determinant principle for human life, or to put it another way, of the Future as an irreducible presupposition of (for) thinking the World and History. Non-philosophers are engaged in an aleatory navigation between the respect for the most rigorous utopia, whose rules are not that of the reproductive imagination but those from the Future determining imagination itself, as well as the temptations, diversions, and remorse of history. Little by little, we will begin to understand that the Future as we understand it no longer has any temporal consistency or positive content, without being an empty form or a nothingness, but that it is foreclosed to past and present History, just as it is foreclosed to the place of places, the World, and that it is the only method for establishing the practice of thinking in a non-imaginary instance. Because it is the World and History that are imaginary and have a terrible materiality, it is not necessarily utopia. We will overlap two objectives here: the defense of non-philosophy against the (non-) philosophers that we are, only occasionally, and the introduction of philosophy to a rigorous future. Together they set out to definitively render, without any possible return to philosophical conformism or towards the facilities of the past and present, the non-philosophical enterprise understood as utopia or uchronia. Imagination and speculation, left to themselves and thus undistinguished, are quite good for participating in the grand game of History but have little value or worse for the Future which is unimaginable and unintelligible and must be maintained as such. MAN-IN-PERSON AS SUSPENSION OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL CHORA The point where philosophical resistance is concentrated is without a doubt the invention of the Name-of-Man, first name, oracular as much as axiomatic, of the determining cause for the non-philosophical posture. And that which concentrates the differends is the style of non-philosophy as identity that possesses the dual aspect, of discipline and of the oeuvre, of the theorem and of the oracle. But the real difficulty in understanding the simplicity of non-philosophy is profoundly hidden in the depths of philosophy itself. Because philosophy, from Parmenides to Derrida, even Levinas, continues to be a divided gesture, without a veritable immanence, transforming its thematic contents of transcendence in also forgetting to transform the operative transcendence in the element from which the ontology of surface is established which we will call, in memory of Plato, the chorismos. The general effect of the chora literally gives place to philosophy, demanding binding and sutures to which we will once and for all “oppose” the Man-in-person, his power of cloning, and his future being. All philosophy contains a hinter-philosophy in which it deploys its operations and weaves its tradition like an understudy of a topographical nature and in the best of cases being itself topological. Philosophy as well consists of two levels, its pre-ontological operative conditions on the one hand, and its superficial theme on the other, it too has its presupposed, but is not aware of it or erases it within the unity of appearance named Logos. Rightly, the Logos, and its flash or lightning nature, possesses a “dark precursor,” the chora, which is as much a virtual image, and philosophy, dazzled by its own lightning flash, seems to completely forget about it at the same time it sets itself up within it. Non-philosophy risks taking this same path, of confusing what it believes to be the real with its phantom double, contenting itself to working on the thematic level of philosophy, not its surface objects and its idle chatter (we stopped talking about this a long time ago and in any case they are merely simple materials for inducing a work of transformation), but the transcendence-form of its objects. In the end it risks, through precipitation, taking back up the heritage of philosophy, a heritage of a misunderstood presupposed, even more profound than the play of transcendences. This is what the imperative of the radicality of immanence meant, to treat immanence in an immanent manner, not to make a new object out of it. And from here we get non- (philosophy) and its refusal of the Platonic chorismos , symbol of all abstraction, and thus all transcendental appearance. There are no illusions. The message will leave a heritage in tattered pieces and interpretations. But it was difficult not to dispute the differend to its core. There will be complete confusion of the multiple, possible, and necessary effectuations of non-philosophy with its interpretations. The non-philosophical or human freedom of philosophical effectuation and the philosophical freedom of interpretation. Effectuations demand non-philosophy to return to zero from the point of view of its philosophical material and thus also but within these limits the formulation of its axioms , but in no way providing from the outset divergent interpretations of the aforementioned axioms. They are divergent because they do not take into account the material from which these axioms are derived within non-philosophy, and because they do not see themselves as symptoms of another vision of the World. The utterances of non-philosophy are not mathematical theorems and pure axioms, they merely have a mathematical aspect . They are, by their extraction or origin, mathematical and transcendental. And by their determined function in-Real, within non-philosophy, they are identically in-the-last-Humaneity entities which have an aspect of an axiom and an aspect of interpretation (or an oracular aspect as we say) that attempts (sometimes it is ourselves who provide the occasion) to isolate and transform, in complete freedom of interpretation. There will be an opportunity to complain about the complex character of the language of non-philosophy, an idiom saturated with classical references, sophisticated in a contemporary way. Its freedom of decision up against the whole of philosophy demands these effects of “complication” and “privatization,” as the saying goes. But it also demands fighting against the drift [ dérive ] of the pedagogical-all and the mediatic-all that leads philosophy into the shallow depths of opinion, which is the site of its impossible death. The noble idealism of “pop-philosophy” has been consumed into a “philo-reality;” against this we propose philo-fiction. Parricide, which is at the bottom of these interpretations and which we can judge as being quite fertile, although it has informed tradition, only takes place once or within one lone meaning. In regards to Parmenides, it was possible; Plato introduced the Other as non-being and language, bringing into existence the philosophical system of the World, but is it possible to repeat it again with the same fecundity in regards to non-philosophy, this time in introducing (non) religion or (non) art, still mixing them without taking into account this mixture, alternatively as a philosophical or religious resentment? If philosophy begins via a crime, it is no doubt obliged to continue down similar pathways, to the effect that the crimes of philosophy, once the founding crime has been committed, are a reaction of self-defense. It is undoubtedly from this that we get Marx’s declaration that history begins by tragedy and repeats itself or ends in farce. The preservation of rigor and fecundity is, in every respect, a psychologically difficult task within a theory such as non-philosophy. Having posited an essential objective of liberation in regards to philosophy and its services, one has often understood this objective as an authorization of providing particular interpretations of its axioms and ends up obliterating their scope. This ends up confusing, on one hand, two kinds of freedoms in regards to non-philosophy, the freedom of its interpretations and the freedom of its effectuations. On the other hand, any defense of “principles” against precipitated interpretations is immediately taxed with a will to orthodoxy, a prohibitive objection when we are dealing with, as is the case here, a heretical theory of thought. Nevertheless, it is time to stop confusing heresy as the cause of thought with an ideology of heresies, which is certainly not at all our object, but rather a form of normalization. As for the “disciplinary” aspect, which is not the only aspect, it demands something other than philosophical “answers to objections,” a precision in the definition and use of its procedures in the formation of utterances, since non-philosophy is neither a supplementary doctrine interior to philosophy nor a vision of the world but one whose priority is a “vision of Man,” or rather Man as “vision” that implies a theory and a practice of philosophy. In the end, struggle is only one aspect of non-philosophy, not its whole or telos, struggle coming only from its materiality. In particular, if the discipline of non-philosophy is inseparable from struggle, it is not a question of reducing the monomaniacal obsession of its “marching orders.” This would reduce its complexity and kill its indivisibility, deploying it in a “long march” and a form of Maoization whose philosophical presuppositions no longer have any pertinence here, a case of the One and the Two, which are now cloned and no longer tied together. More generally, non-philosophy is a complex thought composed of a multitude of aspects, which is to say, unilateral interpretations, of a philosophical origin but reduced by their determination in-the-last-instance . The “liberalism” of non-philosophy is merely one of the aspects of which it is capable, not an essence. Similarly, it is only capable of having a “Maoist” aspect. Let us generalize. The weakness of non-philosophy is due to a specific cause, the determination-in-the-last-Humaneity of a subject for the World. Everything that has a right to the philosophical city can be said about it in turn and in a retaliatory mode since Man contributes nothing of himself that Man takes from the World. We can consider non-philosophy as being pretentious, absurd, idealistic, empty, materialistic, formalistic, contradictory, modern, post-modern, Zen, Buddhist, Marxist; it endures or tolerates, perhaps “appeals” to, or at least renders possible, sarcasms, ironies, and insults without even talking about the misunderstandings, partly for the same reason as psychoanalysis. All of this goes beyond simple “deviations.” They are its aspects, which is to say, its “unilateral” philosophical interpretations in both senses of the word, being either sufficient coming from the mouth of philosophers, or reduced to their absolute dimension of sufficiency and totality in the mouths of non-philosophers, and both times due to the weakness and strength of Man-in-person as their determination only in-the-last-instance. The non-philosopher is certainly not a Saint Paul fantasizing about a new Church. The non-philosopher is either a (Saint) Sebastian whose flesh is pierced with as many arrows as there are Churches, or a Christ persecuted by a Saint Paul. What is engaged in here is the practice of retaliation. A negative rule of the non-philosophical ethics of outlawed discussion by way of argumentation (the sufficient is you, the orthodox one is always you, you are the fashionable one, and when a master you are someone else) that is founded on the confusion of effectuations of non-philosophy and of its overall interpretations. Retaliation is the law but as with any too-human law, it must acquire a dimension that displaces it, or rather emplaces it and takes away its authority but not all of its effectiveness. If the non-philosopher is only authorized by himself, which is to say by philosophy but limited by the Real-of-the-last-instance, its critique of other non-philosophers can merely be retaliatory under the same conditions, only by the Real limited in-the last-instance. THE TREE OF PHILOSOPHICAL SAINTLINESS The thematic horizon or material of these debates is in the relationships between philosophy, religion as gnosis, and non-philosophy. It is inevitable, regarding non-philosophers in general (whether they are non-philosophers by name or simply its neighbors) that we often end up evoking Marx’s Holy Family and imagining, arranged on the neighboring branches of the tree of philosophy and annexed, sometimes abusively, to non-philosophy, authors who would quite evidently and quite rightly refuse this label. So it is that we find, for example, a Saint Michel, a Saint Alain, a Saint Gilles 1 without even mentioning the youngest who aspire as well to the freedom of “saintliness” and who make their muted voices heard here. If there is a Holy Family of non-philosophers, it extends completely beyond these three, provided that the sectarian spirit can save us. This book is organized in the following manner: To begin, in order to recall the essential part of the problematic, we have organized a Summary of Non-Philosophy , a vade-mecum of notions and basic problems, in a classical style. Secondly, there is Clarifications On the Three Axioms of Non-Philosophy , designed to posit their proper use as much as to elucidate their meaning. Thirdly, an analysis of Philosophizability and Practicity , both being extreme constituents of philosophical material or the contents of the third axiom. Fourthly, the heart of this work: Let us Make a Tabula Rasa of the Future or of Utopia as Method . Fifthly, we have a theoretical outline of a non-institutional utopia, The International Organization of Non-Philosophy, L’Organisation Non-Philosophique Internationale, (ONPHI) already created in practice but under the conditions of possibility and functioning from which here we put into question “de jure,” thus not without a perplexity concerning “facts,” in any case, without the capability of “getting to the bottom of things.” Sixthly, an essay characterizing The Right and the Left of Non-Philosophy , a brief topology of several philosophizing and normalizing positions of proponents or tenants of this problematic. Seventhly, Rebel in the Soul: A Theory of Future Struggle , a systematic discussion starting from a confrontation of non-philosophical gnosis and non-religious gnosis to the extent that they pose, posed or perhaps still will pose themselves as rivals to non-philosophy in a mixture of fidelity and infidelity. Despite the fact that it can also be read as putting non-philosophy into perspective: it pits against a standard Platonism two contemporary appropriations of Gnosticism. On the basis of the paradigm of Man who never ceases to come as the Future-in-person, each one of these moments strives to reestablish not the “true” non-philosophy and its orthodoxy, but the minimal conditions to respect in order to allow for its maximum fecundity. And in order to bring about one of the last possibilities of its development, making explicit Humaneity as a utopia-for-the-World. In introducing these considerations in the form of a “testament” and “ultimatum,” we want to indicate two things: First, that this is the last time we will intervene in order to caution non-philosophers against the temptation of returning and looking backwards towards philosophy. Only a disillusioned nostalgia for the former World and its traditions barely remain permissible to us.… Secondly, that non-philosophy is also a sort of ultimatum for considering one’s life and transforming one’s thought from the perspective of a uni-version rather than a conversion. Man as future is this ultimatum in action, not an impatient self-proclaimed genius, and philosophy is his testament. It is obviously the ultimatum that determines this testament as “old” with a view towards a life that is, itself, non-testamentary. In and of itself, the “old” can never bear a veritable eschaton. Thus, this book intersects according to the logic of this paradigm, under the sign of the ultimate or “last” as future, philosophy as testament and cautionary note for maintaining the non-philosophical oeuvre as “future” or “utopian.” We will see that between these two dimensions it cradles a theory of struggle. In the end, this book envisions non-philosophers in multiple ways. It inevitably sees them as subjects of knowledge, most often academics insofar as life in the world demands, but above all as close relatives of three great human types. The analyst and political militant are quite obvious, for non-philosophy is close to psychoanalysis and Marxism insofar as it transforms the subject in transforming philosophy. Here again, one must have a sense not of certain nuances but of aspects (of the interpretations, albeit unilateralized) and not in order to construct a simple proletarization or militarization of thought as theory. To be rigorous, rather than authoritarian or spiteful, is its task. And lastly, non-philosophy is a close relative of the spiritual but definitely not the spiritualist. Those who are spiritual are not at all spiritualists, for the spiritual oscillate between fury and tranquil rage, they are great destroyers of the forces of Philosophy and the State, which are united under the name of Conformism. They haunt the margins of philosophy, gnosis, mysticism, science fiction and even religions. Spiritual types are not only abstract mystics and quietists; they are heretics for the World. The task is to bring their heresy to the capacity of utopia, and their utopia to the capacity of the paradigm. NOTES We will recognize allusions, and sometimes references, to closely related or distant themes, but which are related, in the work of Michel Henry, Alain Badiou and via the representative of “non-religious” gnosis of a Platonic origin, in Gilles Grelet. It goes without saying that these discussions are current and local, neither concerning the ensemble of doctrines nor prejudging the eventual evolution of certain amongst them. This concerns defining certain proximities with non-philosophy (rather than adversaries which in some sense they are) and typological and emblematic differends (rather than conflicts with a certain author). (shrink)

Owen’s writings on this subject helps us to see in a profound way that every aspect of Christ’s work is based upon an act of divine love and good pleasure in which Christ has come to us in order to restore us to fellowship with God. The Divine counsel stands at the basis of Owen understanding of Christ mediatorial work. In all their aspects, Owen’s Christological reflections represent a restatement of orthodox Christology which stands in fundamental continuity with the (...) Reformed tradition, particularly in its use of the threefold office of Christ. What emerges in Owen regarding Christ as Mediator is positively shaped by the intratrinitarian relations defined by the covenant of redemption and the three-fold office of Christ as prophet, priest, and king which preserve both, the historical and the eternal dimensions. There is nothing more demanded from the church of the present day than the revival of the idea the we live in him who is our High Priest in heaven. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:"INTRINSICALLY EVIL ACTS" AND THE MORAL VIEWPOINT: CLARIFYING A CENTRAL TEACHING OF VER/TATIS SPLENDOR 1 MARTIN RHONHEIMER Roman Athenaeum of the Holy Cross Rome, Italy 1. Introduction: Distinguishing choices and their objects from further intention:s and consequences MANY CATHOLIC moral theologians have asserted during the last few years that to know what a person really does each time he or she is acting and, consequently, to qualify (...) morally this concrete doing, one must take into account all the further goals for the sake of which this person chooses what he concretely does. Equally, so these theologians contend, a balance of all foreseen consequences should be established to make out whether a determinate behavior is the right or the wrong thing to choose. Therefore, according to this view it will always be impossible to qualify as morally evil according to its speciesits "object "-the deliberate choice of certain kinds of behavior or specific ads, apart from a consideration of the intention for which the choice is made or the totality of the foreseeable consequences of that act for all persons concerned (VS 79). The encyclical Veritatis Splendor rejects this view of so-called " teleological " ethical theories 2 as incompatible with the exist1 I thank Prof. John M. Haas of Philadelphia for having carefully reviewed my English version of this paper, originally written in German (and not yet published). 2 The term "teleological " as a characterization of ethical theories became successful through C. D. Broad's essay, " Some of the Main Problems of Ethics," Philosophy XXI (1946), reprinted in C. D. Broad, Broad's Critical 1 2 MARTIN RHONHEIMER ence of describable concrete actions which are " intrinsically evil," that is, which are evil " always and per se, in other words, on account of their very object, and quite apart from the ulterior intentions of the one acting and the circumstances " (VS 80). Consequently, this view finally is judged as incompatible with the Essays in Moral Philosophy, ed. D. R. Cheney (London: Allen & Unwin; New York: Humanities Press, 1971), pp. 223-246. Broad simply identified any "teleological" argumentation with a consequentialist one. So he says (p. 230 of the reprinted essays) : " One characteristic which tends to make an act right is that it will produce at least as good consequences as an alternative open to the agent in the circumstances (... ) We can sum this up by saying that the property of being optimific is a very important right-tending characteristic. I call it teleological because it refers to the goodness of the ends or consequences which the act brings about." Broad, then, goes on to say that a " nonteleological " characteristic of an action would be, for example, the obligation, independent from considering consequences, to perform what one has promised. But already in 1930 Broad had distinguished "teleological" from "deontological " ethical theories; see C. D. Broad, Five Types of Ethical Theory (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1930), pp. 206 ff. Many, today, call non-teleological ethics (in Broad's sense) "deontological "; cf. William K. Frankena, Ethics (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1963). The term "teleological ethics" was thus " imported " by German moral theologians, mainly by Bruno Schuller; see his Die Begrundung sittlicher Urteile. Typen ethischer Argumentation in der Moraltheologie, 2nd ed. (Diisseldorf: Patmos, 1980), pp. 282-298 (first published in 1973). According to Schuller, a normative ethic would be "teleological " if it affirms that " the moral character of all the actions and the omissions of man is exclusively determined by its consequences" (282). So he uses "teleological ethics" as synonymous with "consequentialism" (a term in fact created by G. E. M. Anscombe) and even with " utilitarianism." Its counterpart would be " deontological ethics," which holds that there are some actions the moral rightness of which should not be judged exclusively on the basis of their consequences; see also Bruno Schiiller, "Various Types of Grounding for Ethical Norms," in Readings in Moral Theology No. 1: Moral Norms and Catholic Tradition, ed. Charles E. Curran and Richard A. McCormick, S.J. (New York: Paulist Press, 1979), pp. 184-198. However, as it seems to me, these distinctions are not very clarifying; they rather seem to confuse judgments of prudence ("such and such is the right thing to... (shrink)

“Artworks are not being but a process of becoming” —Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory In the everyday use of the concept, saying that something is grotesque rarely implies anything other than saying that something is a bit outside of the normal structure of language or meaning – that something is a peculiarity. But in its historical use the concept has often had more far reaching connotations. In different phases of history the grotesque has manifested its forms as a means of (...) subversive resistance against society’s prevailing notions of form and power. What aids this impact and distinguishes two of its basic stylistic features is the grotesque’s dissolution of form and its hyperbole. Such grotesqueries, however, soon solidify into new forms, new structures of meaning, hierarchy and practice, and in this sense the history of the grotesque is, on one hand, a continual opposition and transgression of the prevailing notions of art as well as of God and humanity, while on the other hand it offers continual resistance to its own solidifying process. As such the grotesque will not and cannot be contained in form without it losing the very thing that makes it grotesque. Even though it is somewhat easy to point out certain stylistic features of the grotesque, the sum of those features tell us very little about what is at play within it. Definitions concerned with the grotesque’s content rather than its form faces similar difficulties. Throughout history, expressions relating to the grotesque have been used in defense of a whole host of different social and cultural discourse including, for instance, Catholicism (See Erhard Schön’s Der Teufel mit der Sackpfeife , 1536), Protestantism (See Lucas Cranach’s Der Papstesel , 1523), a material folk culture (see Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and his World , 1984) and an idealistic romantic structure of meaning (see Wolfgang Kayser’s The Grotesque in Art and Literature , 1957). Thus though the grotesque cannot be reduced to the expression of certain forms or meanings, in order to examine what the grotesque is about one has to try to see how it’s relationship to flow and process and how, by maintaining this relationship, it attempts to avoid solidifying into form and meaning. The process of the grotesque alluded to here revolves around a play between periphery and center, the marginalized and the dominant. Most often this is expressed as a direct negation of the center of power. In the medieval grotesque tradition of the carnival, for example, it is expressed by its emphasis on the nether regions of the body as the center of creation of meaning. Spirit does not come from above, but from the belly, buttocks and genitals, and there is, expressed in this manner, a mockery of the predominant Christian notion of truth and meaning. Such inversions of the sites of meaning most often explicitly express an increased interest in materiality instead of ideal content which comes to the fore through the play between periphery and center. Even in early grotesque Renaissance art (for example in the works of Raphael) the depiction of the mythological or ideal reveals an exploration of the possibilities of the material. The works of art thus explore their own boundaries rather than act as vessels of the divine and in this way the grotesque explores the limits of form and materiality. This in turn brings to the fore a metaphysical dimension in the workings of the grotesque: It is an immanent exploration of its own boundaries. Materiality and metaphysics are joined together, because it is through the awareness of itself as a structuring (dis)order that it places itself in opposition to the prevailing notions of form and power. This way the grotesque expresses an awareness of the division of sign and reality and a search for this reality. It implicitly expresses the awareness that meaning is not something God-given and static, but fluctuating and man-made. In modern explorations of the history of the grotesque it is commonly seen as a form of realism that manifests a shift from the ideal towards the material, freeing art from representing some hidden higher order and instead making the work of art the very site of creation and meaning. Going even further, the grotesque actively opposes the notions of the ideal by marking a shift from an ahistorical view of the world towards the historical. However, this also makes clear why the grotesque has a tendency to solidify into new static forms of meaning, for by establishing itself as a subversive counterforce there is an idea of transgression and emancipation. That is why the grotesque often historicizes and relativizes only to repeat the mistakes of that which it negates: putting itself in the king’s chair. The exploration of the material seems to create new forms and notions of the ideal. The representation of an otherness outside the prevailing notions of meaning and truth becomes a positive manifestation of this otherness as truth itself. Thus the historical “truths” of the grotesque are superseded by history itself. When the expressions of the grotesque solidify into static form and meaning, they become mere objects like anything else in the world. Instead of being this elusive thing of process and flow, it becomes tangible to the existing hierarchy of power as well as history itself. In this way the grotesque can be expunged, included or simply revealed as yet another false notion of truth, which is precisely what has happened with the grotesque throughout the course of history. If from the beginning the expression of the grotesque has not already been in the service of some structure of meaning and truth, it has quickly been included or has quickly included itself in such a structure. But by doing so it rejects its own basis: the tension between periphery and center is replaced by the attempt to create a new center, a new structure of meaning and truth. The doubleness, ambiguity and flow of the grotesque are then rejected by the grotesque itself. THE NON-FORM OF FORM In the critical thinking of Theodor W. Adorno (1903-69) the problem of art, caught between a reductive and prevalent notion of truth and meaning and a peripheral and alienated otherness, is reexamined and reformulated. For Adorno, the instrumental rationality of Enlightenment itself reverts into a new form of mythology which is every bit as static and exclusive as the hierarchies of religion it supersedes. All is excluded that is non-identical to the instrumental mastery of the objects of the world, "For the Enlightenment, anything which cannot be resolved into numbers, and ultimately into one, is illusion; modern positivism consigns it to poetry." 1 As such the non-identical has been banished from the realm of thought and action, and banished specifically to the realm of art. But the realm of art is not able to provide a decent home for it because even modern art is not something entirely autonomous. While it is excluded from the notions of truth and meaning provided by instrumental rationality, it still originates from society. Just like instrumental rationality art is about mastery, structuring and exclusion. Therefore, the problem for art is that it cannot directly provide a space for the non-identical because its mode of operation is similar to that of instrumental rationality. Even worse, art has very few possibilities to free itself from this. If it becomes l’art pour l’art it is at the same time reduced to the very thing instrumental rationality claims it to be: a subjective judgment of taste.expressionism also stands as an example of this. Conversely, art cannot work within the framework of the identity-thinking of society, because any notion of freedom or emancipation would reproduce the exclusive practices of instrumental rationality. For example: Explicit socialist literature may establish itself in opposition to instrumental rationality while at the same time reproducing it. Its language may seem different, but in reality it merely provides a different set of reductive schematics for human life and experience. The problem for the art of the grotesque was, as I mentioned earlier, that far too often it was merely a symbolic manifestation of a notion of otherness—not otherness itself. Because of this the subversive character of the grotesque ends up shaping and containing otherness instead of providing a space for it. According to Adorno the only way to avoid this is to radicalize the grotesque. In order to avoid solidifying into form the work of art has to be an object which cannot be contained in thought or form—a non-form of form. The work of art has to work in a way that it strives for autonomy but without entirely leaving a discernible reality. In other words, it has to pull in two directions at once. Thus the work of art is a paradox. It is autonomous in the sense that it closes itself off from everything outside of the work of art, trying to shy away from the contaminating influence of the identity thinking of instrumental rationality. At the same time though the work of art is heteronomous in the sense that it originates from a specific historical context and is bound to be what society is not. Autonomy and heteronomy are inseparably intertwined. Unable to display otherness itself, but still trying to be a refuge for it, there is only one option for art: It has to turn against itself and destroy its own logic of form, thereby demonstrating how any representation of otherness is impossible. Art becomes a lamentation of the victims of the identity thinking of instrumental rationality and shows the traces of the otherness that is unable to appear. Adorno’s pessimistic theory of art and history stages art as a negative dialectical process where the work of art closes itself off and rejects everything outside, while the individual elements in the work of art destroys its very own logic of form from within: Artworks synthetize ununifiable, nonidentical elements that grind away at each other; they truly seek the identity of the identical and nonidentical processually because even their unity is only an element and not the magical formula of the whole […]. The resistance to them of otherness, on which they are nevertheless dependent compels them to articulate their own formal language, to leave not the smallest unformed particle as remnant. This reciprocity constitutes art’s dynamic; it is an irresolvable antithesis that is never brought to rest in the state of being. 2 Relative to a traditional understanding of the grotesque, Adorno radicalizes the tension between center and periphery, autonomy and heteronomy. In the traditional understanding of the grotesque, as we find it for example in the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin, the grotesque establishes the display of otherness as a new center of meaning and truth. However Adorno rejects such notions and argues instead for a modernism of the grotesque in which both center and periphery are included in a negative dialectical process and continually synthesizing and destabilizing each other’s positions. A modernism of the grotesque works on the inside of the sign or the artwork, continually outlining and questioning the boundaries between materiality and form. This moves the focus away from the relation between the sign or work of art as a conceptual manifestation on one side and the object it refers to on the other side. Instead it implicitly points to the amorphous mass from which the signs and thereby meaning have been carved, the remnants that have been left behind. Modernism of the grotesque does not imply that it is emancipatory or that it reconciles man with nature, and does not represent a new position or a new ideology. It merely remembers and insists on the double nature of man and art: to write or paint yourself or an artwork whole by inscribing meaning in life or by applying form on a canvas is at the same time both creation and destruction. The very signs we use to center meaning in our lives carry its own alienation in them. Meaning surfaces only when process and flow comes to a halt—solidifying, but at the same time excluding parts that do not fit into that particular structure of meaning. NOTHING DONE AND NOTHING UNDONE It has always been difficult for art historians to find a suitable category for the works of the Danish artist Leif Lage (b. 1933). In his paintings the sensitive figuration seems so fragile that it is on the verge of turning into abstraction. Or conversely: the figurative emerges cautiously and hesitantly out of abstraction. As an art critic once wrote, he can almost paint things away. 3 Working in some undefinable space between abstraction and figuration, the Lage’s works shy away from the realm of words, and as a result few critics have been able to write anything meaningful about his works. In fact even fewer have been able to write more than one or two pages. The Danish author and art critic Leif Hjernøe is one of those few, but even he starts off by saying how impossible it is to write about Lage, confessing that his works exist both as process and in a field of in-between which words cannot reach. He writes: Always you find yourself in a place where nothing is done and nothing left undone, and where the elements of the work of art rest in a continuous motion. Always there is the open wound, where infection rather than surgical intervention is considered as an opportunity. And the conflict between matter and antimatter makes all diagnoses uncertain and allows conditions of uncertainty to spread in a place of raw presence. 4 The art works against the diagnosis and the certainty. Words are being eaten up by what is outside the realm of words: tension, process and doubleness. An approach to an understanding of the work of Lage could be to follow his connection to Samuel Beckett (1906-89). One can note, therefore, that Lage has illustrated several of the Danish translations of Beckett’s works. Though one is an author and the other a painter both seek a place where figuration, where the word, erodes. For both this entails an attempt to question and examine and so move in behind the façade of the surface in an exploration of that something or nothing that may be behind representation. At the same time even in the vanishing point of figuration or words, the meaningless words or the disjointed lines still stand as signs of human activity—signs of movement in emptiness. With very few exceptions Lage’s artworks revolve around one motif: Man—most often “en face.” But unlike traditional portraitures Lage’s people are found within. The artworks do not sense the reality of appearances, but rather the existential dimensions within man. As a seismograph they are sensitive to the utmost subjectivity in order to display an objective, sensuous depiction of the very problem of subjectivity. Instead of a static façade of a man, Lage’s “en face” shows the process-character of man. The people in Lage’s paintings are always in process—in the midst of becoming or dissolving. I will take a closer look in the following at the ways in which Lage establishes this sense of being in constant process, of being in-between modes or categories. THE DOUBLENESS OF THE STROKE Lage’s etchings attract attention in particular for the tension conveyed there between the material and the form. The material physically opposes the violence of the needle. But instead of embracing the violence of the needle and the victory over matter—instead of making the artistic creation and figuration express a heroic mastery of the background it is made out of—Lage uses the stroke to express the very tension between stroke and material, figuration and background. In the drypoint etching Untitled from 1983, which illustrated the Danish translation of Beckett’s Ill Seen, Ill Said , the needle tears up the material in long rough lines: Together, the primarily horizontal and vertical lines form a face. Thus the force needed to etch a line in the metal-plate draws attention to itself: It is there in the absence of curves and nuances. Man emerges on the metal-plate after great exertion and in a very simplistic form. This way Lage enhances the nature of the material, as the material’s resistance is not something to overcome. On the contrary the figuration is smitten by its very resistance and as such expresses the violence of its own becoming. Even more pronounced is the fact that the lines do not just show the violence of creation—it actively erases figuration in the same process that creates it. For example the mouth consists of 8-10 horizontal strokes, of which some seem to be connected to each other as if the mouth has been quickly scratched out. The mouth speaks of the inability to speak. In the same way, the eyes are black holes due to a large amount of criss-cross cuts, which together form a dark middle. Those lines, at the same time, form the eyes of the figuration and scratch out the eyes of the figuration. The extroverted aspects of the face—connected to speech and sight—are portrayed as introverted as well. Just as the etchings down into the metal-plate makes something appear. Leif Lage, Untitled , 1983 (etching) The figuration of the etching is connected to creation. It expresses that something is wrought into existence out of nothing by sheer artistic force. However, this force is at the same time presented as a violence of creation, which makes it impossible for form to truly emerge. Herein lies one of the basic principles of Lage’s art, namely that art cannot be that nothing or something behind the realm of words or signs. Without form, art would lose its ability to express anything at all. Form is a necessity if art is to avoid becoming as devoid of expression as the reality is that we cannot reach behind the appearance of things. On the other hand, art cannot raise itself above its own material in joyous celebration of the beauty of form. This would use the material in the manner of an instrument and thus would suppress the otherness it attempts to rescue. When art becomes mere form, any traces of otherness will have dissolved. Then art would be a question of technique, in no way different from the instrumental rationality of society. Therefore art works in a particular space between form and non-form. As Hjernøe says of the works of Lage, it is in the center of the event, in the in-between where things neither are nor are not, "And everything takes place just before it changes character. As the blood just before it coagulates, as the milk just before it separates, as fried egg just before it turns white […]." 5 The precise emphasis on the in-between of Lage’s art points in particular to the work of art as both outside of and in time. The work of art is a singular point in time, but at the same time it is continually in process. In the borderland between form and non-form, between creation and destruction, it shimmers like a fata morgana . The work is done but at the same time undone. It is only there as a cry in response to the inability to come into being. Akin to the etching is the drawing, but while both, of course, use the stroke or line as their main instrument, the paper does not resist the line in the same sense as the metal-plate of the etching. As a result in Lage’s drawings the stroke frolics in a space with almost no tension at all. There is nothing there to keep the pencil stroke at bay, but at the same time this means that there is nothing there to keep it together. One of the more expressive examples of this is found in an untitled drawing from Tegninger og Text ( Drawings and Text ) from 1999. The drawing consists of one unbroken pencil stroke. It is as if the stroke is confused—it darts around on the paper making doodles on the way or gathers itself in more straight lines in the center of the paper. It is in this manner that the semblance of a body is established. A couple of small circles serve as eyes and are the reason that the rest can be read as both face and body instead of pure abstraction. In fact the unbroken stroke serves as both abstraction and figuration as on the one hand it is the stroke that seemingly outlines the shape of a figure, while on the other hand the unbroken stroke dissolves any truly recognizable figuration by continuously, without end or aim, overflowing the boundaries of the figure. Seen again here is a doubleness to the stroke and the act of creation. In the etching it was all about the tension between the resistance of the material which created the doubleness. Here it is the opposite. It is the lack of tension. The stroke is free to do anything, but has no aim: without some kind of resistance, there is nothing to hold figuration together. It threatens to dissolve into nothingness. Conversely, the drawing can also be seen as a process of becoming. Like a form of automatic writing, the pencil darts around until it finds a point of densification. But even in such an interpretation of the drawing, the figuration appears artificial—it points to itself as the result of the artistic act of creation. The stroke is primarily stroke and only secondarily figuration. With its wild movement it calls attention to itself as stroke. Thus the figuration never becomes something in its own right. It points to the basic principle of creation: Someone has drawn me, I am the result of artistic endeavors, and therefore I am not for myself but always overflowing the boundaries that contain me. It is the stroke that in the very same movement creates figuration and dissolves it. Leif Lage, Untitled , 1999 (drawing) THE LIGHTNESS OF COLOR, THE DENSITY OF PAPER Often the watercolor is used as a precursor for larger paintings, because it has an immediacy in which one can quickly paint the main lines of a composition. However, Lage’s watercolors are not temporary points in a process leading to another final painting. They are not sketches, later to be filled with details in another material. For him watercolor is an end in itself. This also implies that he doesn’t try to work against the paper’s absorption of the water color and its tendency to absorb detail. On the contrary, he examines the possibilities inherent in this blurring of the line and absorption of color. As in the previous examples, there are of course recognizable shapes in Lage’s water colors. But these shapes are rarely separable from color, line or even paper. In other words: the figurative and the abstract more or less become one. One of the reasons for this is that Lage often works on wetted paper which means that the paper hungrily absorbs color into its fabric instead of it being on top of the paper. The paper becomes line because it is the absorption of the color which, together with the brush stroke itself, separates the colors from each other. The line is also color and the color is also line, because there is no separation between the different colors other than the colors themselves. At times this results in almost complete abstraction. In such cases Lage add lines with a pencil as if he wants to hold some sort of figuration together. At other times it is the other way around: the strokes of the pencil are a being dissolved by the water color blurring out the figuration. Untitled 1 from 1999 displays various tones of green. The contour of the colors appears unusually rough. Most of all it is reminiscent of a shoreline which has found its form through the work of thousands of years between water and land. Pockets of resistance surface as islands not yet drowned in color—as paper or color not yet consumed by the dominant color. The shape of the colors does not seem created by the hand of the artist, but rather by the inner workings of the watercolor: color against color over time has resulted in this very image, as if it is all a part of a natural process of change and decay. Despite the fact that there are no strong differences in color there seems to be a struggle taking place in the watercolor. For example, inexplicable holes in the dark color, which cover most of the right side of the watercolor, appear as if the underlying color is eating away the dark color, or that the dark color is in the process of covering up the underlying color. The small pockets of resistance demonstrate a process and development that, almost as a happy accident, evokes a couple of small eyes and a large mouth. Behind the colors a few slanted lines can be discerned, but the hand of the artist has long ago disappeared behind the life of the colors. Thus the watercolor seems to be held at precisely the point in time where figuration randomly appears. The small eyes and wide mouth seemingly express the realization of the figuration’s temporality. It is just a moment in time, soon to be consumed again in the life of the colors. The nature, the background it stems from and is part of, moves on undeterred, continuing its everlasting process of creation and decay. In this sense, the watercolor provides an experience of how neither artist nor man is able to transcend the materiality they consist of. The colors of man, the materials man consists of are “becoming” and “progress” but also “decay” and “disappearance”. The artist’s pencil strokes have been eaten up long ago, and the figuration is living on borrowed time. Human or artistic activity is about creating form, transcending mere matter by shaping and applying meaning to it. But Untitled 1 shows the doubleness of such creation: the transience and fragility of human life. Should the figuration come into being, should it rise and transcend the material, which binds it to its temporal existence, it would become nothing because its very existence is conditioned by the life and work of the colors. In the same sense man cannot escape his own temporality. He too, for better or worse, must accept a life in the volatility of sensation. Leif Lage, Untitled 1 , 1999 (watercolor) In most of Lage’s watercolors there seem to be a stronger artistic control than in Untitled 1 . Most often both the arrangement of colors and the technique in which they are painted express the hand of the artist. An example of this is Untitled 2 from 1999. While figuration in Untitled 1 seemed to appear as a happy accident, the figuration is much more “created” in Untitled 2 . Here the most important parts of the figuration, the eyes, the mouth and part of the skull, are colored black and painted on top of the background’s play of colors. The background primarily consists of blue and yellow tones. Only parts of the paper are covered in color, however, which yet again stresses the act of painting: There is a surface which is being filled by color by an artist. The blue tones are concentrated in the figuration, while the yellow tones surround it. All this means that the figuration stands out more clearly in this watercolor. This is also underlined by the fact that the blue and dark tones cover part of the yellow tones as spots here and there. Thus it is not a background which is in the process of consuming figuration, but rather the emerging figuration which blots out the background. Such an understanding is even suggested by how the mouth and eyes are placed in the larger blue color field. The eyes and mouth are in the center of the watercolor, while the blue color field is placed from center out towards the left side. This gives the impression of a face turned slightly to the right and slightly upwards, which again makes the mouth appear to emerge from the paper. It also helps that the mouth cuts the center axis of the watercolor. In other words, the arrangement of the blue and black colors create some depth and perspective which gives the illusion of a figuration, seen partially in profile, emerging from the background. Seen in profile, the eyes and mouth seem extroverted—they almost seem as if they are put on top of the face. But at the same time they are painted as black holes, sucking in the gaze of the onlooker. The watercolor is even more challenging if one follows what may be the faint outline of the skull, which, on the right side of the watercolor, no longer works together with the blue color, but rather alone postulates the outline of the skull. If not the blue color field, but this line, is the outline of the skull, then all of a sudden the face is not in profile but “en face”—staring directly towards the onlooker. Outline and color seemingly work against each other and establish two different expressions. Without the slightly upward tilted expression of the profile, the eyes and mouth do not seem to emerge from the paper. On the contrary, seen “en face,” the eyes and mouth are really gaping pits of darkness. In this sense Untitled 2 is at the same time surface and depth of perspective. The line gives form but at the same time it dissolves the form created by the colors, and vice versa. Leif Lage, Untitled 2 , 1999 (watercolor) As the last example of Lage’s artistic method, I have chosen another untitled work (as indeed nearly all of Lage’s artworks are)—this time from 2000. This is perhaps one of the most figurative watercolors Lage has created, though that doesn’t tell us too much. The painting depicts a human face in blue and green tones on a yellow toned background. The colors create a clear demarcation between the figure and the background, which compensate for the watercolor’s lack of outline. Beneath the face darker tones imply the beginning of the torso, and nuances of color even hint at something which could be a collar. The hair is in even darker tones and its structure is emphasized using pencil strokes on top of the water color. One eye is marked by a brown spot with a darker spot in the middle, while the other eye is added by pencil. The mouth is a round, red dot. In Untitled from 2000 the work between abstraction and figuration is much less pronounced than in the previous examples cited here. Nonetheless the watercolor has a delicacy to it which almost makes the figuration disappear, even as it appears. This has something to do with the fact that all the individual brush strokes have dissolved. The only outlines are those created by the clash of colors. Even the red mouth seems to be more paint than mouth—unable to be formed truly as anything other than a speck of color with some small semblance to a mouth. In contrast to the other watercolors, there is no movement, no progress or decay, just a vibrating standstill. The figure is not emerging or disappearing but embedded in and as surface, and as such it makes the figure seem stuck in its condition rather than freed by the act of giving form: mouth open as a wound. Pencil strokes add detail and life to the hair as an attempt to help the figure emerge. But all this does is create two levels in the watercolor: The pencil strokes are put on top of the figuration rather than being part of it. Thus they end up highlighting the endless distance between the movement and form-giving of the pencil strokes and the static and stuck figure behind these strokes. Leif Lage, Untitled , 2000 (watercolor) MAN AND THE VIEW OF THE ONLOOKER Lage’s works seem at the same time to be an examination of tensions between form and material in art and a display of an image of man full of the same tensions. This is because the people who are emerging in Lage’s images are not just in his works, They are his works. This means that man is not something emerging from a background but is part of this background and vice versa. The art of Lage inscribes man in its surroundings and background. Man is not the ruler of nature. Man does not rise above matter; there is no truly transcendent position for man to occupy in the art of Lage. Instead man is a part of the very matter, it, at the same time, tries to distance itself from in order to distinguish itself from its surroundings. Man emerges in an attempt not to be line, stroke, color. In an attempt to free itself of matter. Should it succeed in this, however, it would turn into nothing. On the other hand, if man fully accepted itself as mere matter it would disappear in it—in instincts, urges and lack of reflection. The appearance of man is thus subject to a state of being in-between. Only in the tension between material and its negation can the outlines of man be traced. However this also means that in the art of Lage man is never something in itself but always in process—on the way to its freedom and its loss. However, Lage’s art is not just about showing the tensions inherent in man but also about showing such tension on the verge of breaking point. In the moment before everything is done, or when nothing yet has been done, the delicate tension between form and material has been stretched to its utmost in such a way that man’s character of process emerges and is contained on the paper or canvas. Therefore, Lage’s art contain traces of human life. Not only is it an autonomous unity of tensions where man is stretched out between its singularity and the surroundings it is a part of. It is also this pulsation between figuration and material which brings about the traces of human endeavor and activity. Even when man almost seems to have disappeared into the material, strokes and lines are still there as a reminder of human activity and potential creative power—as a reminder that hope is still possible and that man is still there. The view of the onlooker seeks out forms and meaning. It seeks outlines and edges. But first and foremost it is the eyes in Lage’s works of art that allow the onlooker to decode the figuration at play. This creates a distinctive relationship between the onlooker and the artwork. The onlooker tries to wrest the enigma from the artwork, tries to reduce it to solid, meaningful form. But the very same moment that hints at such a possibility sees the view of the onlooker confronted with a gaze of its own. The eyes of the figure in the work of art are most often dark pits, as if they were an illustration of the violence committed against the eyes of the onlookers and their search for meaning. Or as if they were a dark reflection of the onlooker’s failed attempts to delineate the traces of life in the artwork to a solid meaningful form. Therefore, the gaze of the figuration speaks not only of its own powerlessness but also of the powerlessness of the onlooker. When the view or sight has trouble finding solid meaningful forms, it has something to do with the fact that the precondition for sight, light, no longer stems from something transcendent. In Lage’s art there is nothing outside the works of art, nothing outside of human life, and as such nothing to shed light on the works of art or human life and reveal solid meaningful forms. All light comes from within. In a western context, light as a medium for sight is central to the understanding of meaning. People speak of the clarity of thought, while knowledge is tied together with enlightenment, and so forth. But the light no longer originates from a divine point of view. It originates from man, who has created himself in the image of God. The problem with this is that light always covers up its own base. Light illuminates something but at the same time it hides itself. 6 While it was previously God who was unknowable, now it is man. It is also problematic that sight and the medium of sight stem from the same place. Following this thought one can posit two final problems. Firstly, the immediacy and presence established by light by making forms and objects accessible to sight is fake. Light is not some independent entity which present things in a neutral manner for the onlooker. It is inextricably tied together with the gaze’s desire after meaning. In other words: Light perverts the appearance of things because it doesn’t originate from some objective entity which allows them to appear as they are. Instead light is based upon and originates from the subject and its conquering gaze, seeking out meaning and form constantly. Secondly, the joining of sight and light makes introspection within human life impossible. Everything can be illuminated by its use value for the subject but only as long as it is separated from the subject, as long as it is an object. But the subject itself cannot be illuminated. Lage’s art tears down such a dividing line between subject and matter, but it does so without reestablishing a divine position from where the light emanates. Therefore, the light in Lage’s art may not illuminate very well. It may not have the certainty presented by modern science or the religions of yesterday. But it does show what such light tries to hide, namely, the subject as it is in its material reality—inscribed in time and death, which are the basic conditions of materiality, but at the same time also full of life in its joy and will to create. For the onlooker the meeting of the gaze in Lage’s works of art is thus also a destruction of the view of the onlooker. The ability to see is challenged in a radical way. Those outlines will not solidify into static form, as if the light was too dim to see. Just as in Lage’s figurations, the view of the onlooker turns to black: turns towards the onlooker in recognition and becoming—or disappearance. NOTES Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment . (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2002): 4-5. Theodor W. Adorno. Aesthetic Theory . (London & New York, 2002): 176. Carsten Bach-Nielsen. “Mere glæde end gru.” Kristeligt Dagblad . September 24, 2002. Leif Hjernøe. “Den yderliggående inderlighed.” LEIF LAGE—Retrospektiv udstilling 1983 . (Copenhagen: Brøndum, 1983): 18. Ibid. Maurice Blanchot. The Infinite Conversation . (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993): 162-163. (shrink)

The emphasis that the modernity gives to disengagement and beginning leads one to think that the modernity itself is in fact a culture that initiares crisis. Even if there is no initial crisis, it can be created through the ambivalent nature of modernity. Behind the concept of crisis lies the notion that history is a continuous process or movement that opens the door to nihilistic understanding which stems from the idea of contemporary life and thought alienation through the pessimistic meaning (...) of the word. There is a dialectical relationship between the ideas of modernity and progress, and the decadence, and the main theme of Nietzsche's philosophical career. Since the death of Hegel, who made the idea of crisis plausible, everything is nothing but a counter-movement not only in Germany, but also in Europe. The first of these counter-movements is romanticism with its objection to the mind which is liberated from the bonds of tradition. The main thesis of the present article is, between reactiveness of romanticism -on the surface- and the modernity; from one side romanticism's consuming modernity, which is its mirror image, while at the same time feeding from it and modernity's manipulating the ideas developed against it and monopolizing them thanks to its ambivalent nature. For this purpose, following an an anti-enlightenment thinker Nietzsche's, anti-romantic footsteps which at the same time feeds from the romantic heritage, an attempt will be made to analyze the relationship between modernity and romanticism. Another goal of this article is to allow a comparison of how the intellectual development in the West finds its response on the modernization process of our country by probing how the modernization experience of early period Islamist's who experienced this process in a feeling of "backwardness" and with a wounded consciousness and anxiety has led to a shallow romantic worldview. SummaryRomance and romanticism are the main topics of this article. Romanticism is a period, whereas romance is a spiritual attitude not limited to this period, therefore, even today it’s existence is felt. In other words, it is not specific to the Germans. This term is often used to correspond to certain aspects of European intellectual life in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, for instance between 1790 and 1850. In its extremely diverse definitions, the most "romantic" definition in our opinion, belongs to Novalis: “I'm romanticizing by giving a high meaning to ordinary things, a mysterious reputation to the ordinary, the honor of the unknown to the known, an infinite look to the finite.” The rejection of existing social reality, the experience of loss, the melancholic longing and the search for loss are the main components of the romantic motive. This study is based on the argument that there is a dialectical relation between romanticism and modernity, which is known as an opposing movement against enlightenment thought. The intellectual feature, which contains the opposite of modernity itself, makes this argument plausible. In addition, the view of modernity as a crisis culture due to the emphasis on disengament and beginnings offers us the possibility to establish a relationship between modernity, which accepts itself as decadence, and romance. Behind the concept of crisis lies the idea that history is a continuous process or movement opening the door to the nihilist understanding in which modern life and thought are alienated in a pessimistic sense. Thus, Allan Megill defines historicism as a prerequisite for nihilism. According to the author, Prophets of Extremity, if the history has no direction to be changed, maintained or lost when wandering in history, it also cannot have a "crisis". The suggestion of "God is dead" is the most concise expression of this crisis. In this crisis state of nihilism, it is a completely forlorn condition of living in the present. Today, which is in the absolute forlorn state; the savior declares his belief that he is devoid of all sorts of features, things that let us reconcile with the current situation of things. In the face of this situation, when people see that the present becomes completely forlorn, they move in two opposite directions with a desire to regenerate culturally: They either have to go back to the past or head for the future. However, every attempt to determine what the future or the past posess will require them to be real, belonging to the present. This will return us to the forlorn state. Nietzsche embraces both opposing sides, but does not attempts choose between them. This is the place where Nietzsche dictates that today is corrupt taking a radical attitude against romanticism fed by the notion of crisis. The fact that modernity has given up its critique of reason, which is revealed by its dialectic, had a great influence on Nietzsche's putting distance between himself and romantics. That is to say, in response to enlightened thought, although romantics speak of unity, apparently, they could not prevent emergence of emotion against mind, local against the universal, individual against social, in other words, the emergence of the second values, which they believed that these were belittled and despised by Enlightenment. Therefore, romantics seem like they could not save themselves from being caught in the web of dialectics in the account they entered that is based on the subject-object distinction in cartesian thought. It is because modernity acts with the consciousness that the life is established on the occurrence and decadence. Based on this, we can say that decadence is inevitable. This decadence (distortion) from the outside may be through movements developed against it, or experienced within itself (even if no one attempts to destroy it). Modernity, with the awareness that it cannot escape from the decadence, wants to arbitrate itself by turning this decadence in its favor by manipulating it. In other words, the modernity dramatizes the feeling of crisis considering itself decadence and the seemingly contradictory ideas of avant-garde and decadence become almost synonymous. It must be the reason why Nietzsche identifies modernity with decadence Modernity manages to put the decadence in its body at the center of attraction by producing self-opposing movements, monopolizing and manipulating. In short, both romanticism and avant-garde movements are the movements that are emerged not against modernity but from itself. Just like an apple worm, they both consume modernity and feed on it. They act as a mirror. Although they seem to criticize, as movements that have emerged from it, they allow the modernity to complete and correct the deficiencies. As a result of this, we can say that romantic critical movements are developed against the world and are shaped by modernity, beginning with the idea of enlightenment, and moved forward in the track of modernity.While romanticism developed in the West as opposed to modernity, in Ottoman-Turkish thought, it was seen as the rhetoric of retardation and regretting of backwardness from civilization. It is inevitable that the experience of modernization in a sense of backwardness, with a wounded consciousness and urgency, will open up space for romance. In our modernization adventure starting with Tanzimat, it is a fact that there has not been a drastic reckoning due to Enlightenment on an intellectual basis, industrialization on an economic basis, programs of revolutionary and nationalist formations on a political basis. Therefore, in Turkish thought, it is not possible to talk about a critical tradition developed against modern paradigm. The status of being audience to what was being experienced in Europe, resulting from superiority was transformed into grudge due to the defeats in the military field. Due to the decadence experienced in the present, inability to find the solution to the problems of its age, melancholic state of mind because of being stuck in the golden age experienced in the past, in the case of a preference, led to a romantic world view because of the appeal of its simplicity to imitate what was once lived in the past. Thus, it is very natural that the direction of Namık Kemal, the cult personality of Islamist-Turkish thought, is towards the past even when talking about progress and civilization. Seeing the 19th century Europe as a re-implementation of ideas and institutions that are actually Islamic, Namık Kemal, in our opinion, showed us a clear example of a typical Islamist romanticism and an example of occidentalist approach regarding that the West learned the civilization from Muslims. In fact, the exact equivalent of this approach displayed in Turkish cogito without even knowing that it is romantic, emerging in the personality of Namık Kemal and in the feeling of backwardness,with a hectic and injured consciousness, is kitschization. So much so that, the state of being kitsch also explains the current situation of Islamic geography which is far from creating a tradition for at least a century, and it clearly tells the usual romantic end. (shrink)

Our self-understanding as human agents includes a commitment to three crucial claims about human agency: that agents must be active, that actions are part of the natural order of the universe, and that intentional actions can be explained by the agent's reasons for acting. While all of these claims are indispensable elements of our view of ourselves as human agents, they are in continuous conflict and tension with one another, especially once one adopts the currently predominant view of (...) class='Hi'>what the natural order must be like. One of the central tasks of philosophy of action consists in showing how, despite appearances, these conflicts can be resolved and our self-understanding as agents be vindicated. The mainstream of contemporary philosophy of action holds that this task can only be fulfilled by an event-causal reductive view of human agency, paradigmatically embodied in the so-called 'standard model' developed by Donald Davidson. Erasmus Mayr, in contrast, develops a new agent-causal solution to these conflicts and shows why this solution is superior both to event-causalist accounts and to Von Wright's intentionalism about agency. He offers a comprehensive theory of substance-causation on the basis of a realist conception of powers, which allows one to see how the widespread rejection of agent-causation rests on an unfounded 'Humean' view of nature and of causal processes. At the same time, Mayr addresses the question of the nature of reasons for acting and complements its substance-causal account of activity with a non-causal account of acting for reasons in terms of following a standard of success. (shrink)

The principle of moral equality is one of the cornerstones of any liberal theory of justice. It is usually assumed that persons’ equal moral status should be grounded in the equal possession of a status-conferring property. Call this the property-first approach to the basis of moral equality. This approach, however, faces some well-known difficulties: in particular, it is difficult to see how the possession of a scalar property can account for persons’ equal moral status. A plausible way of circumventing (...) such difficulties is to explore another avenue for the justification of persons’ equal moral status: moral equality should be grounded in the wrongness of treating others as inferiors. Call this the relation-first approach to the basis of moral equality. This paper aims at providing some reasons as to why this approach should be rejected and clarifying why the property-first approach still represents the most promising way of justifying our commitment to moral equality. Two objections will be pressed against the relation-first approach: first, grounding moral equality in the wrongness of treating others as inferiors gives rise to some disturbing normative implications; second, relation-first accounts cannot vindicate the idea that a range of beings has equal fundamental rights. This, however, is precisely what an account of moral equality is meant to justify. The paper, then, concludes that the relation-first approach fails to provide a plausible answer to the question of the basis of moral equality. Property-first accounts, whatever problems they encounter, are still more viable in principle. (shrink)

June 2022 A Revolutionary New Metaphysics, Based on Consciousness, and a Call to All Philosophers We are in a unique moment of our history unlike any previous moment ever. Virtually all human economies are based on the destruction of the Earth, and we are now at a place in our history where we can foresee if we continue on as we are, our own extinction. As I write, the planet is in deep trouble, heat, fires, great storms, and record flooding, (...) weather patterns drastic everywhere. Capitalism has been so successful in supplying us with an endless array of consumer items, that we have never noticed there is a cost. But there is a cost, the cost is the very life of the Earth herself, and now the day of reckoning is here. Days of reckoning are most often days of rath. But I am hoping that this is a day of major Awakening over the entire planet. We have caused a crisis so great for the Earth we can hardly get our minds around it. But I am proposing that deeply embedded in the crisis are ideas, about who and what the Earth is, Ourselves, and what we are here for. I am proposing that this is a call to all philosophy and philosophers to rethink ourselves from the ground up. The human race has never gotten the Earth right and now we must, for the Earth is the true foundation for civilization. We are in deep trouble with the Earth, and it owes to the fact that the great male thinkers never got the Earth right, they could never make the connection between the life of mind and the life of the Earth. I am proposing that deeply embedded in the crisis we are in are ideas. And that in fact the planet is in the grip of a false metaphysics, and scientific image of nature that really comes most recently from Descartes. His conviction that matter, and with it the Earth, are simply the weighable, the measurable the extended in space and time, utterly devoid of any inner life of mind thoughts or Consciousness. This view of matter and the Earth goes back to the very dawn of thought, Descartes is just its most recent and comprehensive version of things. This view of matter is really a false metaphysics that dominates most of the modern world and underpins the whole scientific image of nature itself. I am proposing this is a false metaphysics and offering a new version of things based on Consciousness. If there is a single idea fueling and driving the destruction of the planet, it is the conviction that the Earth is something without Consciousness. When you intend to ravage and savage the planet, turn it into consumer items to be converted into money in the bank, first pretend that all of the bright beings in the natural world are devoid of Consciousness, just “things” you do not have to have any conscious about destroying them. I am proposing that this term Consciousness, that has appeared as term and a problem for modern science, is the key to getting ourselves right with the Earth. I propose this new theory for science will ramify into every other disciplines as well, and the ways we think just about everything. This old paradigm based on a false theory of matter, has run its course, it has brought us to the brink of our own extinction. We need new ideas, and we need them now. You will find my recent work in the Scientific God Journal under the title: Consciousness as the Organizing Principle, and a very complete version of my arguments for this term Consciousness, along with radical reinterpretation of modern science itself, on the Galileo Commission site. It is a radical moment for all of the thinkers among us, take this as my small contribution to rethinking ourselves in new terms, based on my understanding that the true basis for the whole of Being, the Universe, the Cosmos, and with them Ourselves, is this term Consciousness. And unpack it. And I predict that with this term Consciousness every intractable human problem in both science and the modern world will go down like a line of dominos before it. And so, here are a few new ideas I would offer you. These are the times of the Reappearance of the Feminine, a great Awakening as of Springtime after a long dark and lonely Winter. We are leaving behind us an old civilization based on male dominance, fear lies and control, now in decay, disease, and death disintegrating all around us. We are moving into a whole new civilization based on Love and Truth. A new civilization requires new basic terms values and first principles. And so, I return to Descartes. 1. Just over 300 years ago a young man travelling with the army found himself stranded in a foreign town in a bare room lit by a candle with nothing to do but think. And in a couple of nights Descartes laid the entire thought foundations for modern science and most of the modern world. It isn’t clear that modern philosophers with their funding sources of grants, their graduate students, their reputation and all the perks and privileges of academia can do any better. Descartes claimed there are just two principles in the Universe, Matter and Mind. God was pure mind; human beings were mind and matter. And we are the only ones on the planet with mind. Everything else all of the bright array of beings who share the planet with us are simply matter. And matter? The weighable the measurable the extended in space and time utterly devoid of any inner life of thoughts, feelings, or Consciousness This classification was a boon for developing science. Scientists did not have to worry about any inner life in nature, ideas or Consciousness, they could just set about weighing and measuring, as they have until the present day. But it was a disaster for the Earth. Earth was once worshiped as a Goddess. With Descartes she became almost overnight “things.” Simply commodities and resources, an endless of supply of consumer items, to be turned into money in the bank. And now Descartes concept of matter is up for us. If there is a single idea that is enabling and driving the destruction of the Earth, it is the conviction that Earth is something without Consciousness. This whole scientific image of nature as something devoid of Consciousness is driving the destruction of the Earth, and driving us all insane, and it needs to change. Ever since Descartes formulated Dualism, scientists and philosophers have been trying to get rid of it. They have done this by attempting to make matter the fundamental term of reality, and to explain mind or Consciousness in terms of matter. And now, Consciousness has emerged as term and a problem for modern science. 2. The prevailing Universe picture has been mainly based on the belief that Consciousness appears only at the end of evolution in ourselves and some of the higher animals when matter attains “a certain state of complexity” and it is produced by neurons in the brain. But Consciousness is nothing real in itself, the neurons are doing the work, Consciousness is simply a byproduct of neural activity. As William James summed up this position, not his: Consciousness is to the brain as a shadow to the runner, it runs beside him but never influences his stride. And so, the great problem of neuroscience: How do neurons produce Consciousness? So far, no one has been able to say how. All we have is parallelism. Two processes are running in parallel a train of neural events and a train of Consciousness events. And so, which one is primary? The face of neuroscience and much of the modern world is that the neural events are what is really real, Consciousness is secondary. The conviction that Consciousness is something produced by neurons is so deeply held and has been so for so long, that it seems like an obvious fact. It is in fact an assumption and a theory, and it could all well be the other way around. The scientific image of nature as something devoid of Consciousness is now up for us. It has enabled the destruction of the Earth, and we are now at a unique place in our own evolution where we can foresee if we continue on as we are, our own extinction. And so, there are the best reasons for rethinking Descartes concepts of matter. Scientists and philosophers have been trying to escape dualism by making matter the fundamental term. And now, this has not worked. In a nutshell: The mind body problem, the “hard problem of Consciousness” ---how do neurons in the brain, atoms and molecules give rise to ideas thoughts and feelings and who what and where is the “I” who sees them? And then, the near-death experience. I remind you of the truth of the near-death experience. The body in the bed is brain dead eeg flat, but the patient, pure Consciousness is hovering at the ceiling watching the doctors work over the body below, able to read dials he could not have seen from the bed, sometimes able to events in the corridor beyond the room, all subsequently confirmed by the doctors. Evidence as good as it gets that the patient really was out of his body. And so, the patient is able to see without eyes, hear without ears and to think and remember without a brain. There is not a single scientific principle that can account for this. And I am proposing that the near-death experience is a threshold and a key for a much deeper understanding of the Universe. These three problems are so hard they cannot be solved by present scientific principles and therefore call all present principles and ways of thought into question. When your axioms cannot account for the data, it is time to drop them and find better fundamental terms. We have not been able to solve the problems of Consciousness with the assumption that matter is the most basic and fundamental term. And so, if Cartesian dualism is to be overcome at all, we need to try it the other way around. 3. We are in the position of Copernicus. Remember Copernicus? He was making his calculations on the assumption that the Earth was the center of the Universe until they became so unwieldy that he decided to try it all the other way around. To make the sun the center, the Earth revolving around it. And lo, all of his data fell neatly into place. I am proposing a whole new Universe picture. Evolution makes us continuous with every other being, Consciousness would not be in us if it were not in them also, and then, in the atoms and molecules and cells that make up living beings. I propose to make Consciousness the most basic term and see what follows. I am in fact, proposing a new Copernican Revolution, that Consciousness is the true basis for the Universe and the right fundamental term, for science itself all other disciplines as well, and the whole of the modern world. And I predict that every intractable problem in science or the modern world, will go down like a line of dominos before it. In a nutshell: Consciousness and not matter is “first and fundamental” in the Universe, it is there from the very “Beginning” everything has it and all of the true causalities, the explanatory principles belong to it. Not to matter. What then is matter? All matter is an Appearance of something much more real, Consciousness. All matter is an expression of Consciousness, even the least little bit of matter contains Consciousness, and is an expression of Consciousness. And so, we revise the scientific image of nature. Science at present is two termed, matter/energy. It needs to become three termed: Matter/energy/Consciousness, with the recognition that all of the basic principles, the true causalities of events, and of the Universe belong to Consciousness. And now physics. To accommodate this new Universe picture physics needs to alter just one term, energy. All energy contains Consciousness, that idea alone will change our world forever. The animals the trees the plants are just as conscious as we are, as is the Earth herself, a continuum of many forms of Consciousness of which our own is one. The Earth consists of interacting and intersecting forms of Consciousness, Consciousness within Consciousness within Consciousness within Consciousness. A remarkable work has just appeared entitled “Beyond Words What Animals Feel and Think.” Describing in detail how like ourselves all of the animals are. And the more we can see how like us everything else really is, the harder it will be for us to do them all in, in the interest of turning them into consumer items. And so, here is a new principle of understanding, that entails completely new forms of explanation, and a whole new Universe picture to be spelled out in terms of Consciousness and its various properties. This is a Universe that is aware awake and Enspirited throughout. And so, there is only one principle, not two. And so, how does Consciousness work? There is “no mind/body problem.” My Consciousness is aligning the Consciousness of neurons in the brain, that aligns the Consciousness of all other cells in the body, that aligns the Consciousness of molecules and atoms themselves. Mainly from the top down, but also interactive, and not reduction to the purely physical forces. 4. And so, here is a radical new Universe picture, and with it a new way to think about the Universe itself, the Earth, Ourselves, and Spirit. It requires a complete revision of both of the terms of modern science itself. The problem of the modern world owes in deep measure to Descartes concept of matter as something devoid of interior life. But he is only the most powerful and simple expression of a whole tradition of thought that predates him, that goes back to the very dawn of thought itself. It owes to the conviction of both Plato and Aristotle that the Earth was something devoid of reason, or mind, and therefore something to be held in complete contempt. We are emerging from a civilization based on contempt for the Earth, and down the road, it will become contempt for the body, sex, women, the Native people, and people of color everywhere. And so, this entire tradition is now up for us, it has brought us to the brink of our own extinction, and we need to get beyond it. I am proposing that this term Consciousness is the way out. The missing piece of the puzzle and the idea whose time has come. And it will enable us to move into a completely new civilization based on respect for the Earth, women, sex, people of color, that honors everyone and has a place for all. Revolutions in science occur when new data show up that cannot be accounted for by existing paradigms (Thomas Kuhns: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions). Consciousness, and all the properties and problems of Consciousness are just such data, and they compel a new scientific revolution. But we are a scientific age. A new Copernican revolution in science is such as revolution everywhere. And Consciousness is the key to getting every other reality at all levels and depths right as well. It will enable us finally to get the Earth right, get ourselves right with the Earth, and with one another. Archimedes: Give me a place to stand, and I will move the world. I am proposing a new synthesis among our fundamental terms in which this term Consciousness is the new lynchpin. And so, I return once more to Descartes. Descartes in the Mediations was a dualist, they were two realities interacting in the pineal gland mind and body. But Descartes age was high on “Cartesianisms,” on Descartes concept of matter. Animals were simply cleverly wired machines (Hobbes called them automata). Rumor had it that Descartes followers went about kicking dogs reasoning that their howls were not due to any feelings of pain, but simply the wiring of the machine. We have been doing this to the Earth ever since, and now the Earth is not going to stand for it any longer. It is time we all woke up. There is no matter in Descartes sense of it, or in Plato and Aristotle’s sense of it. This old concept of matter is embedded in all of the crisis and catastrophes---fires, drought, pandemics, over population, the disintegrating economies, our ways of life, capitalism and consumerism themselves. All matter is Enspirited, contains Consciousness, and is an expression of Consciousness. Now I tell you something about Descartes you may not know. In the Mediations was a dualist, there are minds and bodies. But by the end of his life, he knew the truth. Descartes guided his whole life by these vivid dreams, and toward the end of his life he had this dream: He saw the Universe as a giant machine and in the heart of the machine propelling the whole, was Consciousness. And so, out of the shades and shadows and into the light of day. Here is a renewed and a new science, a new cosmology. And with it, a revolutionary new metaphysics. The whole of the modern world is in the grip of a false metaphysics, based on Descartes theory of matter. Here is a new, and finally true metaphysics based on the single term, Consciousness. 5. And in all my works, I spell out this new metaphysics based on Consciousness, and what it means for how we think about virtually everything: The Universe, the Earth, Ourselves, and Spirit. Of who, what and where Spirit is, that we may connect with Spirit everywhere. There is only one term for the Universe, and not two, this single term Consciousness, that manifests itself in two modes: Consciousness in Form, Consciousness Formless. And so, here is a sketch of what this new term Consciousness really means. For four great aspects of the real, four new cornerstones for a whole new civilization on Earth, based on Love and Truth. A. For the Universe: New causalities, all matter is an expression of Consciousness, awake and aware, Enspirited throughout, which has a place for the causalities of love ideas intent plan and purpose, what Aristotle called final causality, that for the sake of which. And it has a place for subjectivity, the greatest mystery in the whole of the Universe, knowable only in ourselves, but there in everything else as well, bedrock in the chain of causalities. The buck stops here. Here are two very different Universe pictures. The Cartesian Universe consists of things, pushed, and pulled around by the physical forces that function blind. The true Universe consists of selves and not things. Selves at least in ourselves, are organized and focused about an I, an I am, or a sense of self in everything, ever other being dear to itself. Just one aspect of subjectivity. And so, it is Consciousness all the way down, and subjectivity all the way down. Science proceeds on the basis of the negligible of what it can leave out as unimportant. Subjectivity is the ultimate animating principle of the Universe. What Descartes really did was to strip from nature what is most essential about it, its animating principle Consciousness. And so, we come out of a long history of “clunk.” The great male thinkers have killed creation. First in concepts and now in the lived life. And so, after centuries of fruitless search, not all of it in vain, finally, and just in time the true basic principle for the Universe has shown up in virtually all disciplines, this term Consciousness. B. And so, the Earth: What does this term Consciousness really mean for the Earth? It means that all of the bright array of beings around us have Consciousness. And the more we can realize how like us they are, the harder it will be to do them all in. Is this what it really means to be “made in the image of Spirit?” To destroy ever other living being? The god of Genesis is a creator god who has created billions and billions of living forms. Man, taking himself to be made in the image of Spirit has destroyed virtually all of it. The Earth is not things, not commodities and resources, not an endless array of consumer goods. The Earth consists of conscious living spiritual beings like ourselves, who need to be honored and respected, nurtured and cared for, to be Loved. And if the human race can finally pull it off and bring Love here and start helping the Earth rather than destroying her, even our vast numbers now at 8 billion, may not matter. Deeply embedded in the modern world is a false cosmology based on the hitherto useful but ultimately false metaphysics of Descartes. In particular it owes to Descartes concepts of matter, and of the Earth, as something devoid of Consciousness. And now this concept is up for us. If there is a single idea enabling and driving the destruction of the planet, it is the conviction that the Earth is something devoid of Consciousness. And we all have a vested interest in keeping this false concept in place. When you intend to ravage and savage the Earth, to turn it into consumer items, and money in the bank, first pretend she has no Consciousness that way we need not have any conscious about it. We are in deep trouble with the planet. Virtually all human economies are based on the destruction of the Earth, and we are now at a place in our history where we can foresee if we continue on as we are, our own extinction. And so, here are a few new guiding principles for the planet, based on Consciousness. Consciousness has field properties. The Earth is Consciousness throughout, connected and interconnected throughout, intersecting and interacting fields of Consciousness of which our own is one. To harm one is to harm all. Only this understanding of the Earth can set our destructive technologies, and capitalism, their goals, and their limits. The real problem with capitalism, and with civilization itself is it has no true understanding of the Earth, all the exquisite networks and webworks that connect all beings with one another. Nor it is about to admit that the Earth is our “life support system,” reason gone insane in the modern world. We are destroying our life support system, capitalism is the full expression of the human death wish in the modern world, and it needs to change. And now, let the barriers between ourselves and all other beings go down. C. And so, Ourselves. This new Universe picture based on Consciousness opens into and has a place for new concepts of human identity. In particular, it has a place for reincarnation, a process whereby one Consciousness dons’ bodies again and again and lays them down. This is a process wholly impossible on materialistic theories. This new view of things puts a higher perspective on Freudian determinism, which is a partial knowing in a greater account. We are something more than the victims of genes drives and childhood. We are immortally eternal evolving spiritual beings who take on a cycle of earthly lives in order to achieve certain goals and abilities, and then, our earthly cycle complete, we depart the Earth plane for other areas of the Universe physical or purely spiritual, to continue our evolution elsewhere. The scientific evidence for reincarnation is increasing on all sides, see for example the work of Michael Newton, a mainstream scientist forced to confront the fact of reincarnation. A completely new reincarnational picture is now emerging everywhere. We choose our parents for abilities we could acquire through them. We all come here with reasons for being here, and we all have free will, an original property of Consciousness, and we work out our issues accordingly. We all come here with the same reason for being here. It is to experience the Earth plane and human society at all levels and depths, in every social role, every climate, both sexes male and female and in all races. We are all here to acquire a deep understanding of the Earth plane with all its challenges and all of its present problems. We are not here to devour and consume the Earth, but to honor her for the learning experience she makes available for us. And so, reincarnation is the great equalizer, the fundamental basis for any bill of rights. Many of the problems of the modern world owe to the fact that reincarnation has not been taught in the West. Reincarnation was the center piece of Jesus teachings. It was banned by a fourth century council that decided the populous could best be controlled through fear. They edited all mention of reincarnation from the scriptures, and inserted fear terms instead, a judgmental god, and so on. If reincarnation had been taught, there would have been no suppression of women, but the gift of both sexes would have been honored and developed. And there would have been no reason for contempt for people of color because who they are, we have been or will be. There is no reason to look down on anyone when we know that our own identity includes membership in theirs. The truth of reincarnation needs to be the foundation for getting ourselves right with the Earth, and with one another. D. And so, Spirit. This new Universe picture, based on Consciousness, has a place for Spirit as simply Infinite Consciousness. All universes all worlds are formed out of this Consciousness, divine and sacred throughout. And Spirit is everywhere in the Earth and can be connected everywhere. And the Native North American people had things right. Everything has its own Spirit, and without contradiction is also an expression of Spirit. And what I am really doing in terms of concepts of modern science is presenting the Native North American version of the Real. And this new Universe picture has a place for the essential insight of all religions almost smothered by church tradition: Love. Not an emotion but a great Oneness, that can be found everywhere, even in a busy city street. But especially in the Earth, that is levels and depths of Oneness everywhere. And so, for the first time in their long and bitter antagonistic history, science and religion now share a common base with this term Spirit, the lynchpin in a new conceptual framework. And I offer an interpretation of where we are in our history, this present moment of historical grace, and these tumultuous times in which we live, the return of the Goddess and the Divine Feminine, the Reappearance of the Feminine in history, the Advent of Women, this great Awakening, as of Springtime after a long dark Winter, the Awakening, the Second Coming. And so, stay tuned! (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THE IMPACT OF VER/TATIS SPLENDOR ON CATHOLIC EDUCATION AT THE UNIVERSITY AND SECONDARY LEVELS* CARDINAL PIO LAGHI Prefect of the Sacred Congregationfor Catholic Education INTRODUCTION T HE TOPIC which has been proposed to me, "The Impact of Veritatis Splendor on Catholic Education at the University and Secondary Levels,'' requires a note of clarification with regard to the word impact. When this Encyclical Letter of Pope John Paul II appeared, (...) it was received with much comment, both positive and negative, on the part of the press and the other media. This is one aspect of the topic proposed : to trace in a synthetic way a picture of the reactions which the document stirred. Such would certainly be an interesting study, but I would perhaps be led to traverse much terrain before arriving at the nucleus of what I feel is my duty to say to you. I shall limit myself, therefore, to commenting on two positive reactions appearing in Italian newspapers immediately after the publication of the Encyclical. The first was in the well-known Roman newspaper, Il Tempo, under the title, "An Act of Consistency in an Epoch of Doubt." It states: "If lighthouses had been moved every month, the sailors in the night would have seen the ships of history dashed against the rocks; and no voyager would have reached his homeland again if the North Star, within the Zodiac, had to obey vacillating positions of fashions and ideologies.... The papal document stirs discussions.... Nevertheless it is very much of current interest. While many ships finish on the rocks because they have * This paper was originally presented at the Forum on Catholic University Education at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, 3 November 1995. 1 2 CARDINAL PIO LAGHI sailed following fireflies instead of lighthouses and while the ruling classes have shipwrecked for having chosen compasses that lie, there is abroad a need to see the permanence of certain values recognized in the midst of all that changes, the necessity of an ethical nucleus linked to principles of the human person, honesty, freedom and responsibility." This is a positive reaction, then, which welcomes the Encyclical as a text which says things that have to be said, giving basic directions for a journey, and stating the things no one dares to speak but of which everyone knows the necessity in daily living. This is also the substance of another comment on the Encyclical that I think it would be useful to cite. Carlo Bo, a university professor and a well-known figure in Italian intellectual life, writes: "Modern culture no longer has objective criteria for distinguishing good from evil,'' and he adds, "John Paul II has fought against Communism in defense of freedom; now he criticizes Western culture, which makes of freedom an absolute value.... The exaltation of freedom leads to ethical relativism, against which the Pope raises his voice." Agreement and basic approval are transparent in these lines, but the title under which they appear is "A Call to Order." Immediately the image is evoked-negative to the sensitivities of our times-of a commander intent on imposing order on his soldiers. The heart of the problem perhaps, at least with regard to the teaching of moral theology in the Catholic context, is in the clear perception of the need for an unchanging point of reference, of a lighthouse for the voyage, and at the same time the fear of speaking of this need, of making it the subject of reflection, communication, and teaching. There is a kind of widespread fear which keeps us at a distance from the truth, from the permanent foundations of human acting, from the objective and the universal; a fear which is perhaps the principal cause on account of which so great a part of contemporary humanity risks dying of thirst while standing before a spring of cool water. In order not to appear authoritarian or negative, one keeps silent, does not speak, expresses oneself in a partial or even an erroneous way with regard to all that is most necessary for life. It would be difficult not to see in this a problem which is typically an educa- THE IMPACT OF VERITATIS SPLENDOR 3... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Note of Interpretation: Theistic Finitism as an Aesthetics of Religious NaturalismAndrew Stone Porter (bio)In our cosmological construction we are, therefore, left with the final opposites, joy and sorrow, good and evil, disjunction and conjunction—that is to say, the many in one—flux and permanence, greatness and triviality, freedom and necessity, God and the World. In this list, the pairs of opposites are in experience with a certain ultimate directness (...) of intuition, except in the case of the last pair. God and the World introduce the note of interpretation.—Alfred North Whitehead1Theistic finitism, the position that God is not omnipotent, is the most tenable solution to the problem of evil—but it also necessitates a slide toward immanence. Among the ranks of the finitists we find philosophers such as William James,2 process thinkers such as Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne,3 theological personalists such as Edgar Brightman (and, Rufus Burrow argues, his pupil Martin Luther King, Jr.),4 feminist disability theologians like Julia Watts Belser,5 and popular religion writers such as Harold Kushner.6 Like many others, Kushner found in finitism not an answer to an abstract theological puzzle, but an existentially necessary salve for the despair that nearly overtook him when his three year-old son was diagnosed with a terminal degenerative disease. No loving, all-knowing, all-powerful creator would ever allow such [End Page 70] a thing to happen, Kushner reasoned. If God is not all-powerful, then God need not be the author of our pain, but a friend who hurts with us as we bear it. Rather than sadistic puppeteer, a finite God becomes “the fellow-sufferer who understands.”7 As Jürgen Moltmann put it, “the one who cannot suffer cannot love either. So [God] is also a loveless being.”8 Or, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer reflected as he awaited execution in a Nazi concentration camp, “Only the suffering God can help.”9However, when one strips away divine omnipotence, one must also bid adieu either to God’s omniscience or creator-hood: for an omniscient creator, crafting the world with full knowledge of how everything would unfold, would be ipso facto omnipotent. We are left, then, with the following alternatives: we could posit a God who pressed the “create world” button not knowing what would happen (which seems irresponsible, calling into question God’s goodness)—as Tim Bayne puts it, “If future contingents fall outside the scope of God’s knowledge, then creation was a massive gamble.”10 We may share Albert Einstein’s famous distaste for a God who plays dice with the universe. The other alternative is that God’s knowledge and power are partial, that the Divine is merely one being/force among many. But if God is “just a stranger on the bus, trying to make his way home,”11 then in what sense can we say that God is God at all?This paper offers a construal of theistic finitism as a form of religious naturalism with an aesthetics of empathetic solidarity. That is, when we relinquish belief in God’s omnipotence, instead imagining that God is struggling and suffering along with us, we relinquish as well belief in an overbearing “supernatural realm” or “order” governing/underlying all things. To see God in this way, as Whitehead says, is to “introduce the note of interpretation.” And that note, I suggest, is a musical note, specifically a blues note.12 To call the loving [End Page 71] friendship we experience “God” is an aesthetic choice, an informed way of interpreting life in order to move through it with companionship, tenderness and care. A naturalistic religiosity, in Carol Wayne White’s phrasing, “can be a mode of reflecting on, experiencing, and envisioning one’s relationality with all that is.”13 In this way theology becomes, as Belser puts it, “a grammar of the imagination.”14 As a blues aesthetics of empathetic solidarity, theistic finitism may be considered a form of religious naturalism particularly well-suited to our present moment, mired as it is in cascading crises and careening into catastrophe. I suggest that, as young spiritual seekers exit churches in search of more meaningful community... (shrink)

continent. 2.3 (2012): 218–223 Vijay Prashad. Arab Spring, Libyan Winter . Oakland: AK Press. 2012. 271pp, pbk. $14.95 ISBN-13: 978-1849351126. Nearly a decade ago, I sat in a class entitled, quite simply, “Corporations,” taught by Vijay Prashad at Trinity College. Over the course of the semester, I was amazed at the extent of Prashad’s knowledge, and the complexity and erudition of his style. He has since authored a number of classic books that have gained recognition throughout the world. The Darker (...) Nations , a peoples’ history of the Third World, sent defibrillating shockwaves through an academic world that had almost forgotten the epic scope and historic dignity of the non-aligned movement and post-colonial struggles. In his recent, award-winning work, Arab Spring, Libyan Winter , Prashad delves into his capacious knowledge of the Third World to excavate the discourses and narratives surrounding the upheavals of 2011. “Revolutions have no specific timetable,” states Prashad in the opening line of this exciting and provocative look at contemporary events. Instantly, an atmosphere of suspense emerges. The reader is alerted to the problem of history. Does the making of history then involve a suspension of historical time, or is it a continuous narrative structure into which events must eventually be integrated? Arab Spring, Libyan Winter shows that the answer to the question, “How is history made?” lies just as easily in the asking. The first half of the book works through the events that transpired to bring about the explosive popular uprisings of Arab Spring: Tunisia and Egypt, Yemen and Bahrain. But the events are not put together in a cohesive, chronological fashion. Using an uncommonly gripping style more akin to the folk-story motif of the djeli than to traditionally Orientalist academia, Prashad suspends a given situation, points out its components, and traces back the characters and genealogies that define each link before resuming a narrative. Every moment is an end to itself, and an origin of something different. Thus, the making of history becomes the suspension of its own progress, it’s catastrophic 'stability,' in a process of differentiation through inclusion. Empirically, one might suggest that history is a condition of time, and by extension, of the subject, but history is also an eminent producer of the Subject and her concept of time through memory and narrative. Hence, history is often overdetermined by a dominant narrative of the sovereign. The apparently chaotic composition of Prashad’s historicity is, then, an interstitial morphology of resistance. It illustrates that the time to act for the revolutionary lies in the gaps within the dominant historical realities. It points out the sorties of signifiers constituting nothing in the obliterated ruins of history. Through such illuminations, Arab Spring, Libyan Winter breaks through “the surface of history” to elaborate revolution’s snapping synapses, exploding interruptions and breaches, connecting flows. Messianic Politics It is tempting to think, 'History is either singular, or it is diffuse. It is either one coherent factual narrative, or it is comprised of the aletheia of the multitude.' Yet the reader finds Prashad examining the structure of history on multiple levels. For Prashad, world history is shaped by geographically defined political movements, such as communism or national liberation, with historical agents like the working class for the former and the nationalist militant for the latter. Religion, however, is another matter: “Religion has an unshakable eschatology which a post-utopian secular politics lacks.” Within the telos of religion, there appears on the horizon the image of Benjamin’s thoughts on messianic time—time as “a small fissure in the continuous catastrophe,” a break with history, may contain an ultimate redemption of the human beyond the political power struggle. Succoring the split between geo-political and utopian-religious (messianic) time in the context of Arab Spring, Prashad indicates that the base of “the deep desire and commitment to some form of democracy” is forged by the affinity between eschatological Islamist politics with the People. To think about the Subject of messianic time in the context of the lack of a “coherent timetable” for emancipatory politics, it is perhaps best to return to the modern tradition of Martin Luther King, Jr., whose prefigurative blending of liberation theology and emancipatory politics became most important during his works of 1963, the climactic year of “The Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” the March on Washington, and the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church. In “The Letter,” King states the point bluntly: Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct-action campaign that was “well timed” in view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant ‘Never.” We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.” The timing of rebellious action must not be a part of history. It must change history. The kairos appears spontaneous and untimely in its convulsive, shocking presence, yet it is, deeper still, a path, a longue durée , forged through diligent and rigorous praxis. King put a finer point on the path of historic liberation in his declaration in his 1963 speech at Western Michigan University: “[T]ime is neutral.... Somewhere along the way we must see that time will never solve the problem alone but that we must help time. Somewhere we must see that human progress never rolls in on the wheels on inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated individuals who are willing to be co-workers with God. Without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the insurgent and primitive forces of irrational emotionalism and social stagnation. We must always help time and realize that the time is always right to do right.” Time, then, exists in “the neutral,” while action must turn to the kairos , not only of taking time, but taking the right time. By turning our relation to time into kairos , we move time from its context within history to a duration between histories—the longue dure?e of Messianic time. The implementation of neutrality in this context suggests a broad space of time to extend through the valley of positive and negative. In Roland Barthes’s lectures from 1978, the neutral takes place in this minimal distance of non-conflict that exists outside of two extremes. It is, in the words of Maurice Blanchot, “the non-general, the non-generic, as well as the non-specific.” For Blanchot, the neutrality of time permeates life as death, impassive and beyond control; such is the neutrality of messianic time, which permeates the charge of history, changing the "I" into the "one." The neutrality of time therefore implicates history in a case against extremism, showing that the work of the radical is not to tend to any particular side, but to have the time to navigate through the terrible terrain of history by altering its course, its patterns and rhythms of movement, connection, sociality. Hence, one does not simply “make history,” one alters the course of history in accordance to “the right time.” The historical path toward emerging power is transmitted as a gesture to the outside of history, against history; a gesture as simple as reaching out. Thus a counterhistory, to use Foucault’s term, is brought forward as the guide of time past a point of no return, a Rubicon, the point where the normal path of history falls to the past. The subject, who must be the only true agent of history, facilitates time through helpfulness, and both the Subject and her history become decentered in relation to one another. Yet history negates the neutrality of time. As Barthes discloses, although the neutral is the “thought and practice of the nonconflictual, it is nevertheless bound to assertion, to conflict, in order to make itself heard.” Engaged with history, time is charged with a destiny, and becomes an opposition. As Prashad insists, “For Arab lands, the events of early 2011 were not the inauguration of a new history, but the continuation of an unfinished struggle that is a hundred years old.” The emergence of the Subject during Arab Spring did not conceive of a new history, but changed the path of history toward a different destiny. “Historical grievances combined with inflationary pressures now met with the subjective sense that victory might be at hand—this was not simply a protest to scream into the wind, but a protest to actually remove autocrats from their positions of authority. The facts of resistance had given way to the expectation of revolutionary change.” The negativity of this charge toward “revolutionary destiny” rendered control, as a positive force, seriously lacking. The lack of control lies in the problem that the Subject is not totally detemporalized or timeless, but untimely in her presence. The Subject is untimely, because her work is visionary, and it is only through such visionary work that the Rubicon can be crossed. Still, the crossing of this border is haunted by anxiety over an impending disaster that lays in wait. It is only through the form of what Benjamin calls divine violence, captivated not with the justice of the means, but the ends—the transformation of history—that a revelation of history’s traumatic foundations can be liberated, and patterns and rhythms of time developed throughout obscured traditions awakened. In this situation, the Subject appears to be outside of right, but setting the state to rights. Because her position is correct, in-so-far as the rebelling subject rebels due to a lack of recognition, her representation appears outside of the norm, which is mistaken as right. Therefore, such visionary work must be carried out through obscured traditions, underground, away from the surveillance of empire. Explaining his method from the start along the lines of Marx’s metaphor of the mole, Prashad insists, “It is the burrowing that is essential, not simply the emergence onto the surface of history.” Arab Spring, Libyan Winter is a book on uncharted networks of time, spread out over the 252 pages like an elaborate spider’s web of passages intertwining with and overwhelming the machinery of the state. Although untimely, Arab Spring was not a flash in the pan, or a Facebook or Twitter revolution. Prashad notes that the government’s suspension of these tools led to further radicalism by furthering communications through face-to-face encounters. In existential terms, Arab Spring might be thought of as a revolution of Being over techne , an uprising of the unchartable, infinite potential of the Other. The name of this Other is found in Chance. The faith of the revolution lies in the proper decentering of the subject, its giving to the Other of time, for only with respect to time does history actually appear on the horizon of the subject, rather than as an imposition. This time of historical agency appears as a moment when anything can happen—a revolutionary truth event where everything comes into question while being realized in its Otherness as a community of the people begins anew in the streets amidst discourse, friendship, reconfigurations of hegemony, and a becoming of a constituent power. Throwing a wrench into the gears of the “cobwebbed tradition” of Orientalism, the decentering of history in Arab Spring, Libyan Winter is a defining quality of its impassioned revolutionary cry. But perhaps the most paradigmatic points of the book emerge from the unexpected voices. To make the connection between the particular manifestations of revolutionary demands to the general historic terms of revolution, Prashad quotes an anonymous young Egyptian in Tahrir Square, who reminds us, “[T]he French Revolution took a very long time so the people could eventually get their rights.” Far from timelessness, the historicization of Arab Spring must exist precisely within the most uncanny appearance of time, as something that does not appear to come from the natural state of time as we know it, but in arriving has completely transformed the way that we understand time. Strange Monsters Revolution is never as simple as a revolt from below against a rusting structure of elites trying to remain in power. As with the French Revolution, Arab Spring consisted of complex familial ties, outside interests, and religious factions fighting alongside, often in awkward juxtaposition to, liberals, working class parties, farmers, and students. It is perhaps because of this historically difficult and incongruous composition that the Arabic word for revolution is thawra , referring to the image of the bull, or thawr , which has religious significance as a pagan deity for the Ancient Semitic tribes and Cartheginians. If Daniel Guérin was correct in saying, “Anarchism and Marxism drink from the same spring,” then it is quite a different oasis that drove the thirsty beast of revolution through what Prashad calls, “the Libyan labyrinth.” Recalling Bataille’s Acéphale, the intestinal labyrinth gains significance as the mode of metabolism and rumination in which, “(the Acephale) has lost himself, loses me with him, and in which I discover myself as him, in other words, as a monster.” Unraveling the discourse of the revolution, the flows of power and hegemony—from Qaddafi’s nationalist coup in 1969 to the wars with Chad from 1978 to 1987, the neoliberal reforms of the 1990s to, finally, the War on Terror—we find that the metabolic process of Libyan Winter ends in the production of oil. In a process of what Prashad calls “involution,” Qaddafi’s bellicose policies, along with his attempts to nationalize Islam together with oil, mutated the source of his power, turning his house against itself. Already a divided nation, with its two major cities on opposite geographic sides of the country, Libya became split between two opposed political powers—liberal reformists and staunch nationalists—as Qaddafi’s political disengagement manifested through what can only be described in psychoanalytic terms as a recursive passage a l’act (mysteriously calling Wikipedia “Kleenex,” declaring that opponents drank hallucinogens with their instant coffee, and so on). Prashad declares, “The mercurial style that Qaddafi adopted was not about his personality alone, but also a leader’s natural response to a system that relied upon power brokers whose own loyalty… did not have any ideological commitment to the system.” As in the case of other nations during Arab Spring, the true expression of revolt was an outward exposition of what had inwardly been happening in microcosmic societies throughout the realm—from indigenous tribes to political parties, for a century, the people, partly motivated by (and in resistance to) economic impositions of development, had been changing the traditional social compositions and participating in what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls, “the relative autonomy of the movement from the leaders.” It was this empowerment of political reconfigurations taking place under the context of new democratic assemblages that shocked the elites and evoked such a powerful response. Unlike Qaddafi’s awkward policy choices and rants, real acts of power from the West were clear and decisive. Prashad sets the stages of war and diplomacy, far removed from the deserts, mountains, and cities that forged the backdrop of popular politics. Taking place under the now-classic architecture of the “four pillars” of US interests—oil, the War on Terror, Israel, and the circumvention of Iranian hegemony—we find elites rubbing elbows in “Heliopolist cocktail parties and hushed conferences in Kasr al-Ittihadiya” as well as the Concorde-Lafayette hotel in Paris, which provides the setting for a meeting of anti-Qaddafi figures consolidating their power. These scenes are buttressed with the careful portraiture of key historical actors. As Prashad brings the stage of history to life, we find the diplomats and liberals like Frank Wisner, whose career has brought him from Enron in the late 1990s to the Obama Administration, under the aegis of which he was meeting with Mubarak about military support during Arab Spring. We spy the provocateurs, for instance, gauche cavalier , Bernard Henri-Levy, who telephones Sarkozy from Benghazi about the need for more NATO air strikes. We follow the rebel military establishment as it suffers mysterious deaths and even more mysterious assents (like that of apparent CIA cohort, Khalifa Hifter). In each of these intriguing characters, we find different representations of the security state biopolitique: an oil-injected reification that drives Arab Spring from the resentment of rising food prices to the brink of implosion in Libyan Winter. Reminiscent of the scenes of Cold War soirées represented in old Bond films, the aristocratic fight for oil against democracy that was Libyan Winter presents a harsh truth that the new global crisis is simply the continuation of the old history: the global exploitation of capitalism waged against the imagination of the people. As Benjamin laments, “The labyrinth is the right path for the person who always arrives early enough at his destination. This destination is the marketplace.” Yet, “(t)he labyrinth is the habitat of… a humanity (a class) which does not want to know where its destiny is taking it.” Thus, the labyrinth leads, like the desert, only further into itself. As Blanchot explains, “The desert is even less certain than the world; it is never anything but the approach to the desert.” Only the visionary can take time out of the involution toward oblivion. It is here, in this approach to and escape from history, that we find ourselves within Benjamin’s Golgotha, Blanchot’s desert: A space of indeterminate uncertainty where we become familiar only with our own exile. Blanchot writes, “For the moderated and moderate man, the room, the desert, and the world are strictly determined places. For the man of the desert and the labyrinth, devoted to the error of a journey necessarily a little longer than his life, the same space will be truly infinite, even if he knows that it is not, all the more so since he knows it.” The desert, as allegory, provides an eschatology, a mortality in the destiny of Arab Spring. But any allegory of nature might lead to a labyrinthine eschatology (for example, in Bachelard, the forest presents "a limitless world"); the prescience of the untimely is always an uncanny acceptance of the infinite within the finite—the outside of what is understood. Transgenerational and occupied with the image of the future, the untimely makes otherness its home as it proceeds toward liberation. In the work of helping time navigate this dangerous passage of history, Prashad illustrates that the more violent break with history may have occurred in the peaceable struggles of Tahrir Square, and not in the military clashes of Qaddafi with his former Generals who defected to the CIA and NATO countries. It might be possible to suggest, then, that in the case of Tunisia and Egypt, the historical subject of the people was drawn together in a Dionysian dance of different rhythms in the marvelous realm of the ancients, while we fear that the case of Libya suggests an Apollonian future where time, itself, may lay dying under the machinic hand of history. The properly Nietzschean inversion would follow: time is dead, for history has killed it. Yet, if time is dead, struck down in Golgotha, exposed in the desert, mauled by the thawra , it is only in the present sense that it is rendered impossible outside of the context into which the untimely has thrown us. Thus, if history becomes an art of revolution, life as being-towards-death (death as the provocation of the neutrality of time) becomes what Benjamin calls “the allegory of resurrection” through the glorious ruins of history. Prashad ends his work with a rousing finale: “The time of the impossible has presented itself. In Egypt, where the appetite for the possibilities of the future are greatest, the people continue to assert themselves into Tahrir Square and other places, pushing to reinvigorate a Revolution that must not die… For them the slogan is simple: Down with the Present. Long live the Future. May it be so.&rdquo. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:GENDER AND THE PRIESTHOOD OF CHRIST: A THEOLOGICAL REFLECTION BENEDICT M. ASHLEY, 0.P. Aquinas Institute of Theology St. Louis, Missouri I. Does "Patriarchy" Explain the Tradition? HE CONGREGATION for the Doctrine of the Faith, n its 1976 Declaration on the Question of the Admission f Wonien to the Ministerial Priesthood, based its negative response primarily on tradition.1 For many this argument 1 Inter Insigniores (Oct. 15, 1976, AAS 69 (...) [1977]), Origins 6, 33 (Feb. 3, 1977) : 518-531. For a general bibliography on women's studies see Patricia K. Ballou, Women: A Bibliography of Bibliographies, 2nd ed. (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986). For select bibliography pro and con on the present topic see note 92, p. 560 of my Theologies of the Body: Humanist and Christian (St. Louis: Pope John Center, 1985) and Wendell E. Langley, S.J. and Rosemary J ermann, " Women and the ministerial priesthood: An annotated bibliography," Theology Digest 29 :329-42 (Winter '81). Strong cases against ordination are made by Louis Bouyer, W onzan in the Church, tr. by Marilyn Techert [Epilogue by Hans Urs von Balthasar and Essay by C. S. Lewis, "Priestesses in the Church"] (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1979) ; Manfred Hauke, Women in the Priesthood? A Systematic Analysis in the Light of the Order of Creation and Redemption, tr. by David Kipp (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988); L. Ligier, "Women and the ministerial priesthood," Origins, 7:694-702 (April 20, 1978); and Patrick Dunn, Priesthood: A Re-Examination of the Roman Catholz'.c Theology of the Presbyterate (Staten Island, NY: Alba House, 1990), pp. 173-196. Strong cases for ordination are made by Ida Raming, The Exclusion of Women from Priesthood: Divine Law or Sex Discrimination, tr. by Norman R. Adams (Meutchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1976) ; Haye von der Meer, Women Priests in the Catholic Chitrch: A Theological -Historical Investigation, tr. by Arlene and Leonard Swidler (Philadelphia : Temple University Press, 1973) ; George Tavard, Woman in Christian Tradition (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1973) ; Karl Raimer, "Priestertum der Frau," Stimmen der Zeit, 195 :291-301 (May 1977) ; Joseph Komonchak, " Theological Questions on the Ordination of Women," Catholic Mind 75 CJan. 1977) : 13-28; Carroll Stuhlmueller, C. P., ed., Women and Priesthood: Future Directions (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1978); and Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins (New York: Crossroad, 1983). 343 344 BENEDICT Mo ASHLEY, OoPo fails to persuade" It seems obvious to them that this " tradition " merely reflects the " patriarchalism " of the Jewish and pagan milieu of the early Church" The Declaration anticipated this objection when it pointed out (a) that Jesus was counter-cultural in many respects, especially in his attitude toward women; (b) a better explanation for the tradition can be found in the reality (res) which the sacrament of ordination symbolizes, namely, that the priest acts ini persona Christi capitis ecclesiae" Thus the essential role of a Christian priest is to represent Christ present and acting in his Church as its male Head" The Congregation formulated its conclusion cautiously: "The Church, in fidelity to the example of the Lord, does not consider herself authorized to admit women to priestly ordination." 2 Thus no other opinion may be followed in practice, and if bishops or theologians raise questions about the meaning of the tradition they must not trivialize its importance nor arouse illusory expectations of change. Final judgment on the matter can only pertain to the magisterium. In what follows I will not explore the argument from tradition as such, but only the supporting argument from symbolism, in an attempt to fill in certain steps which it seems to me the Declaration passed over. Nor will I deal here with other secondary arguments against the Declaration's conclusion, particular the pragmatic argument that since Christians have a right to the Eucharist, the decline of male priestly vocations in many secularized countries justifies the ordination of women" H the Church has no power to ordain women validly, obviously that argument, however practically attractive, is beside the point2 2 Inter Insigniores, last paragraph of the Introduction. 3 The members of a local church have a " right " to the Eucharist only if they... (shrink)

In this article, disasters as a factual reality will be discussed within the framework of Allah's justice and human responsibility on the basis of husn-qubh. In this context, the ontic structure of man and the universe, man's being in the process of being tested, the definition of good-bad/goodness-evil that enables this process, the evaluations in the literature, and the meaning of taklīf within the scope of Allah's justice (‘adl) will be discussed. The problem of evil is the problem of (...) reconciling a God who is omniscient, omnipotent, and does good deeds with a universe in which evil exists. As a problem of evil, disaster is a phenomenon that must be addressed in relation to God, the universe, and human beings. While its relation with God in terms of creation appears as the legality of the universe, its relation with human beings in terms of dealing with the phenomenon and responsibility is within the scope of being subject to the offer. Therefore, a correct understanding of creation and justification of the reasonableness of the offer will answer many questions regarding disasters. The aforementioned issues and concepts in the theological literature have been discussed thoroughly (dakīk) in the schools of theology. Theologians defined God and divine action, human beings and human actions, and the universe in accordance with the paradigm of their discourse groups, and they made discussions based on the meaning they gave to these definitions and concepts. The basic determinants of the discussions are God's possession of knowledge, power, will, wisdom, and justice, and the creation of human beings in the nature of reason (‘akl). These concepts and definitions have been understood differently by the discourse groups, and the debates have moved back and forth between determination/compulsion and free will. It makes sense here that a person who experiences the phenomenon and wants to know what is happening theologically should know the Qur'anic conception of God and man. The relationship between God and man needs to be right and moral. Therefore, it is necessary to evaluate the topics that have been studied many times in terms of each concept together. In this respect, the article aims to seek answers to some questions about the human profile and the conception of Allah. There are three aspects to be questioned here: First, an ontological inquiry into the nature of the concepts of existence that contain moral value; second, an epistemological inquiry into whether moral value is determined by reason or revelation. In this context, the last inquiry is moral. Accordingly, what is good-bad and goodness-evil? What determines good and evil as a value? Who is the agent of the good-evil action? What is the position of the divine will if the perpetrator (fā‘ıl) is human? What is the relationship or boundary between divine will and human responsibility? What is the theological status of the perpetrator? On this basis, what is a disaster? What is the value judgment of disasters? What is the relation of disasters to God's actions? Who is the perpetrator of disasters? Are disasters a test? Are disasters a divine warning? Are disasters a divine punishment? If they are a divine punishment, what is the possibility of knowing it? These questions will be answered in the article, sometimes explicitly and sometimes implicitly. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:17~ BOOK REVIEWS sician, hiding the most important elements of his thought in obscure passages, burying the central concepts of his theory of language, and offering a sly double entendre (l\foDonough's reading of T 7) without giving the reader the slightest clue. But McDonough's account does not persuade; so we are not obligated to make this reassessment. JOHN CHURCHILL Hendrix College Conway, Arkansas The Nature and Limits of Authority. (...) By RIOHARD T. DEGEORGE. Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1985. Pp. 305 with index. Richard DeGeorge has produced a very thorough analysis of the nature and limits of authority in general as well as of authority in such specific domains as the family, political society, the labor place, religious bodies, the domain of knowledge in general (epistemic: authority in general), and the university. DeGeorge draws some very useful distinctions among different kinds of authority. His working model is: "someone or something (X) is an authority if he (she, it) stands in relation to someone else (Y) as superior stands to inferior with respect to some realm, field or domain (R) " (14). On his analysis authority is sometimes a power and sometimes a right. He divides authority most basically into executive authority and nonexecutive authority. Executive authority is the right or power of someone to do something in some domain. Nonexecutive authority, on the other hand, concerns knowledge or example. Nonexecutive authority can be epistemic or exemplary (i.e., the authority of one who sets an example to follow, as in art or morality). DeGeorge discusses all of these with patience and clarity. DeGeorge's justification for epistemic authority is that: 1) people are not equal in knowledge (or competence), and 2) the reliance on epistemic authority allows many more people to benefit from some people's knowledge than just those who directly know (38). There are criteria by which rational acceptance of epistemic authority can be distinguished from irrational acceptance. For example, Y must have good reason for believing that X has knowledge in the relevant domain. DeGeorge takes seriously the challenge of anarchism, discussing in some detail arguments by Bakunin, Marx, and Robert Paul Wolff as examples. DeGeorge defines various types of freedom and concludes that, pace the anarchists, the exercises of various kinds of authority, and, in particular, BOOK REVIEWS 173 of political authority, can enhance, rather than limit, free choice and "teleological freedom" (i.e., the ability of persons to conceive of and to attain their goals). Thus he justifies political authority, not on the basis of consent, but on the basis of its necessity in order to preserve and increase effective teleological freedom. Consent is not the foundation for political authority's legitimacy, but, if I understand DeGeorge correctly, a necessary condition of its legitimacy. DeGeorge argues that there is no such thing as executive moral authority. That is, there is no one who makes something morally right simply by commanding it. In another chapter he distinguishes among various kind of religious authority: delegated divine authority (e.g., to preserve revealed truths handed down), operative authority within the church organization (i.e., authority to represent or act for the church body, and religious epistemic authority. In a very enlightening chapter on university and authority, DeGeorge defends the value, both intrinsic and instrumental to all of society, of what he calls the objective-knowledge university. " The objective-knowledge university has as its primary end the traditional trio of discovering, preserving, and transmitting objective, systematic, and unified knowledge " (251). DeGeorge often takes a very non-dialectical approach, which sometimes inadvertently hides how controversial some of the issues are and how significant the positions are which he calmly sets out. The book is extremely thorough; it brings analytic clarity to issues on which there has been surprisingly little philosophical work done. It should be consulted by anyone doing philosophical or theological work on any of the several topics that demand clear thinking about the nature of authority. Center for Thomistic Studies University of St. Thomas Houston, Texas PATRICK LEE... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Thomas Aquinas on the Metaphysics of the Human Act by Can Laurens LöweThomas M. Osborne Jr.Can Laurens Löwe. Thomas Aquinas on the Metaphysics of the Human Act. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Pp. 225. Hardback, $99.99.This book is about the way in which Thomas Aquinas understands the human act to be composed of form and matter. It provides a fresh reading of many central texts from Thomas and (...) addresses philosophical concerns that are relevant to the contemporary literature. Although Löwe is not clear about this point, Thomas does not use in this context the terms 'formal' and 'material' in the strictest sense, as when he describes the soul as the form of the body, but in different extended senses, as when he says that charity is the form of the other virtues because it gives them a new character (Summa Theologiae, II–II, q. 23, art. 8).Löwe focuses on choice, which he considers to be antecedent to the human act, and the commanded or exterior act, which he considers to be the entire human act. This focus simplifies his account, since in one and only one text—the Prima Secundae of the Summa Theologiae—does Thomas appear to give as many as twelve acts that are stages or phases of a complete human act. Thomas devotes special attention to three acts of the will concerning the end, namely simple willing, intention, and enjoyment; and three acts of the will concerning the means, namely consent, choice, and use; and two intellectual acts, namely deliberation and command. Four other possible phases or stages are mentioned in passing, such as the judgment of choice. According to the standard interpretation, a human [End Page 152] act such as almsgiving might consist of intending to help an indigent person, deliberating about whether to give food or money, making a judgment of choice about the best means of helping (such as giving money), choosing to give the money, and then commanding the will's use of certain other powers, such as the movement of the hands and feet. In his other writings, Thomas mentions only some of these stages, and he often mentions only simple willing, deliberation, and choice. Scholars disagree over the number and importance of the acts or parts of acts discussed in the Prima Secundae and how to integrate them with what Thomas says in other texts. Löwe argues that the human act is what Thomas describes as the act's execution; he claims that this act has the intellect's command for its extrinsic form, the will's use for its intrinsic form, and the commanded act for its matter.This book has three parts. Part 1 provides a general account of the author's view that choice explains the act's freedom even if it is not part of the resulting act. In part 2, Löwe gives a novel account of Thomas's claim that the judgment of the intellect gives form to the act of choice. He draws on the distinction that Thomists make (although Thomas is less clear) between the composition of terms, or the enunciative proposition, and the judgement, or judicative proposition. For instance, the statement 'carrots are orange' as an enunciative proposition might be entertained as doubtful or likely, or placed in a conditional statement. However, someone might assent to this same composition by judging that it is true. Löwe's account is confusing on this point, as he describes as "judgment" what his Thomists describe as the enunciative proposition, which is the composition of terms (38–41). Terminological difficulties aside, Löwe draws on what he sees as the related distinction between the content of a judgment and the attitude toward the judgment, using this distinction to describe the freedom of the judgment that precedes choice. The intellect composes different precepts and then assents to one of them. According to Löwe, Thomas thinks that the agent's ability to choose between different goods is reduced to the intellect's ability to assent to the content of one precept and not the content of another according to a kind of second-order... (shrink)

Since Nietzsche, the term “perspectivism” has been used as the name for an ill-defined epistemological position. Some have tried to find an adequate meaning for the word “perspectivism,” tacitly investing it with a set of different predicates, such as “the dependence of cognition on position,” “pluralism,” “anti-universalism,” “epistemic humility,” etc. This approach is related to two contestable attitudes: the monolateral linguistic paradigm and the metaepistemological position of multiplicity of incompatible epistemological programs. The monolateral linguistic paradigm proceeds from the assumption that (...) there is no obligatory connection between word and meaning. This makes it possible to denote logical content by any possible sign, and to explicate the sign in any number of ways. The metaepistemological position of multiplicity of incompatible epistemological programs encourages the support of artificial antagonism in the theory of cognition and the creation of “new” positions with different denotations. These attitudes can be contrasted with the method of empirical “originalist” analysis within the bilateral paradigm, as well as the theory of one epistemology and universal epistemic language. The content of the term “perspectivism” can be reconstructed by analyzing the original meanings of its individual constituent morphemes and their combination. The extremely precise and empirically provable definition of the word “perspectivism” is “the tendency to act by seeing through something”. This points to the problem of the impossibility of analytically deducing from it “the dependence of cognition on position,” “pluralism,” and other predicates. The same problem of inconsistency between the name of the epistemological position and its content is also encountered, for example, in the literature on relativism. It freely attributes a set of doctrinal beliefs to the term “relativism” without explicit linguistic signification of the predicates and blurs the difference between perspectivism and relativism. This points to the inexpediency of constructing epistemological positions on the basis of words denoting one of all possible interrelated cognitive actions, and the need to rethink epistemological practice. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:AQUINAS ON THE PRELIMINARY GRASP OF BEING I IN NUMEROUS PASSAGES, which are to be found scattered throughout his works, Aquinas repeatedly insists that that which is first apprehended or conceived by the intellect is being (ens).1 But from these statements an initial problem immediately arises. When Aquinas affirms that being is that which is first apprehended or conceived by the intellect is he talking about a priority which (...) concerns the logical order or the psychological order? I shall first of all explain what I mean by these two expressions. By the " logical order " I intend to refer to the order of priority and posteriority which holds between different concepts on the basis of the relations of necessary inclusion and exclusion that hold between the contents of these concepts: between the rationcs that these concepts express. Certain concepts contain as a necessary part of their content the contents of other concepts which therefore need to be understood before they themselves can be understood: these other concepts which precede them in this manner are prior to them in the logical order.2 1 See In I Sent., d. 8, q. 1, a. 3 c. and ad 3; In I Sent., d. 19, q. 5, a. 1, ad 2 and ad ult.; De Ver., q. 1, a. l; De Pot., q. 9, a. 7, ad 15; S.T., Ia, q. 5, a. 2; S.T., q. 16, a. 4, ad 2; S.T., Ia-Hae, q. 55, a. 4, ad 1; S.T., Ia-Hae, q. 92, a. 2; In I Met., 1. 2, n. 46; In IV Met., 1. 3, n. 566; In IV Met., 1. 6, n. 605; In X Met., 1. 4, n. 1998; In XI Met., I. 5, n. 2211; Sup. De Causis, Pr. VI, I. 6, n. 174. 2 "Dupliciter enim dicitur aliquid non possit intelligi sine altero. Aut ita quod non possit intelligi si non ponatur alterum esse... Sive ita quod quandocumque intelligitur unum, intelligitur alterum, sicut quicumque intelligit hominem intelligit animal. Et hoc modo "esse" potest intelligi sine vero, sed non e converso: quia verum non est in ratione entis, sed ens in ratione veri... sed numquam potest intelligi intelligibile, secundum hanc rationem, nisi intelligatur ens. Unde etiam patet quod ens est prima conceptio intellectus." In I Sent., d. 19, q. 5, a. 1, ad 2., 555 556 MICHAEL TAVUZZI, O.P. By the " psychological order " I do not intend to refer to the order of the temporal genesis within individual consciousnesses of particular concepts-as it might be studied, for example, by the developmental psychologist. This is a purely empirical matter and one which might well vary greatly from individual to individual. As such, I do not consider this perspective, whilst of great interest in itself,3 to be of direct relevance to the present consideration. Rather, by the "psychological order " I intend to refer to the order of priority and posteriority which necessarily holds between the various intentional conditions of possibility which must be realized if an act of understanding or intellectual cognition, considered in general, is to be carried out at all. If we now return to the initial problem its import will be immediately evident. After all, Aquinas would hardly identify the logical and the psychological orders, as I have characteried them, and what holds a certain position in one order might well turn out to hold a wholly different position in the other. Nevertheless, as will be seen in the course of this discussion, it seems that for Aquinas being is that which must be attained first in both the logical order and the psychological order. It must be noticed, though, that this primacy or priority which is attributed by Aquinas to our attainment of being in both the logical order and the psychological order only rarely seems to be discussed by him within the one and the same context. Each context where Aquinas affirms that being is that which is first attained by the intellect needs to be considered separately and to be closely scrutinized if one is to arrive at a correct determination of whether the cognitional priority of being which is affirmed in that particular context... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:16~ BOOK REVIEWS There are fairly frequent typographical errors in the text; most of them harmless hut one of them reverses the meaning of the sentence- " institutionally prescribed means " for " institutionally proscribed means" (p. 279), and a couple of them are comical-" In a previous part of this discussion (pp. 000-000) ", (p. 265); see also p. 274. MICHAEL STOCK, O.P. St. Stephen Priory Dover, Massachusetts (...) Rhetoric and Praxis: The Contribution of Classical Rhetoric to Prac· tical Reasoning. Edited by JEAN DIETZ Moss. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1986. Pp. 168. $24.00 (cloth). The six essays on classical rhetoric which constitute this collection were first presented at a conference entitled Classical Rhetoric and the Teaching of Freshman Composition held October 6-8, 1983, at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. In her excellent introduction, Jean Dietz Moss, the editor, indicates that the purpose of this collection of essays is " to retrieve from the classical age of rhetoric some methods of practical reasoning-methods of stimulating and ordering thought about matters of common concern-that might inform our teaching of writing today" (p. 1). This particular theme runs throughout all of the essays. Professor Moss informs us that the basis of these studies is the conviction that the act of reason has not changed since the time of the Sophists, Plato, and Aristotle, even though its forms have. The reasoning process is the same for us today as it was for those of the past. Armed with this conviction, the authors of these essays attempt to recover from classical rhetoric some means which will assist in the teaching of freshman composition. In the initial essay, Professor Schoeck gives the background and history of rhetoric, thus setting the stage for the essays which follow. These essays take up in turn five classical concepts: topoi, enthymeme, kairos, aitia and telos. The first two concepts are the more familiar and are derived from Aristotle's Rhetoric; the other three, while less familiar, are discovered throughout the writings of other philosophers and rhetoricians of the classical period. Professor Hairston focuses even more sharply on the cause of the present problem in writing among students. Hairston explains that early in the twentieth century rhetoric as an academic discipline was separated from the English BOOK REVIEWS 168 departments, and then, within a brief period of time, was dropped from the curriculum altogether. In the absence of rhetoric, the teaching of writing was left entirely to literature departments, and according to Hairston, this was a serious mistake. The romantic view held by most literature departments at that time led them to deal with writing as a nonrational activity. The papers in this collection put forward the view that composing is a cognitive task and training in rhetoric can assist in its development. Schoeck reflects the attitude of all the contributors when he proposes that what is needed now is a rhetoric for our times. " One of our purposes in these essays is to insure that there will be a renewed presentation that will keep pace with contemporary literary production" (p. 38). One must applaud the effort both to improve the writing of com· positions by students and to recover a part of classical rhetoric for our day. This particular effort to recover some of the riches of the past appears to be a part of a growing trend which the reviewer heartily endorses. By and large, this collection of essays is very good. However, a teacher of composition unfamiliar with rhetoric might find its usefulness limited. Although the terminology is defined within the context of the articles, it is my judgment that the essays would be found difficult to understand by one who had little or no previous familiarity with rhetoric. The usefulness of these essays would improve exponentially for someone who came to them equipped with some knowledge of classical rhetoric. None of the articles deals directly with the problem of teaching writing or communication. The participants at the con· ference at which these essays were originally presented had the advan· tage of ongoing discussions from which they were able to develop tactics to be implemented in the... (shrink)

This study is an attempt partially to describe the sociological foundations of modern science. When the question is put, under what social circumstances did the idea of science develop, one sees that there is here an inadequately explored sociological area. Perhaps a definition and a contrast will make this clearer. By the idea of science is meant simply the proposition that the valid source of human knowledge is to be found in the analysis of experience. But knowledge in (...) this sense was not a problem in the medieval period. In the first place, it was then taken for granted that the universe was intelligible to man on the basis of divinely revealed principles. Secondly, man constituted the center of the universe, which in its entirety was thought to be subordinate to man's destiny. Thirdly, not only was the universe which existed for man then known by him, but it was endowed with human qualities. The categories of interpretation were substance, essence, form, matter, quality, and purpose. The reason why rain fell upon the earth was to grow crops; the purpose of the moon and the stars was to light the earth at night, and to act as guideposts for him on his travels. Bodies tended to their proper places, light ones upward, heavy ones earthward. Quantitative differences were inferred from these qualitative ones. It is well-known, for example, how tenaciously was the knowledge held, that heavier objects fall more quickly than lighter ones. And finally, the universe was religious. If the world existed for the benefit of man, man existed for the glory of God. Human sojourn upon the earth was merely preparation for permanent residence in eternity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:156 BOOK REVIEWS of theological method in Aquinas (p. 193; see also pp. 57 and 173). But this is not sufficient. Farthing should have acknowledged that Biel's recurrent critique of the supposed ' positive ' use of reason in Aquinas is beside the point and that, by thinking that Thomas is trying to ' demonstrate ' the faith, Biel has carelessly dismissed much that is interesting and valuable in (...) Aquinas. By bringing Biel's error to the fore, Farthing would have made clear to the reader that in this crucial respect, the dialogue between these two thinkers has completely broken down. University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, Indiana JOSEPH WAWRYKOW The Reshaping of Catholicism: Current Challenges in the Theology of Church. By AVERY DULLES. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988. Pp. 276. $19.95 (doth). Each of Dulles's twelve articles commends itself no less as a chapter in this collection than when it first appeared separately between 1984 and the end of 1987. In ensemble, " they give," Dulles remarks in his Preface, " a fair sampling of the issues the Catholic Church has had to face in the two decades since the Council." Whatever the leading Catholic ecclesiologist in America has to say about specific problems in Church renewal deserves careful attention. A positive general evaluation of the book is all hut a foregone conclusion. Still, a review can perform that opening survey of contents that will lend precision to a reader's anticipation of what the author has singled out as the current challenges. Four chapters take up the task of interpreting the texts of Vatican II, not as a species of source-criticism but in light of post-conciliar difficulties. Chapters 2 ("The Basic Teaching of Vatican II "), 5 ("Vatican II and the Recovery of Tradition"), and 8 ("Vatican II and the Purpose of the Church") emerge from a situation of divided opinion. They also apply the Council's teaching as a solution. Chapter 7 ("The Church and Communications") likewise engages conciliar texts, along a more speculative line. Chapter 1 ("American Impressions of the Council") joins with 2 in opening the book at a somewhat more popular level. The other chapters employ conciliar teaching to formulate theological answers to some important questions. These are questions which trouble not only the hierarchy and the theologians but also ordinary BOOK REVIEWS 157 members of the Church, as they come to terms with the Church's renewed self-understanding. Chapter 3 (" The Emerging World Church and the Pluralism of Cultures") picks up where Karl Rahner's wellknown address at the Weston School of Theology in 1979 left off. Dulles accepts Rahner's argument that Vatican II achieved the first official self-actualization of Catholicism as a world church. Taking the resulting problem of inculturation as the current phase in the relation between Christianity and culture, Dulles specifies the relation between two cultures as "cultural reciprocity." He leaves behind the simple, familiar contrast between classicism and a non-normative concept of culture. His ecumenical research enters into Chapter 4 ("The Meaning of Catholicism: Adventures of an Idea "), which places Vatican II in the context of two centuries of Protestant-Catholic discussion on the essence or basic idea of Catholicism. Intra-Catholic pluralism turning into opposition underlies most of the hook, hut Chapters 5 and 6 ("Authority and Conscience: Two Needed Voices") treat two such polarizations thematically. In 5 Dulles finds Dei Verbum open to an understanding of tradition as the handing on from generation to generation of the " tacit knowledge " whose content is the lived awareness of the God of Jesus Christ. Chapter 6 does not admit a second, alternative magisterium, hut it does situate hier· archical teaching amid the several sources of authority accepted by Catholicism-Scripture, tradition, the whole People of God, and theologians along with the hierarchy. And, in the formation of personal judgments and decisions, conscience has its own authority. A theology of communication follows from each of five models of the Church. Chapter 7 shows how this, in turn, implies a distinct approach to evangelization, use of mass media, and episcopal and papal teaching. Chapters 8 and 9 {"The Church, Society, and Politics") discuss the tensions inherent in the Church's mission... (shrink)

MacIntyre, Clark, and Heidegger would all agree that the current problem with moral theory is its lack of a satisfactory conception of human telos. This lack leads us to resort to such fictions as rights, interests, and utility, which are “disguises for the will to power.” Ibid., p. 240. These thinkers would also agree that modern nation-states are cut off from the roots of the Western tradition. Modern political economy, with “its individualism, its acquisitiveness and its elevation of the values (...) of the market to a central social place”Ibid., p. 237. is leading us into “the coming age of barbarism and darkness.”Ibid., p. 244. MacIntyre's grim depiction of the future, which Heidegger calls “the time of the darkening of the earth” and “the flight of the gods”,Heidegger, “What Are Poets For?” in Poetry, Language, Thought. can only be met by re-appropriating our own tradition. Although Aristotle has much to tell us, I believe Heidegger is right to turn to Heraclitus for a non-anthropocentric conception of humanity's place in Nature. Other writers, however, such as Arne Naess, George Sessions, and Stuart Hampshire, argue that the writings of Spinoza may offer the most helpful vision of humanity needed to guide our efforts to find a more appropriate basis for our behavior toward each other and toward the non-human world as well.George Sessions, “Spinoza and Jeffets on Man in Nature,” Inquiry 20 (1977):481–528. Sessions' essay was criticized by Genevieve Lloyd in “Spinoza's Environmental Ethics,” Inquiry 23 (1980):293–311. In reply, Arne Naess wrote “Environmental Ethics and Spinoza's Ethics: Comments on Genevieve Lloyd's Article,” Inquiry 23 (1980):313~ 325. Cf. also Stuart Hampshire, Two Theories of Morality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). Yet Aristotle, Qark, Heidegger, Heraclitus, Maclntyre, and Spinoza all agree that in order to behave fittingly, we must understand what it means to be human. At this time, I would like to acknowledge the importance of the following objection to what I have been arguing here: While it may be true that the concept of human rights is a fiction, it is nevertheless a very useful fiction for changing how human beings relate to each other. Tom Regan has frequently pointed out that even if the concept of rights proves to be ficticious, it can be helpful in protecting non-human beings from abuse by humans. Cf. his essay “Exploring the Idea of Animal Rights,” Animals' Rights - A Symposium (Sussex and London: Centaur Press Ltd., 1979); Regan, “Animal Rights, Human Wrongs,” Environmental Ethics 2 (1980):99–120. The doctrine of the rights of man justified the American and French revolutions, which brought forth new and important human freedoms. Today, most of humanity still lacks the protection afforded by constitutionally guaranteed human rights. Moreover, even in constitutional democracies there are frequent abuses of and attempts to curtail human rights. Until far more people become committed to protecting human rights, it is unlikely that there will be a big movement to extend rights to non-human beings, much less to overcome the anthropocentrism inherent in the concept of rights. What the Buddhist tradition calls “skillful means” is appropriate in our current situation.My thanks to Professor David Levin of Northwestern University for having reminded me of the importance of approaching the question of human rights in a “skillful” way. We must approach people in a way sensitive to their current self-understanding. Before we can pass on to the stage of planetary unity made possible by non-anthropocentric thinking, we need to find ways that promote mutual respect among human beings.On the topic of the relation between spiritual-psychological growth and the shift in human morality, cf. M.W. Fox, “Animal Rights and Nature Liberation,” in Animals' Rights - A Symposium. Out of such respect there can also arise respect for the non-human as well. While largely in agreement with this point of view, I would like to note that our means must be very skillful, indeed, if we are to transform our relationships to each other and to the natural world before irreparable damage is done to the earth, through nuclear war or environmental destruction. The time grows short for the transformation needed to bring us from the stage of anthropocentrism to a deeper awareness of our internal relationship to the whole world. Some people, such as Peter Russell, argue that we are witnessing the evolution of a non-anthropocentric mode of planetary consciousness that will be supported by the revolution in communications and computers. Peter Russel, The Global Brain: Speculations on the Evolutionary Leap tp Planetary Consciousness (New York: J.P. Tarcher, 1983). Other people, such as Jeremy Rifkin, maintain that the coming computer age promises ever greater intrusions into natural processes, such as the drive for control of genetic structures.Jeremy Rifkin, Algeny (New York: Viking, 1983). In my view, while it is important to extend the idea of human rights wherever possible, it is also crucial that we consider seriously the possibility that the idea of human rights is merely a transitional way of conceiving of morality. As we learn more about the interrelationship of human life with all other aspects of the earth's life, our self-understanding will no longer be in harmony with the human-centered morality we know today. We will either learn to respect all beings and act toward them in appropriate ways, or else we will continue down the road we are now headed - a road which seems to have a very disturbing destination. Learning to dwell appropriately on earth is the most pressing moral issue of the day. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A NOTE ON THE RELATION OF PACIFISM AND JUST-WAR THEORY: IS THERE A THOMISTIC CONVERGENCE? 1 GABRIEL PALMER-FERNANDEZ Youngstown State University Youngstown, Ohio FOR CENTURIES, the moral analysis of war began with a consideration of a set of principles which together form the doctrine of the just-war and with a rejection of pacifism. However, several recent studies by Catholic moralists argue that pacifism and just-war theory have much in (...) common and converge in at least one morally important way-namely, they share a presumption against violence. In this note I want to consider whether or not classical just-war theory gives us reason to accept this claim. I will give evidence against it, and suggest that the "original just-war question," as James Turner Johnson calls it, does not begin with aprohibitive presumption or some equivalent constraint on action. If we are to speak of a presumption in classical just-war theory, it is that justice be done for the sake of the common good. Up to very recent times, those Christian denominations which Ernst Troeltsch called the "church-type" (Lutheran, Anglican, Calvinist, and Roman Catholic) upheld a " two-tiered " or "double" morality. A "vocational" pacifism was required of clerical ranks, and the individual Christian was obligated to take up arms for the sake of the common good. For example, prior to the Second Vatican Council, Roman Catholic teaching on war rejected conscientious objection to all war (i.e., pacifism) as an option for Catholics. Manuals of moral theology prior to Vatican 1 I wish to acknowledge the very helpful and detailed comments provided by Richard B. Miller to an earlier version of this paper. 247 248 GABRIEL PALMER-FERNANDEZ II did prohibit the soldier from fighting in an unjust war and made room for subjective doubt about the justice of a particular war. But the consensus among Catholic theologians was both wide and deep. Pacifism for individual Christians did not have any moral-theological justification. It was, in fact, a grave moral error. In spite of this, Vatican II called for a " completely fresh reappraisal of war." 2 The policy of obliterating whole cities enacted during World War II, coupled with the development of nuclear and other indiscriminate weapons of destruction (e.g., incapacitating gases, biological weapons, etc.) and the instability of superpower relations, created an unprecedented condition for which traditional teachings on war seemed woefully inadequate, if not morally dangerous. A new, more far-reaching perspective was needed. And this was to allow for individuals the pacifist option as a second and complementary moral doctrine alongside traditional teaching on war.3 As the American Catholic bishops said in their pastoral letter on war and peace : 2 Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, in A. Flannery, 0.P., ed., Vatican Council II: The Conciliar and Post Conciliar Documents (Collegeville, Minn. : Liturgical Press, 1975), par. 80. 3 This development in contemporary Roman Catholic teaching on war and peace has been challenged with considerable force by George Weigel in what has become one of the most controversial studies on the subject. In Tranquillitas Ordinis: The Present Failure and Future Promise of American Catholic Thought on War and Peace (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), Weigel advances several arguments which are meant to correct what he insists is a failure among Catholic ethicists in the U.S. to develop their tradition, and, indeed, an abandonment of their heritage. " At the level of moral theory," Weigel maintains, "the two classic positions [just-war theory and pacifism] are not reconcilable. The attempt to merge them... tends to corrupt both traditions. Pacifists end up making judgments on military strategy and tactics, and just-war theorists are held accountable to arguments they previously declined to accept.... The net result is to bifurcate morality and politics, and to abandon attempts to apply the tradition of reason to the limit case of the use of armed force in the defense of values-which is precisely the result Murray most feared in his strictures against moralism" (251). For David Hollenbach's rebuttal, see his review essay, "War and Peace in American Catholic Thought: A Heritage Abandoned? " Theological Studies 48 (1987) : 711-727... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:INTELLIGO UT CREDAM: ST. AUGUSTINE'S CONFESSIONS* BAPTISM INTO the Catholic Church ended Augustine's Odyssey through the intellectual and spiritual seas of late antiquity. His Confessi.ons tells us how he joined the Manicheans, became attached to astrology, imbibed Aristotle, was attracted to the Academy, learned Epicureanism, discovered the Platonists, and finally came home to Christianity.1 From the first moment he read Cicero, then, Augustine became a seeker of wisdom; few (...) of humanity's questions and concerns failed to move him. His initial conversion to Manicheanism, indeed, was prompted by its alleged ability to give a satisfactory response to the questions raised by human experience. In the same way, his initial aversion to Christianity in part arose from its alleged inability to provide such an account. Still, the nature of Augustine's ultimate conversion to Christianity is not entirely clear. He certainly indicates that a properly tutored biblical faith is the only solution to those questions and concerns which so vexed him: " credo ut intelligam," as Anselm formulated Augustine's understanding. But what is the role of philosophical reflection in this? Does reason work only within the context of faith? Is it merely the scullery maid for explicating the understanding of divine revelation? Or does Augustine say or at least show that unaided human reason has another sphere of operation? Can human reason understand *Earlier versions of this paper were read at the Twentieth International Medieval Congress, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, Michigan, May 11, 1985, and at the University of Dallas Augustine Colloquium, November 22, 1985. I am grateful to Dr. Michael Platt for his helpful comments and suggestions. 1 All references to the Confessions are from J. Gibb and W. Montgomery, The Confessions of Augustine (Cambridge, 1927)..JAMES LEHRBERGER, O. CIST. anything about God, human beings, and the universe before the advent of faith? While Augustinian scholarship has tended to stress the way in which philosophical thought. especially Neo-Platonism, operates within Christian faith, I hope to show that Augustine conceives the " faith and reason " relation in broader terms.2 More specifically, in this paper I hope to show that the Confessions presents reason itself, without revelation, as capable of assaying the possibility of any religious claim to 2 The problem of "faith and reason," or " authority and philosophy," in Augustine's thought has a history of critical analysis reaching back to the last century. The early discussions of this question have been traced by Sister Mary Patricia Garvey, in Saint Augustine: Christian or N ea-Platonist (Milwaukee, 1939), pp. 3-40, and more briefly by J. O'Meara, in St. A.ugustine, A.gainst the Academics, "Ancient Christian Writers," XU (Baltimore, 1950), pp. 19-22. The more recent discussions have failed to produce any consensus. H. A. Wolfson, in The Philosophy of the Church Fathers, I (Cambridge, 1956), pp. 127-140, sees Augustine as illustrating the patristic "double faith" against Manichean credulity. R. Cushman, in "Faith and Reason in the Thought of St. Augustine," Church History, 19, 1950), 271-294, awards the primacy to faith on the basis of the perversity of the will. P. Courcelle, in Recherches sur les Confessions de Saint Augustin (Paris, 1950), pp. 251-255, understands Augustine to progress from Neo-Platonism to Christianity without abandoning the former. R. Holte, in Beatitude et Sagesse: Saint Augustin et le probleme de la fin de l'homme dans la philosophie ancienne (Paris, 1962), pp. 373-386, considers the cooperation of reason and authority in Augustine's use of Christianity to confront the philosophic problems of his age. J. O'Meara, in The Young Augustine (New York, 1965), pp. 196197, admits a clarification in Augustine's thought but no basic change in his understanding of the primacy of faith over reason. R. O'Connell, in Saint Augusti.ne's Confessions: the Odyssey of a Soul (Cambridge, 1969), insists on a strong Neo-Platonic influence on Augustine's understanding of the human being as the " fallen soul." A. H. Armstrong, in " St. Augustine and Christian Platonism," Plotinian and Christian Studies (London, 1979), Ch. XI, 1-66, argues that the designation "Christian Platonist" is insufficient to characterize Augustine; the way in which Augustine takes up and transforms... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 36.4 (2003) 353-375 [Access article in PDF] A Rhetoric for Polytheistic Democracy: Walt Whitman's "Poem of Many in One" Peter Simonson Department of Communication University of Pittsburgh This essay aims to generate rhetorically oriented normative communication theory useful for the current socio-intellectual moment. It draws upon Walt Whitman's 1850s poetry as an artistically compelling statement of what I call polytheistic democracy, a form of life (...) marked by three overlapping ideals: pluralistic tolerance for multiple gods and moral orientations; commitment to recognizing, preserving, and artfully representing socio-cultural variety; and receptivity to contact with a diverse range of particular others. Whitman offers theory in the sense of a structured way of seeing. It is normative in that it describes a world that might be, not one that is, and provides orienting visions, regulative ideals, and topoi of praise and criticism that stand available to guide the communicative practices of individuals, groups, and institutions alike.The theory is "rhetorically oriented" in that it draws upon techniques and vocabularies developed within the rhetorical tradition. Methodologically, it is generated through rhetorical criticism and imitatio. I offer a reading that brings out the rhetorical dynamics of Whitman's vision of polytheistic democracy as articulated in his 1856 "Poem of Many in One" (later and canonically titled "By Blue Ontario's Shore"), a central social statement in his much-revised masterwork, Leaves of Grass. In so doing, I hold Whitman up as a model for imitatio, the complex interpretive practice whereby, in Michael Leff's words, historical texts come to serve "as equipment for future rhetorical production" (1997, 201). Imitatio is an intellectually generative process. "As the embodied utterances of the past are interpreted for current application, their ideas and modes of articulation are reembodied, and old voices are recovered for use in new circumstances" (203).I couple imitatio with a neo-pragmatist rhetorical criticism oriented toward practice and reflection in the current cultural moment. Whitman gains significance insofar as he helps us experience, think about, and act [End Page 353] within the worlds we now traverse. 1 Among other qualities, those worlds are marked by heterogeneous groups and people who must continuously find ways to live with one another; by large institutions that stand as steady reminders that individuals may not matter very much; by ubiquitous electronic and print media offering copious streams of symbolic culture; and by countervailing geographical forces of circulation and social segmentation of fleshly bodies in the material spaces of public life. In worlds with such qualities, Whitman is a useful locus of imitatio—someone whose cosmopolitan social imagination, deep pluralism, wide-ranging habits of contact, and attention to corporeal individuals all serve as useful equipment for new rhetorical and moral production."Poem of Many in One" has a self-exemplifying 2 aspect to it, for it models what it aims to cultivate in the world. Whitman's print-based rhetoric provides an overarching vision of polytheistic democracy and mass community, scattered across time and space and actualized partly through individuals. His discourse models this social condition by displaying radical openness to high and low, sacred and profane, the admired and the socially despised. It is rhetorically driven by a copious style and an aesthetically oriented democratic ethos that Whitman's mediated eloquence aims also to generate in its readers. Its success thus hinges on readerly receptivity and cultivated ethos that re-embodies aspects of his sensibility and rhetorical techniques, giving them new momentum in scattered realms of social being.I amplify key components of Whitman's normative vision not to trump competing moral principles and orientations but to supplement them. In this sense, my essay is pluralist all the way down. It is socially pluralist in that I believe in encouraging the development and preservation of multiple sets of normative orientations, with no single principle or moral perspective ordering all others. It is individually pluralist in that I understand moral principles as interpretive and rhetorical resources deployed and judged on the basis of their contingent appropriateness and usefulness. 3 "One does not... (shrink)

In the context of modal logics one standardly considers two modal operators: possibility ) and necessity ) [see for example Chellas ]. If the classical negation is present these operators can be treated as inter-definable. However, negative modalities ) and ) are also considered in the literature [see for example Béziau ; Došen :3–14, 1984); Gödel, in: Feferman, Collected works, vol 1, Publications 1929–1936, Oxford University Press, New York, 1986, p. 300; Lewis and Langford ]. Both of them can be (...) treated as negations. In Béziau a logic \ has been defined on the basis of the modal logic \. \ is proposed as a solution of so-called Jaśkowski’s problem [see also Jaśkowski ]. The only negation considered in the language of \ is ‘it is not necessary’. It appears that logic \ and \ inter-definable. This initial correspondence result between \ and \ has been generalised for the case of normal logics, in particular soundness-completeness results were obtained [see Marcos :279–300, 2005); Mruczek-Nasieniewska and Nasieniewski :229–248, 2005)]. In Mruczek-Nasieniewska and Nasieniewski it has been proved that there is a correspondence between \-like logics and regular extensions of the smallest deontic logic. To obtain this result both negative modalities were used. This result has been strengthened in Mruczek-Nasieniewska and Nasieniewski :261–280, 2017) since on the basis of classical positive logic it is enough to solely use \ to equivalently express both positive modalities and negation. Here we strengthen results given in Mruczek-Nasieniewska and Nasieniewski by showing correspondence for the smallest regular logic. In particular we give a syntactic formulation of a logic that corresponds to the smallest regular logic. As a result we characterise all logics that arise from regular logics. From this follows via respective translations a characterisation of a class of logics corresponding to some quasi-regular logics where \ is the smallest element. Moreover, if a given quasi-regular logic is characterised by some class of models, the same class can be used to semantically characterise the logic obtained by our translation. (shrink)

The Catholic Church in the United States provides extensive health care service through its more than 600 health facilities. The Church, on the basis of its moral teaching, sees health care as a basic human right and supports universal coverage. At the same time, the Church considers abortion morally wrong and opposes coverage of abortion as a health service in a national health plan. Mandated coverage of abortion would violate the moral commitments of Catholic hospitals and the (...) consciences of Catholics who would be required to financially support provision of abortion services. Keywords: abortion, Catholic hospitals, Clinton health plan, health care reform CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

PHILOSOPHY OF HUMAN RIGHTS: HUMAN RIGHTS IN LIGHT OF THEIR INTERNATIONAL PROTECTION Summary The book consists of two main parts: in the first, on the basis of an analysis of international law, elements of the contemporary conception of human rights and its positive legal protection are identified; in the second - in light of the first part -a philosophical theory of law based on the tradition leading from Plato, Aristotle, and St. Thomas Aquinas is constructed. The conclusion contains an (...) application of the results of the analysis conducted in the second part. The first part comprises four chapters. The first aims at revealing characteristics of human rights on the basis of an analysis of historical conditioning of the inter-national law of human rights and its development. The historical context displays the practical, vindicative, and critical character of the positive legal protection of human rights. Moreover, the process of change of positive human rights law is distinguished from the process of change of human rights as such. In the second chapter the content of human rights - a topic which is only auxiliary to the conducted analysis - is discussed. Basic typology and catalogues of rights proclaimed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and protected in the International Covenants of Human Rights are presented. The review of the content of rights aims at a more precise limitation of the field of research. The examination shows a diversity of rights which poses a serious challenge to the coherence of every philosophical theory of human rights. In the third chapter, central in the first part, international law is analyzed with regard to the characteristics of rights and the foundations of them. The analysis of documents shows a number of solutions referring to the anthropological foundations of rights. The inherent dignity of the human person is the source of all human rights. Each human being is recognized as free, and endowed with both reason and conscience. In the propounded conception of man individuals are not rivals but create a community which is a condition for their development. International law characterizes the rights as universal, inherent, inalienable and inviolable. The reconstructed conception also comprises the following basic elements: on the level of the structure of rights, a recognition of their equality, interdependence, and comprehensiveness; in the grounding of these rights, a recognition of the anthropological foundations of law; in the conception of positive law, a recognition of the secondariness of the positive law of human rights to human rights themselves, and a recognition of human rights and justice as the basis for legal order; in the conception of state, a recognition of the well-being of the individual as the fundamental aim of actions undertaken by political institutions, and recogni¬tion of rights which form an impassable boundary to the power of the state, includ¬ing its legislative actions. The characterization of the international legal paradigm serving for the under¬standing of human rights is supplemented by analyses of the structure of their posi¬tive legal protection. Various meanings of the terms "right" and "freedom" are distinguished. Subjective right, as basic structure of the positive legal protection of human rights, is understood as a complex relation formed by various legal situations of the subject of a right which create a functional whole in respect of the subordi-nation of human person to its good. Subordinating person to a good proper for it, expressed usually in a proclamatory norm, is the central element of particular rights around which further elements aiming at the realization of this good are built. In the second part of the book a philosophical theory is developed which allows for the location of a coherent foundation for the presented characterization of human rights and their positive legal protection. This part consists of two chapters. The first includes a review of some - not entirely satisfactory - means of founding of human rights; the second presents philosophical conceptions of law and man which may form a basis for the constructed theory. The review of arguments contained in the first chapter does not aim at a detailed analysis of various specific ways of argumentation encountered in works on this subject but rather at a concise presentation of the main possible lines of argumentation. These analyses also serve to emphasize the positive solutions which are pro¬posed later and to underscore the explanatory power of the elaborated theory. This theory, retaining accurate intuitions contained in the presented types of argumenta¬tion, helps in avoiding their consequences which are difficult to reconcile with the reconstructed paradigm of human rights. Efforts to base human rights on the norms of international law rightly take into account the necessity of determining the content of the rights and their positive legal protection as a means for the realization of man's good. These attempts, how¬ever, do not properly take into account the inherent character of human rights, which are independent of positive law and provide grounds for applying specific legislative measures and not others. Founding human rights on freedom accurately points at the freedom of an indi¬vidual as a constitutive element of some rights; however, absolutization of freedom leads, to a loss of an important element of the contemporary paradigm of under¬standing human rights. This foundation undermines recognition of the fact that human rights may set limits to both the freedom of others and the freedom of the subject of rights itself. Additionally, attempts at the so-called axiological justification of human rights are discussed. This type of justification has a few variants depending on the as¬sumed conception of value. Subjectivistic conceptions have similar advantages and disadvantages to the conceptions basing human rights on freedom; objectivistic conceptions while providing for the universality of human rights place, the fundamental aim of human rights protection beyond the individual human being - in the idealistically existing world of values; finally, conceptions rooting values and human rights in culture, while accurately noting that human rights are learned through the medium of culture, place the source of human rights beyond a concrete individual - in culture and processes which take place in it - which leads to difficulties in finding a basis for the universality of rights. Furthermore, attempts to ground human rights in specific characteristics of the human being are presented. This type of approach points to an important problem of dependence of the content of rights on what man is. However, recognition of specific characteristics of a human being as an ontic foundation of the existence of rights poses a danger to their universality since one has to accept that it is not enough to be a man to be a subject of rights, but a man possessing specific charac¬teristics. The second chapter aims at outlining solutions worked out by Saint Thomas Aquinas. For a fuller understanding of his propositions selected elements of Plato's and Aristotle's philosophy are presented. It was them who formulated the founda¬tions for reflection on law and justice in the ontological context. A qualification is made that Stoicism is not be analysed in depth. Although Thomas' concept of law was undoubtedly developed under the influence of the Stoic doctrine as well, it is not in this that one should look for the tools to understand the ontic foundations of human rights and law in general since the Stoic moral philosophy and philosophy of law were developed in the context of a theory of being which assumed monistic and pantheistic premises as foundations, leading to the recognition of a total subor¬dination of the human individual to a larger unity of which man is only a part. The analysis of Plato's and Aristotle's texts concentrates on problems of justice. Plato seems to be the first philosopher who reflected on the formula basic in the history of European thought: to render to each his due. It appears that justice as both a characteristic of man and his acts is understood in the perspective of that which is just, that which is a good for another man - the recipient of the act. The basis for determining what is just is the relation of correspondence between some¬one and something. While in the case of Plato this relation is based on something beyond its terms, namely on ideas, in the case of Aristotle the relation occurs on account of the elements of the relation itself. Something is just when it contributes to the develop¬ment of the recipient of an act realizing that which is just. At the same time, the realization of that which is just is a good for the agent. In the analysis of the just two types of relation are revealed: the relation of due-to-recipient occurring on account of the compatibility of that which is due, with the recipient of the act; and - a "superstructure" - a relation of obligation-of-subject occurring on account of the compatibility of the acting subject with the thing which should be done. The basis for being that which is due is formed by various potentialities of development of man - the recipient of agency; the basis of being that which is an obligation is the possibility of development of the subject of action. Aristotle distinguishes various types of freedom and points to the necessity of taking them into account in the discussion of justice. Among other things, as the core of man's freedom, he considers life for its own sake, which can be seen as his expression of the basic indices of the autotelic character of man - which is funda¬mental for later conceptions of dignity. The freedom which is described by him is not, however, inherent and inalienable; being free is conditioned by a factual possi¬bility of undertaking actions, which are not solely means to the realization of aims set by others. Thomas Aquinas takes over the Aristotelian research perspective both in his conception of man and of law. At the same time, however, he significantly enriches it. In anthropology he develops a conception of personal being. Drawing upon his distinction between existence ("that something is") and essence ("what something is"), he sees the basis for being a person in the dignity of personal being which is a certain way of existence of a rational being more perfect than that of non-personal beings. The person is a being which, by virtue of its act of existence, is individual¬ized in a specific way. It is an aim in itself. Expressing it in a negative way, one may say that it does not exist as a means for the realization of the aims of others and, in this sense, that it is free. As distinct from Aristotelian conclusions, being a person is not conditioned by the specific actions of a being. Dignity is inherent, based on that which is the foundation of the factual existence of every rational being. Although freedom requires that a being is rational, dignity still encompasses all being, all its properties and potentialities. Thus an act conforming with dignity has to take into account a whole human being. Among different types of that which is just, ius, the first place, from the point of view of understanding law, falls to "the just thing itself ("ipsa res justa"), which is right in the full meaning of the word. On the one hand, it is that which is due; on the other hand, it determines the way of acting in the utmost degree, since the course of every act is determined in the fullest extent by its aim. The content of ius may be determined both by elements independent of free decisions - ius naturale - and by free decisions taking into account the state of things - ius positivum. Recognition of the objective structure of being as the basis of law does not entail that it is possible or desirable to determine unequivocally "the only right" patterns of conduct. This concept is very well justified within the system proposed by Saint Thomas. Individualization of being is a significant element of the develop¬ment of a person as a person. It is attained by the realization of individual aims which are not unequivocally determined by circumstances and the nature common to all people. By virtue of free choices made in the sphere of that which is not by its nature unjust, the object of action becomes ius. Since in the realization of the person the individualization of human being is central, Aquinas clearly sees the need for the protection of the sphere of "dominion of will". This sphere itself constitutes ius naturale, something which is due to man independently of the acts of will. Therefore "law should forbid nothing which is not unjust" ("nihil debet lege prohiberi quod licite fieri potest", In 3 Sent., dist. 40, q. I, a. 1, 3). Besides the relation of due-to-recipient, ius also includes the relation of obligation-of-subject which is superimposed on the relation of due-to-recipient. As far as the ontic foundations of obligation are concerned, in explaining why man is subordinated to realization of the good of others, Aquinas generally follows Aristotle in accepting that this basis is the subordination to moral good - to actions conforming with the learned truth about reality. Aquinas' systemic solutions allow, however, to reach deeper and understand why moral development is also a development of the whole human being. This was difficult within Aristotle's system, since he was reluc¬tant to decide whether precedence should be given to intellectual or moral develop¬ment. The inclination to realise good of another appears to be a transcendental characteristic of being, based on its very existence. Morality understood as rational and free subordination to realize the good of another is a specifically personal way of the realization of this inclination. Thus just actions contribute to the actualization of being in the aspect of its existence and therefore to the actualization of being as a whole. Thomas' conception of natural law (lex naturalis) as participation in eternal law (lex aeterna), offers possibilities for grasping that which is just as something which is basically accessible cognition, independently of Revelation and independently of faith in God, and at the same time as something based in eternal law, understood as a design of God's wisdom. Eternal law, embracing all particular actions, is not, from the human perspective, accessible cognition directly. It is enacted in the struc-ture of the created being and - in case of human beings - in free choices taking this structure into account. In the concluding remarks, the results obtained earlier are applied directly to the contemporary conception of human rights. Human rights are understood in the first place as "just things" - concrete goods of man; as that which is due because of subordination, based on dignity, to the personal development of man. That which is just is understood as a relational - actual or potential - state of things, which exists by virtue of existing relations. Evaluations referring to that which is right are true when respective relations of due-to-recipient take place; norms of conduct are true when respective relations of obligation-of-subject take place. Examples of the application of the sketched theory outside the field of human rights are also presented. Procedural consequences of the developed theory are shown, such as the discrimination of two types of legislative procedures which differ significantly in the structure of argumentation: the first aims at recognition of that which is just independently of the will of the legislator, and the second, at making individual or collective "projects" of development compatible. Finally the possibilities of applying the theory to the increasingly important problems of the protection of the environment and the "rights" of animals are mentioned. The central issue is a philosophical conception of man and his freedom and a conception of law. It is also indispensable to turn to a general theory of being. The search for a comprehensive theory of human rights requires attention to the Abso¬lute Being - God - as well. This is important for at least two reasons. First, a conception of the Absolute Being is integral to philosophy of the systemic type -of which the present book is a piece. A conception of the Absolute Being is signifi¬cant for understanding all being, including, first of all, man as a personal being. Second, every theory of human rights which does not comprise the problem of the Absolute may be questioned as to whether solutions adopted in it do not lead, in consequence, to eliminating God from the perspective of the understanding of law. It is desirable that a philosophical theory should deal with this problem directly. A theory which eliminates God from the perspective of the understanding of rights will be unacceptable for all those who, for philosophical reasons or relying on faith, consider God as the author of inherent rights. Nevertheless, a theoretical approach to rights from the perspective of the Absolute Being should only be a possible extension of a philosophical approach which bases rights on something which is cognizable independently of the acceptance of the existence of God so that the theory is also acceptable for those who reject the existence of God or suspend their judgment on this subject. The pursued theory should therefore contain, on the one hand, reference to natural, faith-independent foundations of human rights, but on the other hand, point to a possible extension accounting for the Absolute Being. The analyses contained in this chapter have undoubtedly some historical value since they are based on source texts. Nevertheless, the use of these texts and not critical works was dictated, first of all, by a conviction that analyses embrace a given theory in the aspect selected by the interests of the researcher. Therefore to find out what past thinkers say on the subject characterized in the first part it is simpler to reach to the sources than to adopt the existing critical works. The pre¬sented reconstruction of Aquinas' views on philosophy of law incorporates proposi¬tions of supplementing and developing some of the ideas undertaken by him. Obligation to act in this and not an other way arises because human actions are subordinated to the conformity, on the one hand, of aims realized by these actions and, on the one hand, the order of being determining that which is favourable to man or destroys him. The content of the order of being is, on the one hand, determined by the structure of being independent from man's will and, on the other, by free decisions of man. (shrink)

Early in Aristotle's terminology, and ever since, "essence" has been conceived as having two meanings, namely "universality" and "individuality". According to the tradition of thought that has dominated throughout the history of Western philosophy, "essence" unequivocally refers to "universality". As a matter of fact, however, "universality" cannot cover Aristotle's definition and formulation of "essence": Essence is what makes a thing "happen to be this thing." "Individuality" should be the deep meaning of "essence". By means of an analysis of some (...) relevant Western thoughts and a review of cultural realities, it can be concluded that the difference between the attitudes toward things of the natural sciences and the humane sciences mainly lies in the fact that the former focus on the pursuit of universal regularity, whereas the latter go after the value and significance of human life. The movement from natural things to cultural things is a process in which essence shifts from universality to individuality. It is the author's contention that what should be stressed in the fields of human culture and society is the construction of an ideal society that is "harmonious yet not identical", on the basis of respecting and developing individual peculiarity and otherness. /// "本质" 最早在亚里士多德的用语中包含有两重含义: 是指 "普遍的东 西" ("共相")，一是指 "个体的东西" ("这个")。在西方哲学史上民期占统治 地位的思想片面地认为: "本质" 就是指 "普遍的东西"。但实际上"普遍的东 西" 并不能涵盖亚里士多德对 "本质" 的界定和表述t 本质是使一事物 "恰恰地是 这个事物"的东西。"本质" 的深层含义应是 "个体性"。通过对西方一些相关思 想观点的分析和文化现实的考察，可以得出结论z 自然科学与人文科学对待事物的 态度的区别在于z 前者重普遍性规律的追求，后者重个体性的人生价值意义的追求。 从自然物到文化物是一个由以普遍性为本质到以个体性为本质的转化过程。在人文 社会领域应该强调的是z 在尊重和发扬个人的独特性和差异性的基础上，建立 "和而 不同"的理想社会。. (shrink)

The premodern history of the European university can be divided into two triads of three centuries: the medieval university and the ‘medieval’ university of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. During these last three centuries Europe’s Christian university was a ‘confessional’ university: the catholic, Lutheran, reformed and Anglican university and the dissenter university of New England. The reformed university of these centuries offered a distinctive way of systematic thought. A specific doctrine of God was connected with a distinct ontology and (...) this combination constituted the theoretical framework of its philosophy and theology. What are the main distinctive features of this scholastic way of thought and can a specific traditionhistorical background be identified ? I– The key concept of this systematic way of thought is God’s free knowledge . This free knowledgeis here understood to be God’s knowledge of future states of affairs – see section 7 for the main lines of Turrettini’s doctrine of God. This free knowledge of future states of affairs is also called definite , because future states of affairs are definite on the basis of God’s certain will. Thus God’s free knowledge is partly based on divine will, but the other pillar of God’s free knowledge is that divine knowledge which is structurally prior to an act of divine will: God’s ‘natural’ knowledge . This natural or necessary knowledge of God encompasses all possible states of affairs. This structure turning around the notion of scientia libera is vital for understanding Western thought, because Aristotelianism and latin Averroism, Thomism and nominalism do not dispose of this notion of scientia libera. Such a free knowledge doctrine of God is married to a specific type of ontology, namely a contingency ontology– see section 8. This type of ontology centres on the notion of fundamental possibility. All possible states of affairs enjoy the status of possibility . This status of possibility is constituted by logical possibility. Turrettini joins Duns Scotus in defining the logicum possibile: If a state of affairs is possible, then it is not inconsistent that it obtains. Therefore, the twin concept of fundamental possibility is logical IMpossibility: What is logically impossible, is inconsistent and self-contradictory, because it includes contradictory predicates. This approach leads to the central ontological notion of synchronic contingency. Turrettini’s key term is even almost the same as this modern invention to name this crucial device: simultas potentiae. When is an event contingent in this sense? An event e is synchronically contingent at time t, if e is the case at time t – therefore eis possible – while it is possible too that e is not the case at the same time t. Because of the simultaneity of the possibility of the opposite, reality is not necessary. It is open. Thus, the tool of implicative necessity is essential to Turrettini’s methodology. It does not only govern his doctrine of God, but also his theory of true freedom of the human will. II – In contrast to traditional descriptions of reformed scholasticism, Turrettini’s theology is a theology of will and radical contingency in general and a theology of freedom and grace in particular. I have already indicated that Turrettini followed Scotism in vital respects and Duns Scotus stood on the shoulders of Henry of Ghent and of Bonaventure . The ontological infrastructure was delivered by Duns Scotus’ way of thinking structured by synchronic contingency, but the basics of this type of doctrine of God’s knowledge are already conspicuous in the so-called Summa fratris Aleandri . Thomas Aquinas substantially borrowing from Aristotle consciously deviates from this tradition built on the legacy of Augustine and Anselm, the Victorines and Alexander of Hales by ignoring the new theory of divine knowledge put forward by John of La Rochelle. This new approach develops a new relationship between God’s notitia simplex and notitia visionis on the one hand and his potentia absoluta and potentia ordinata on the other hand. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THE SPLENDOR OF ACCURACY.· HOW ACCURATE? WILLIAM E. MAY Pope John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family Washington, D.C. I N THE introduction to the collection of essays published under the title The Splendor ofAccuracy: An Examination of the Assertions made by Veritatis Splendor,1 Joseph Selling and Jan Jans write that the "central question that needs to be posed to the text of Veritatis Splendor" concerns (...) the audience and situation its author has in mind (p. 9). They maintain that it appears to be addressed to "universal pastors (priests trained in seminaries) who (should) have one set of universal solutions to every conceivable pastoral problem one might face, anywhere, anytime" (p. 9). Assuming that this is indeed the case, they then say that the "best way to interpret what Veritatis Splendor says" is "from the point of view of the pastors and their educators" and that the Encyclical finds serious problems here (p. 9). Notwithstanding the unmistakable implication of the book's title, the subtitle, and, as we shall see, several of its main essays, the editors claim that neither they nor the contributors to the volume "wish or intend that this study be understood as a challenge or a rebuke to the teaching of the magisterium in the encyclical" (p. 10). Rather, they wish to "respond to the assertions made in the encyclical that give the impression of pointing to serious problem areas in contemporary Roman Catholic moral 1 Joseph Selling and Jan Jans, eds., The Splendor of Accuracy : An Examination of the Assertions made by Veritatis Splendor (Kampen: Kok Pharos Publishing House; Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1994). 465 466 WILLIAM E. MAY theology as it is being researched and taught in any number of seminaries, universities and institutions of higher learning" (p. 10). I believe that Selling and Jans seriously misconstrue the purpose of Veritatis Splendor. It is surely not intended to equip priests trained in seminaries with "one set of universal solutions to every conceivable pastoral problem one might face, anywhere, anytime." Rather its stated purpose is to set forth clearly "certain aspects of doctrine which are of a crucial importance in facing what is certainly a genuine crisis" (VS, n. 4) and to address this crisis by presenting "the principles of a moral teaching based upon Sacred Scripture and the living apostolic Tradition, and at the same time to shed light on the presuppositions and consequences of the dissent which that teaching has met" (n. S). In particular, the "central theme" of the Encyclical, as identified by John Paul II himself, is to reaffirm the Church's teaching that there are "intrinsically evil acts" prohibited "always and without exception" by universally valid and immutable moral prohibitions (n. 115). John Paul II likewise emphasizes that the "morality of the human act depends primarily and fundamentally on the 'object' rationally chosen by the deliberate will" (n. 78) and that "reason attests that there are objects of the human act which are by their nature 'incapable of being.ordered' to God because they radically contradict the good of the person made in his image" (n. 80). Human acts specified by objects of this kind are the intrinsically evil acts prohibited by absolute moral norms, the teaching which constitutes, as has been noted, the "central theme" of the Encyclical. Thus the pope repudiates, as incompatible with Catholic teaching, those moral theories which deny that one can judge an act immoral because of the kind of "object" freely chosen and consequently deny that there are intrinsically evil acts of this sort and, corresponding to them, absolute moral norms (cf. nn. 74-77, 79). While repudiating these theories, John Paul II does not name any contemporary Catholic theologians who espouse them. Some contemporary moral theologians who advocate the proportionalist method of making moral judgments are among the THE SPLENDOR OF ACCURACY 467 contributors to this volume, namely, Joseph Selling himself, Louis Janssens, and Bernard Hoose. In their contributions, Selling and Hoose name other theologians known for their advocacy of this moral theory, e.g., Joseph Fuchs and Richard A. McCormick. The purpose of the essays by Selling, Janssens, and Hoose seems to be, as shall be seen... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The 1998 Meeting of the Society for Buddhist-Christian StudiesPeggy StarkeyThe annual meeting of the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies was held at the Walt Disney World Dolphin in Orlando, Florida, on Friday, November 20, and Saturday, November 21, 1998. The theme for this year’s sessions was “Ritual and Its Connection to Ethical Activity in the World.”The Friday afternoon panel, moderated by John Berthrong (Boston University), focused on Buddhist views. John (...) Makransky (Boston College) argued from a Mahayana Buddhist perspective that ritual/contemplative activity is a more effective paradigm for contemporary Buddhist ethics than that of Buddhist doctrine, which is now regarded by many as the source of Buddhist ethics. Historically, ethics has been the outflow of ritual activity and as such is both available to many more Buddhists than doctrine and draws more fully upon the various resources of the tradition. Furthermore, rituals as communal/universal expressions of ultimate reality, when practiced within the horizon of the concerns of one’s culture, naturally take expression in forms of social engagement. Stephanie Kaza (University of Vermont) provided insight into the connection between ritual practice and ethics through her vivid explanation of specific Zen rituals. One such ceremony, adapted to address human suffering in a specific situation, took place at the Nevada Nuclear Test Site. The ceremony prepared people for the difficult decision of choosing or not choosing civil disobedience. Thus, Zen rituals not only provide the invitation for mindful awareness in daily life, but also the possibility, though not the guarantee, for transformation everywhere. Yukio Matsuda (University of Heidelberg) discussed the relation between ritual and social activities in the areas of peace, culture, and education in Nichiren Buddhism as practiced by the Soka Gakkai movement. Chanting the diamoku in front of the gohonzon, for example, enables one to directly touch one’s own enlightened life and encourages not only a responsibility for changing one’s own destiny, but also a commitment to social engagement that works toward the creation of a peaceful society. Don Mitchell (Purdue University), responding from a Roman Catholic perspective, stressed those aspects of the three papers that led him to a better understanding of his own tradition. As in Buddhism, he sees the ritual sacraments in Christianity as providing models for moral behavior, reinforcing faith, and [End Page 175] empowering ethical behavior. He also raised several issues pertaining to the reinterpretation of Buddhist rituals or even the creation of new ones by Western Buddhists.John Berthrong introduced the Saturday morning panel, which focused on Christian views. Nicholas Groves (Chicago Public Library) drew on the history of the Oxford Movement, which he traced from its inception in 1833, for his example of the influence of Christian ritual upon ethics. For this movement, ritual was both an expression of the Christian doctrines of the Incarnation and the Trinity and the basis of an imperative for social justice. For the discussion to follow, he asked, “What is the function of a prophetic and radical reading of a spiritual tradition, either Christian or Buddhist, within the larger community of the Sangha or the Church?” Speaking from a Protestant point of view, Jay Rock (codirector, Interfaith Relations, National Council of Churches of Christ, USA) discussed Christian ritual in terms of the reactualization of the past and of the transformation of the present. Baptism and the Eucharist commemorate past historical events that are made present in the liturgy in such a way that the participating Christians not only receive God’s gift of unlimited love, but also are sent out into the world to live out this love in ethical behavior. Christian ritual confronts the participants with the question, What is now required? Responding from a history of religions perspective, Jan Nattier (Indiana University) raised several questions for discussion: How does ritual—not the theological ideas behind it—empower social action? Would there be Christian social activists without the ritual of the Eucharist? What are the political factors, past and present, that have created a shared sense of the necessity of social action across the boundaries of such radically different traditions as Buddhism and Christianity? The session then ended with a lively discussion.President Paul Ingram presided over... (shrink)

Richard Henson attempts to take the sting out of this view of Kant on moral worth by arguing (i) that attending to the phenomenon of the overdetermination of actions leads one to see that Kant might have had two distinct views of moral worth, only one of which requires the absence of cooperating inclinations, and (ii) that when Kant insists that there is moral worth only when an action is done from the motive of duty alone, he need not also (...) hold that such a state of affairs is morally better, all things considered, than one where supporting inclination is present. Henson's proposals seem to me both serious and plausible. I do not think that either of his models, in the end, can take on the role Kant assigns to moral worth in the argument of the Groundwork. But seeing the ways Henson's account diverges from Kant's makes clearer what Kant intended in his discussion of those actions he credits with moral worth. [...] An action has moral worth if it is required by duty and has as its primary motive the motive of duty. The motive of duty need not reflect the only interest the agent has in the action (or its effect); it must, however, be the interest that determines the agent's acting as he did. (shrink)

In this text, which employs the analytic-comparative method, we read the Poetics of Aristotle in a new way to take an example of translation as an artistic creation. We can present the result of the essay as a metaphor called “the art of translation”, and then we refer to four evidences which can support our metaphor: reading the text as seeing the world, understanding the meaning as perceiving the main action, representing the text as recreating an image, and word making (...) as the art of poetic. If we want to explain the useful dimension of our research, it can be said: every translation has a moral dimension which depends on its imitation of the author’s line and reader’s culture, and also has an artistic dimension that attends to the beauty of text and new vision of culture. According to Moderation theory of Aristotle, an ideal intercultural translation sees the right of author and reader by the equal criterion. Then it shows a production that is combined with “representation”, a term which can embrace the beauty and ethic in the art of translation. Keywords: poetics, representation, artistic creation, art of translation, cultural relationship 1. Mimesis in art and translation As Aristotle has said about art and poetry, they are based on Mimesis or imitation. It means that he believes art is Mimesis. But his theory about this issue is totally different to Plato’s thought. He thinks that Mimesis is not imitation of Ideas as Plato thought. Mimesis in his thought is imitation from the existence, aspect or form of things in this world. So he emphasizes that Mimesis is imitation of something or maybe happenings outside of man. After collecting all of Aristotle’s thoughts, especially about poetry, it seems clear that the imitation or Mimesis is a representation of the subject of imitation in which sometimes the subject of imitation has been represented better than its fact, like tragedy, and sometimes worse, like Comedy. It seems that we can see translation as imitation, understanding the latter as in Aristotle’s conception of art mentioned above. Indeed, a translator at the beginning of is translation process looks at the text deeply and tries to understand it as well as possible. After that, he thinks about the value of translations. In this step, if the text has repeatability in other languages and cultures, the translator starts the imitation from an original text to create another text. It seems that this process is like what an artist does to create artworks. 2. resemblances between art and translation On the basis of Aristotle’s Poetics, we want to explain some resemblances between art and translation to describe our conception of translation as an art. We think those resemblances can convince us to see translation as an art. The first resemblance between creation of artworks and translation is at the first step of them. The first resemblance between the artistic creation and translation is in their first step. Viewing the environment and finding something for imitation is the first step of artistic creation, which is like confronting and reading a text for translation. It is clear that viewing the environment deeply and reading a text carefully are necessary for artistic creation and translation because a surface of them cannot be suitable and helpful for Mimesis or imitation. The second step of artistic creation and translation is the accurate understanding of the subject of imitation. In Fact, deep and accurate understanding is necessary for exact imitation. Without comprehensive understanding, imitation of things is not possible. Both artist and translator in the process of imitation should take this step. In the other words, it seems that by deep and exact understanding they can find the direction of similarity between subject of imitation and artwork or translated text. Rewriting text in a new language like representing an image is the third step of imitation that is visible in the process of artistic creation and translation. In this step, combining their understanding and viewing the environment, translator and artist try to create the subject of imitation in a new style and a new form. The last step of imitation in artistic creation and translation is that of choosing colors in art and words and other literary elegances in translation, and using them. In this step, paying attention to details of their work, artist and translator try to create a new thing that is similar to the subject of imitation, although it is a new thing and there may be some differences between them. As was stated, the understanding of the subject of imitation by artist and translator is a very important step, in which, however, their thought of the subject of imitation is not totally the same as it, and so, during creating the new thing their understanding and thought can affect the form and the style of the new thing. 3. conclusion In conclusion, it seems that, because of the similarity between art and translation based on Aristotle’s conception of art, we can move from ethical and aesthetic functions of art, and artist’s moral duty in creating art, to the same aspects in translation and translator. In other words, based on Aristotle conception, while translator makes a faithful imitation and a creative presentation of the source, after the ethical decision to translate and promote the original text, he should pay attention to linguistic and cultural details of his translation. In this regard, while observing his audience in the target language, he also refreshes his insights and attitudes because this two-sided view, the center of gravity of moderation, will take into account the aspects of beauty and ethics in the cultural interactions of societies. References - Aristotle,, Ethics of Nicomachus, translation of Mohammad Hasan Lotfi, Tehran, New Design. - Aristotle,, About the Art of Poetry, Translated by Soheil Mohsen Afnan, Tehran, Hekmat. - Aristotle,, Fan al-Sha’r, Abdul Rahman Badawi’s research, Beirut, Dar al-Safat. - Aristotle, Sermon, Translation by Ismail Sa’adat, Tehran, Hermes. - Aristotle,, Metaphysics, Sharaf al-Din Khorasani Translation, Fourth Edition, Tehran, Wisdom. - Plato,, Period of works, translation by Hasan Lotfi, Tehran, Kharazmi. - Bermann, Sandra and Wood,, Michael, Nation, language, and the ethics of translation, Princeton University Press. - Koskinen, Kaisa,, Beyond Ambivalence; Postmodernity and the Ethics of Translation, University of Tampere. - Meschonnic, Henri,, Ethics and Politics of Translating, Translated and edited by Pier-Pascale Boulanger, Benjamins Translation Library. - Venuti, Lawrence,,The Translation Studies Reader, Routledge. (shrink)

The author sets a goal to show the specificity of the formulation of universal prescriptive judgments about a virtuous act in the framework of Aristotelian ethical doctrine. To achieve this goal, Aristotle’s philosophy concept of practical wisdom is analyzed. It shows a necessity to distinguish the use of practical wisdom in a personal experience of the act and for forming the inter-subjective practical knowledge about making of a virtuous act. The specificity of ethics as practical knowledge and its difference (...) from individual moral experience are defined by means of the distinction of the use of practical wisdom. It also shows the limitations of practical syllogism as the main rational mechanism for the formation of inter-subjective practical knowledge. Additionally, the universal prescriptive judgments are divided into informative and functional: the former reveals the content of the action, the latter – its structure, that is, the former defines what a person must do, the latter defines what an action should be to comply with the right purpose, consequently, the right content. At the same time, the right content is recognized only in individual experience and can not be expressed universally, without losing its practical value. The author concludes that the formulation of informative universal prescriptive judgments is impossible within the framework of Aristotelian ethical doctrine. It is impeded by the unsolvable problem of the correlation between the general and the particular, the transition from descriptive judgments to prescriptive judgments. However, it is possible to formulate functional universal prescriptive judgments. They also constitute the methodological basis for criticism of the accepted in society moral norms, which are based on the past positive experience of actions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Hope for Common Ground: Mediating the Personal and the Political in a Divided Church by Julie Hanlon RubioBrian StiltnerHope for Common Ground: Mediating the Personal and the Political in a Divided Church Julie Hanlon Rubio washington, dc: georgetown university press, 2016. 264 pp. $89.95 / $29.95Julie Hanlon Rubio wrote Hope for Common Ground to address divisions over ethical and political issues within the Catholic Church. Rubio writes in (...) a spirit of hope, affirming that it is possible for Catholics to find common ground by drawing on resources within their tradition and within themselves. She proposes that "the potential for seeing and developing common ground is particularly strong if we focus on what can be done in the 'local' sphere—that is, in the space between" the personal and the political (xvii). Localized focus is recommended by the Catholic principle of subsidiarity, which means working on social problems from the bottom up through the small- and medium-sized [End Page 195] groups that matter greatly for people's well-being, such as families, churches, and neighborhoods.Rubio's project is vital because civic spaces have become so fraught. Although this book was published early in 2016, these words are even more apt in 2017: "In both popular and academic Catholic circles, politics has become a very uncomfortable space. … Catholics are more divided than at any point in their history, and in this they mirror society rather than providing an alternative to it" (xiv–xv). If Catholic Christians, claiming a common life and common Lord, are as divided as society itself, they testify poorly to their values. By contrast, if they redirect some of their energies from the personal and the political to the local, then "instead of fighting each other, Catholics can participate more, agree on more, and, consequently, build up more" (229).Part 1 of the book draws on Church tradition and ethics texts to articulate a vision of what it means to be a faithful citizen. Divisions within the Catholic community are shaped in part by interpretations of Church teaching that discourage Catholics from thinking they should cooperate with others who think differently. In recent years, the American bishops have pushed Catholic citizens to consider some political issues, such as abortion and gay marriage, as more important than others. Rubio aims to right such imbalances by showing that Catholic teaching supports pluralism, appreciates the pragmatic side of politics, and holds a nuanced account of how people can act conscientiously in an imperfect world. She offers "a social ethic for ordinary Christians" (58), equally focused on faithfulness and effectiveness.The payoff in part 2 of the book is excellent. Rubio enters the culture-war debates over the family, poverty, abortion, and end-of-life care; elsewhere she briefly but insightfully examines white privilege, sweatshop clothing, and police violence. In each of these cases, Rubio describes the current divide, provides background analysis that cuts through misconceptions and slanted data, and suggests ways that Catholics can find common ground and build up the common good in church and society. Here is one small example of the kind of applications she makes: "A Catholic Charities center in my city included a conversation on advance directives in the agenda for a weekly meeting of mothers in a poor neighborhood. Though the instruction was quite simple, it gave the women a chance to talk about their faith, experiences, fears, and hopes in relation to death and dying. … These women are now better equipped than many for the tough conversations that are surely ahead" (218).Rubio practices what she preaches, exhibiting a conversational tone and capacious vision throughout. While focused on Catholic sources and issues, Hope for Common Ground is by no means narrow. Not only other Christians but also all [End Page 196] people have to face the social issues discussed here, and it matters to all citizens how religious communities are addressing them. Therefore, this book is a great launching point for honest conversations in college courses, while scholars in the field will do well to engage with Rubio's theory of local action. The book deserves a wide readership within and outside Catholic circles.Brian StiltnerSacred... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Nietzsche's Immoralism: Politics as First Philosophy by Donovan Miyasaki, and: Politics after Morality: Toward a Nietzschean Left by Donovan MiyasakiJeffrey ChurchDonovan Miyasaki, Nietzsche's Immoralism: Politics as First Philosophy Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022. xv + 292 pp. isbn: 978-3-031-11358-1. Cloth, $54.99.Donovan Miyasaki, Politics after Morality: Toward a Nietzschean Left Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022. xv + 330 pp. isbn: 978-3-031-12227-9. Cloth, $54.99.Without a doubt, Nietzsche's political philosophy is one of (...) the most elusive and ambiguous features of his corpus. How else can we explain the dizzying, even contradictory, variety of interpretations of Nietzsche's politics? Some read him as anti-political or a liberal skeptical of state power. For others, he is an aristocratic radical, obsessed with using state power to entrench a new class of Übermenschen. For still others, his thought is most compatible with democracy, as his defenses of perspectivism and agonism are best realized within a democratic political system. Finally, some other scholars throw up their hands and say that Nietzsche's political thought is incoherent.In this two-volume work, Donovan Miyasaki enters this fray with a distinctive defense of the democratic Nietzsche. Two features distinguish his view from others. First, it provides a novel grounding of Nietzschean democracy—what Miyasaki calls Nietzsche's "metapolitics." This grounding is examined in the first volume, Nietzsche's Immoralism (hereafter NI). Second, it offers the most radical political vision of a left Nietzschean form of Nietzschean socialism. For Miyasaki, socialism follows from Nietzsche's fundamental commitments, rather than the aristocratic radicalism that Miyasaki sees Nietzsche inferring—wrongly—from his own commitments. [End Page 97] This extrapolation from Nietzsche's "metapolitics" is undertaken in the second volume, Politics after Morality (hereafter PM). I discuss each of these contributions in turn. In general, I found Miyasaki's work to be clear, perceptive, and bold in their interpretations. That said, with a book that critiques so much of the Nietzsche scholarship and offers such a radical take on Nietzsche's politics, I have some potential objections to raise.Nietzsche's MetapoliticsOther interpreters of a left Nietzsche ground their reading on what they take to be Nietzsche's radical epistemological views: either his perspectivism or his anti-essentialism. This was a popular approach for the postmodern and agonistic readings. By contrast, Miyasaki grounds Nietzschean democracy in a completely different way, on his metaphysics, particularly his determinism and "hard incompatibilism" (NI 25). On Miyasaki's view, Nietzsche denies that freedom and determinism are compatible and hence also that any kind of moral responsibility or moral agency is possible. This is the meaning of Nietzsche's "immoralism." For Miyasaki, Nietzsche's alternative ideal is to engender a particular feeling, namely, the love of this determinism or amor fati.This thesis of hard incompatibilism leads Miyasaki to some sweeping critiques of scholarship on Nietzsche's ethics. Against the many recent interpreters who develop a Nietzschean view of freedom, Miyasaki argues that freedom is impossible in a deterministic world. Against the perfectionist and constitutivist interpreters of Nietzsche's ethics, Miyasaki argues that ethics requires the freedom to improve or fail, and such freedom is impossible. At the same time, Miyasaki admits that Nietzsche at times appeals to and even defends freedom. Yet he explains that what Nietzsche is after in these passages is not freedom, but only the "feeling" of freedom (NI 49). Miyasaki is driven to some strained interpretive moves, such as when he argues that higher individuals' feeling of freedom is enhanced precisely to the degree to which they have abandoned the "illusion of freedom" (NI 49). How can I have the feeling of something I have come to see as an illusion?It is true that Nietzsche critiques the traditional metaphysical notion of the freedom of the will on the basis of his naturalism and determinism. Yet in recent years, scholars have argued that Nietzsche defends a novel conception of freedom that is compatible with determinism, akin to what we find in Spinoza. On this view, freedom is defined in terms of agency rather [End Page 98] than a power or faculty of choice. A free agent is... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 519 The Church: Learning and Teaching. By LADISLAS ORSY, S.J. Wilmington, Delaware: Michael Glazier, Inc., 1987. Pp. 172. $14.95. This work develops (and repeats) some of the ideas in Orsy's ar· ticle, "Magisterium: Assent and Dissent," TS 48 (1987), 473-497. One of the most neuralgic issues in the Church today is the relation· ship between the magisterium and theologians. This extended essay, notable for its irenic tone, (...) broadens the topic to a consideration of the whole church in its activity of learning and teaching. Its stated purpose is to " clarify some of the foundational concepts and to present a framework in which the interplay between the teaching authority and the whole community can be understood." In the heat of debate when lines are drawn, and each side is in danger of becoming myopic because of the intensity of focus on a given issue, each risks losing sight of the larger dialogic relationship between God and human person. To its credit, this essay counteracts this risk by describing the pattern of encounter between God and the human person. Orsy reminds us that the church in its teaching and learning responds to a mystery which always eludes absolute order and clarity even through both occur under the guidance of the Spirit. Within this dialogic interplay, the function of the episcopate is to witness to the word that God has spoken, a word always predominantly ineffable, while the task of the theologians is to penetrate into the meaning of the word through systematic theological reflection. In the three remaining chapters, Orsy discusses teaching authority, assent and dissent, and Catholic universities and academic freedom. He calls for a new hermeneutic for the interpretation of encyclicals in order to differentiate between statements of doctrine universally held, opinions of theological schools, and statements that may later be found to he erroneous. He points out the ambiguities associated with the term "ordinary magisterium," citing texts where it is the equivalent of "non-infallible," and others where it simply refers rto the manner in which a doctrine is taught. Departing from Dulles' suggestion for a dual magisterium, Orsy sketches the problems associated with the concept of a magisterium of theologians. He then cautions us against an over-simplification of the difference between fallible and non-infallible teaching which fails to account for the organic unity of Christian doctrine. As there is a dialogic interaction between God's word and human response, so is there an interplay between the bishops' witness to the truth in the Spirit and the recognition of this truth on the part of the people of God who then surrender in an act of faith. The exact nature of this obsequium fidei, however, is problematic. Orsy's identification 5!l0 BOOK REVIEWS of obsequium as a seminal locution in Lumen Gentium circumvents the dispute as to whether it means "respect" or "submission." Orsy attempts to defuse much of the emotional charge associated with the term " dissent " by noting that it is a much stronger dialectical term than such European expressions as opinion difjerent or anderer Meinung. He cautions that " to state simply that dissent from non-infallibly held doctrine is legitimate, is simplistic and incorrect " since one must note the relationship of the non-infallible doctrine to the infallible core. He concludes,that the best climate for a healthy relationship between theologians and bishops is mutual trust, a reasonable margin for honest mistakes, a recognition of limits on the part of theologians with a corresponding resolution never to call a final truth what is in reality a hypothesis. Orsy notes that history witnesses to the perils of theologians being subject to correction by their peers only. He points out that theologians should perhaps return to the practice of investigating questions rather than defending theses. The dangers associated with dissent include the possibility of the propositional dissent of a theologian becoming a feeder to a deeper attitudinal dissent in others or in some other way threatening the peace or unity of the church. It is difficult to see how anyone can take issue with such a balanced approach to this sensitive topic. In order to indicate how a university can... (shrink)

Those who urge “realism” in foreign policy making tend to see the American habit of looking at foreign policy in moral terms as a sign of national immaturity or youthful idealism: a good insofar as this trait gives the United States its peculiar vigor, but dangerous and irresponsible insofar as it distorts perception and in the end amounts to “wishful thinking.” This is not to say, of course, that realists believe that the United States has always acted in accordance with (...) what it judged to be morally correct or even that most policy makers have shown such moral concern, but that, by and large, questions of morals and “ideals” arise frequently and are taken seriously in American foreign policy. Henry Kissinger finds men such as Castlereagh and Metternich admirable and imitable just because of their “realism,” their refusal to operate on the basis of “faith” in universal values, and their “coldblooded,” unsentimental submission to the facts. Statesmen and national leaders must attempt to “harmonize the just with the possible,” which in practice turns out not to mean “be as just as possible” ; rather, it means that nations are to choose their ends, or determine what is in their interest, according to their own ideals of justice, and then pursue them by whatever means are possible. This is the point of view Kissinger and other realists recommend. It is the attitude which they believe has prevailed in the diplomacy of other nations at certain times in history and which they judge to be necessary for a mature American foreign policy. (shrink)

In Existence and the Existent, Jacques Maritain speaks about the difficulty of knowing persons as subjects. Typically we know persons as objects, or “from without,” and this explains why we describe people as instantiations of various qualities that can be shared in common with others. But according to Maritain, “To be known as object... is to be severed from oneself and wounded in one’s identity. It is to always be unjustly known.” In this paper, I consider the epistemological means by (...) which knowing persons as subjects is possible. I argue that we can find parallels between knowing persons and what Maritain refers to as the “intuition of being”, and that reflecting on these parallels can help us to see a solution to the problem of knowing persons—just as the act of existence is not known through a concept, but through a judgment that separates what a thing is from the act by which it exists, so too, I argue, one’s subjectivity is known not through a concept but through a judgment that separates one’s shareable qualities from the self/person underlying these qualities. (shrink)