An assessment of Descartes’s relation to his Aristotelian contemporaries in his Regulae ad directionem ingenii—and more specifically his relation to the theory of scientific habitus—has never been undertaken and is long overdue. Despite broad scholarly consensus that Descartes rejected the scholastic theory of scientific habitus in the Regulae, I will show that, in fact, he redefines a centuries-old scholastic debate about the unity of science, and that he does so by employing, not rejecting, the concept of scientific habitus. For Descartes, (...) the sciences are collectively one in virtue of a habitus which inclines the intellect to regard all things, not as they are in reality, but rather as they are relative to the intellect alone. Descartes establishes the unity of science via what Suárez refers to as “extrinsic denomination” in Disputationes metaphysicae 44.11.64. This creates a serious problem. As he no doubt knew and as Suárez would have rightly pointed out, the extrinsic denominations that Descartes employs in the Regulae have no ontological basis in the things denominated. Descartes’s method creates, arguably for the first time, a chasm between how things can be known by the intellect and how they are in reality—i.e., between “epistemology” and “ontology”—that motivates him to pursue metaphysics after the Regulae. (shrink)

This article analyzes the evolution of Philosophy of Educationin Spain and its situation at the dawn of the 21st century. Spain'speculiar socio-historical circumstances have largely conditioned thedirection this discipline has taken over the last several decades. So,although during a period there was some approximation towards themethods of analytic philosophy, Philosophy of Education has never fullyrelinquished its normative vocation. To do so would have meant spurningthe hopes and fears that had filled Spanish society by the mid 1970supon the reinstatement of civil (...) liberties and democracy. Indeed,attention to the circumstances and that normative orientation have foundtheir best fit in a practical Aristotelian-based philosophy meant toendow Philosophy of Education with a normative character that do notshun the educator's need for reflection, practical decision-making, andresponsibility. Since the 1990s, new directions have been marked by thechallenge of postmodernism, inasmuch as it affects not only thetechnological positivist model but also the reflective educator's modelof a practical Philosophy of Education. The new directions spread out invarious ways, yet they all fall into a common denominator of narrativetrends. The problem posed by these new languages lies in the extent towhich they are consistent with pedagogic intent. In turn, the answerstake on different profiles depending on whether the stance leans moretowards the philosophical or the pedagogical point of view withinPhilosophy of Education. The complementary nature of both perspectivescharacterizes the current state of the field in Spain. (shrink)

The central task of this dissertation is to develop a new interpretation of Leibniz's famous claim that there are no purely extrinsic denominations . Though Leibniz regarded NPE as one of his most important doctrines, he nowhere offers an explicit statement as to what he meant by it. One interpretation of NPE, which enjoys a modest consensus among interpreters, is that all extrinsic denominations reduce to intrinsic denominations. According to the reductionist view, things only have intrinsic denominations as properties; extrinsic (...) denominations are not genuine properties of things. Critics of reductionism have argued that the textual case for it is inconclusive at best, and I share this assessment with them. However, in my opinion, a satisfactory non-reductionist understanding of NPE has not been offered. The goal of my dissertation is to provide such a non-reductionist account. I contend that NPE, far from being a claim of the reducibility of extrinsic denominations, is actually an assertion that extrinsic denominations are genuine properties of the things they denominate. ;To establish my reading of NPE, I examine a line of textual evidence to which interpreters have paid little attention: the way Leibniz argues for NPE. In some passages Leibniz derives NPE from his predicate-in-subject principle of truth. In others, he employs his doctrine of the interconnection of all things to reach NPE. Elsewhere, he bases NPE on the principle of the identity of indiscernibles. Though, as mentioned, Leibniz never explicitly defines NPE, he does have much to say by way of explicit definition of each of these three principles. A consideration of what version of NPE could plausibly be drawn from them is thus a revealing way to proceed. In the case of each argument, I show that my interpretation of NPE is the conclusion naturally suggested by the given principle, while the reductionist version of NPE forms only an awkward, textually implausible fit with it. The result of the examination is an original and serious critique of the reductionist reading of NPE, as well as the development of a far more plausible understanding of that claim. (shrink)

In the predominant pedagogical frameworks of our days, rationalist, voluntarist or sentimentalist reductionisms are seen, from which it is about educating people regardless of their Origin and the singular and unrepeatable originality with which they have been given to existence. Faced with this anthropocentric confinement, Sensitive Education arises so that every person, regardless of their culture and creed, remains sensitive to their Origin and captures their own originality, which in the end is what they must accept and try (...) to manifest with education. When educational systems are not sensitive to the original, they develop falsehood. With the aim of consolidating the validity of the pedagogical-anthropological foundation of Sensitive Education, this study seeks to show how Edith Stein’s argument explains Sensitive Education, although Stein, after her conversion, uses explicitly Christian terminology. Stein’s direct terms serve to describe Education Sensitive to the Holy Spirit, but for those who do not start from a Christian worldview, Education Sensitive to Origin can be a more non-denominational way of approaching the Original. To achieve this objective, an analytical-synthetic methodology has been followed in which essential features of Sensitive Education are proposed and in a hermeneutic manner, arguments are extracted from the writings of Edith Stein that offer support for these essential features. In conclusion, it is sufficiently shown that Edith Stein’s thought provides a pedagogical foundation to Sensitive Education. (shrink)

Quinoa farmers in San Agustín, Bolivia face the dilemma of producing for a growing international market while defending their community interests and resources, meeting their basic household needs, and making a profit. Farmers responded to a changing market in the 1970s by creating committees in defense of quinoa and farmer cooperatives to represent their interests and maximize economic returns. Today farmer cooperatives offer high, stable prices, politically represent farmers, and are major quinoa exporters, but intermediaries continue to play an important (...) role in the local economy. Meanwhile, some farmers rebuff the national cooperatives and intermediaries in favor of a denomination of origin and closer association with local cooperatives. This article, based on 4 months of ethnographic research, explores the reasons for the continued presence of intermediaries on the market landscape and how farmers have worked to create a quinoa economy embedded with fair trade values. Farmers demand stable prices, flexible standards, provision of services, and promises of maintaining the distinctive qualities of San Agustín quinoa. They frame their trades in economic, utility, and solidarity terms to reflect their livelihood strategies, farming capabilities, and personal concepts of fair trade. Meanwhile cooperatives, development initiatives, and intermediaries each argue that their particular buying practices allow farmers to attain household goods, credit, and cash for food and economic security. (shrink)

This article investigated the paradox between church response to apartheid and resulting action at the local level in the South African churches of European origin from the perspective of the Presbyterian Church of South(ern) Africa (PCSA). It indicated that this discrepancy arose between the reflections (cerebral faith) at the highest levels of church councils, which operated in an intermittent manner and at a distance, compared with the responses (praxis as faith in action) of local church members who lived at (...) the coalface of the struggle and sought to witness in a society dominated by racism, where the tension between faith and politics was most evident. The primary focus was on two inter-racial congregations, one of the PCSA, the other a united congregation in which the PCSA participated. This study used primary and secondary sources. The theoretical framework of the article was Thomas Groome’s approach of shared praxis.Contribution: This article contributed to the history of the apartheid era in ecclesiastical contexts. It demonstrated the anomalies that arose within different constituencies within churches of European origin by investigating the situation in one particular denomination. This was a discussion of the relationship of faith and politics in the private and public domains, which takes account of developments within a shared praxis approach. (shrink)

My purpose in this paper is to illustrate how we can understand that what the Christian tradition calls the peccatum naturae neither consists in a mere privation nor in the total corruption of nature. There is a widespread understanding that for Catholics the sin of nature consists in the privation of the gift of original justice –the complete order of the natural tendencies and their subjection to reason as a result of the elevation of our first parents to a state (...) of grace–, whereas Protestant denominations would in general terms understand that after the fall human nature was abandoned to a complete corruption. The two stances are sometimes seen as an either-or dichotomy. My intention is not theological, since I do not want to discuss or decide what Christians should believe in this matter, but I try to dig into the conceptual conditions under which we can coherently understand that our present condition is characterized by a twisted inclination of the will, which without destroying or totally corrupting human nature, still runs contrary to its proper good and cannot be considered as belonging or being inherent to it. I first present Thomas Aquinas’ understanding of the peccatum naturae as a moral defect. Then, I take recourse mostly to Rosmini’s work in order to better understand how there could be a moral weakness, which could be rightly called corruption, without implying that our moral condition is completely irrecoverable. (shrink)

The geography of religions is one of the religious sciences, which is intended to study the spatial pattern of the process of the origin and distribution of different religions, to give a modern religious map of the world and statistical data on the spread of different religions, to predict the prospects of changing confessions in the territorial configuration of their activities. Within this science, the role of the natural factor in the emergence and distribution of religions of a certain (...) denominational certainty in different countries and continents is explored, the autochthonality of certain religious entities of certain geographical regions is revealed, it turns out in the historical retrospect of the appearance of other religions there and, accordingly, the fate of local currents, the spread world religions, the conditions of origin and ways of possible overcoming of inter-confessional and interreligious confrontation are considered, the relationship between ethnic and religious denominations in religious mobility is revealed, mapping of religions is carried out. (shrink)

Dans la ligne tracée par les travaux de Paul Ricœur, familier aux exégètes, l’herméneutique biblique doit se préoccuper du lien de la pensée hmaine avec la vie de l’univers., du rapport de l’écriture à la loi ou à l’éthique, de la consonance profonde de la pensée religieuse avec le langage symbolique. L’écriture est, en effet, l’une des techniques par lesquelles l’être humain, dès ses origines, assure sa maîtrise sur l’univers ; l’écrit lui sert à codifier la vie en société et (...) le fonctionnement de l’autorité. La comparaison des diverses cultures religieuses entre elles permet de discerner le travail original de la foi d’un peuple sur les symbolismes dont il a hérité.In the line traced by the works of Paul Ricœur, familiar to exegetes, biblical hermeneutics should be preoccupied with the connection between human thought and the life of the universe, the rapport of scripture to law and ethics, and the profound harmony of religious thought with symbolic language. Scripture is, indeed, one of the techniques by which human beings, since their origin, assure their control over the universe. Writing serves to codify life in society and the functioning of authority. The comparison of diverse religious cultures allows us to discern the original work of the faith of a people on their inherited symbolisms. (shrink)

Reputation monitoring and the punishment of cheats are thought to be crucial to the viability and maintenance of human cooperation in large groups of non-kin. However, since the cost of policing moral norms must fall to those in the group, policing is itself a public good subject to exploitation by free riders. Recently, it has been suggested that belief in supernatural monitoring and punishment may discourage individuals from violating established moral norms and so facilitate human cooperation. Here we use cross-cultural (...) survey data from a global sample of 87 countries to show that beliefs about two related sources of supernatural monitoring and punishment — God and the afterlife —independently predict respondents' assessment of the justifiability of a range of moral transgressions. This relationship holds even after controlling for frequency of religious participation, country of origin, religious denomination and level of education. As well as corroborating experimental work, our findings suggest that, across cultural and religious backgrounds, beliefs about the permissibility of moral transgressions are tied to beliefs about supernatural monitoring and punishment, supporting arguments that these beliefs may be important promoters of cooperation in human groups. (shrink)

El propósito de este trabajo es realizar una radiografía general de las publicaciones sobre el sector vitivinícola es España. Ello ha compuesto un corpus de trabajo que abarca las publicaciones desde el año 2000 hasta el año 2021. Gracias a esta revisión teórica se han podido establecer las principales corrientes de estudios vinculadas al sector vitivinícola en España en cinco grandes grupos: Denominaciones de Origen Protegidas, Enoturismo, Desarrollo del territorio, Marketing, y Nuevas Tecnologías, que dan forma a los resultados de (...) este trabajo. (shrink)

John Taylor's brilliant new book examines the work of many of the major poets who have deeply marked modern and contemporary European literature. Venturing far and wide from the France in which he has lived since the late 1970s, the polyglot writer-critic not only delves into the more widely translated literatures of Italy, Greece, Germany, and Austria, but also discovers impressive and overlooked work in Slovenia, Bosnia, Hungary, Finland, Norway, and the Netherlands in this book that ranges over nearly all (...) of Europe, including Russia. While providing this stimulating and far-ranging critical panorama, Taylor brings to light key themes of European writing: the depth of everyday life, the quest of the "thing-in-itself," metaphysical aspiration and anxiety, the dialectics of negativity and affirmation, subjectivity and self-effacement, and uprootedness as a category that is as ontological as it is geographical, historical, political, or cultural. The book pays careful attention to the intersection of writing and history, as several poets featured here have faced the Second World War, the Holocaust, Communism, the fall of Communism, or the war in the former Yugoslavia. Taylor gives the work of renowned, upcoming, and still little-known poets a thorough look, all the while scrutinizing recent translations of their verse. He highlights several poets who are also masters of the prose poem. He includes a few novelists who have fashioned a particularly original kind of poetic prose, that stylistic category that has proved so difficult for critics to define. Into the Heart of European Poetry should be of immediate interest to any reader curious about the aesthetic and philosophical ideas underlying major trends of contemporary European writing. In a day and age when much too little is translated and thus known about foreign literature, and when Europeans themselves are pondering the common denominators of their own culture, this book is as indispensable as it is engaging. John Taylor has lived in France since 1977. A frequent contributor to the Times Literary Supplement, Context, the Yale Review, the Antioch Review, the Michigan Quarterly Review, and Chelsea, he has introduced numerous European writers and poets to English readers, often for the first time. Some of his works include The Apocalypse Tapestries, a book of poetry and prose based on the famous tapestries in the Chateau of Angers, and Paths to Contemporary French Literature. (shrink)

This comparative and interdisciplinary study focuses on a cluster of epoch-making themes that emerged in the late sixteenth century. Michelangelo and Giordano Bruno are taken as the founding fathers of the Baroque, and we see that beyond the Alps their lessons were echoed in Montaigne, Cervantes, and the Counter-Reformation culture of the Mediterranean basin. Maiorino shows that the common denominator that links the origins of the Baroque to its maturity is the concept of form as &"process,&" which is then articulated (...) into chapters on the formative unity of the arts, art forms at the threshold, and the development from humanist perfection to Baroque perfectibility. Such an evolution in literature and the arts is situated in relation to the age of explorations (Columbus), scientific inventions (the telescope), and the fundamental shift from the enclosed Ptolemic system to the open universe of the Copernican revolution. At the Baroque point of origin, the inner vitality of Michelangelo's emphasis on creation as &"process&" rather than completed act taught a crucial lesson to Baroque artists. Their response to the infinite and open universe of the &"New Science&" was one that took part to be as dynamic and metamorphic as life itself. It is in the context of &"open&" forms within an &"open&" universe that this study moves from Michelangelo to Bruno. His poetics of immeasurable abundance set &"process&" at the very core of the Baroque art, thought, and science. Applied to the forms of art, growth and metamorphosis are linked to what Maiorino calls (borrowing from Mikhail Bakhtin) the Baroque chronotope of formation, which refers to forms responding to the dynamics of space-time interactions. Such interactions were exhaustive and even tested the boundaries between reality and fiction, creation and denial, conformity and criticism from picaresque Spain to middle-class Holland. And it is the painting of a Dutch artist&—Rembrandt's Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer&— that is taken as a symbol of the Baroque reconciliation of humanist learning with human or humane understanding. Such a humanizing attitude also marked the final transformation of humanist ideals of perfection into the Baroque experience of human perfectibility. This book will be of importance to all scholars concerned with the history of ideas, cultural history, and the Baroque in literature and art. (shrink)

As bibliographical classification of published journal items affects the denominator in this equation, we investigated how the numerator and denominator of the impact factor equation were generated for representative journals in two categories of the Journal Citation Reports. We performed a full text search of the 1st-ranked journal in 2004 JCR category “Medicine, General and Internal” and 61st-ranked journal, 1st-ranked journal in category “Multidisciplinary Sciences” and journal with a relative rank of CMJ. Large journals published more items categorized by Web (...) of Science as non-research items : 63% out of total 5,193 items in Nature and 81% out of 3,540 items in NEJM, compared with 31% out of 283 items in CMJ and only 2 out of 126 items in AABC. Some items classified by WoS as non-original contained original research data. These items received a significant number of citations: 6.9% of total citations in Nature, 14.7% in NEJM and 18.5% in CMJ. IF decreased for all journals when only items presenting original research and citations to them were used for IF calculation. Regardless of the journal’s size or discipline, publication of non-original research and its classification by the bibliographical database have an effect on both numerator and denominator of the IF equation. (shrink)

This paper explores the relationship of time and value in the history of economics, using the contributions of Girard, Achterhuis, Kula and Mirowski. In the ‘anthropometric stage’ time and value are intertwined: value and time are not abstract concepts, but they express a concrete process which incorporates the social positions of individuals. In the ‘lineamentric stage’ the concepts of time and value remain cyclical, but they receive an abstract character. The economy reproduces itself cyclically, because the origin of value (...) – human labour – reproduces itself in each production period. In the ‘syndetic stage’ the cyclical conception of the economy is abandoned through the perception of a non-reproductive system. Time and value are detached from each other, and linear time enters economic theory as an analytical tool. The labour theory of value is replaced by external denominants of value: utility and external scarcity. (shrink)

Throughout scattered passages in Quodlibeta Avenionensia and the comments on Liber Sententiarum we can reconstruct the hardly explored core of some metaphysics of the transcendentals in the thought of Durandus of Saint-Pourçain. Bonum: an extrinsic denomination of the entity diverted from the distinctions of negotiantis et ratiocinantis reason, which would redefine evil as disconvenientia, without dismissing its definition as privation of good. The relative being of truth as the relationship of the thing with itself according to its intellective being (...) and its effective real being, or the characterization of the transcendental unum as convenience of the esse individuum to that which exists per illud quod est with explicit veto on the condition of separable accident, outline an original collage, with diverse doctrinal elements, which condemns the dimension of absolute res or the positive formal matrix of the transcendentals. (shrink)

The Republican education, its concepts, theories, and form of discourse belong to the shared European heritage of the pre-modern Age. The pedagogy of humanism and its effects on the early Modern Age are represented by Republicanism. Even if Republicanism found a political continuation in liberalism and democratism of the Modern Age, the same cannot be said of pedagogic continuity without some reservations. In pedagogy of the Modern Age an alternative to Republicanism prevails that builds onto a body of concepts, discourse, (...) and theory; it goes back to an old theological tradition. Rousseau chooses this alternative exclusively for his concepts of education. He is neither the inventor nor the one who builds up this language in contrast to pedagogical Republicanism. Nonetheless, the pedagogical canonization of Rousseau as one of the co-founders of pedagogical Modernity, marks the specific development that this theological language of pedagogy undergoes at the turn of the nineteenth century. Originally it is closely linked to specific theological, dogmatic lines of thought, namely, to the respective Piety movements within the two Christian denominations of Western Europe. Yet at the turn of the nineteenth century, this theological language of pedagogy increasingly loses that exclusive link to this particular context and becomes thus freely available to any form of pedagogy, which puts at its centre the child’s soul, absolute inwardness, and introspection as both holy and also threatened by a basically decadent social environment and outward world. (shrink)

Familiarity creates its own specific continuum of spiritual life in Ukraine, becomes a notable phenomenon in the field of Ukrainian national revival. With this phrase, we identified a group of related phenomena in the spiritual life of present-day Ukraine, based on the idea of ​​a revival in one form or another of pre-Christian religion, which is considered by the organizers of the Homeland Movement as the authentic worldview of Ukrainians. It is impossible to call each of the currents of native (...) religion a neo-religious denomination, because, first, some of them, by virtue of their belief-conceptions of monotheistic religions, do not accept such an assessment of themselves; and secondly, some of these trends are still not religiously determined, but exist at the level of some educational institutions, they appear in the form of peculiar clubs of interest; Thirdly, a number of them functions in a very limited religious space, consisting only of several communities and a relatively small number of followers. (shrink)

Leone's Dialogues consists of three conversations - 'On Love and Desire,' 'On the Universality of Love,' and 'On the Origin of Love' - that take place over a period of three subsequent days.They are organized in a dialogic format, much like a theatrical representation, of a conversation between a man, Philo, who plays the role of the lover and teacher, and a woman, Sophia, the beloved and pupil. The discussion covers a wide range of topics that have as their (...) common denominator the idea of Love. Through the dialogue, the author explores many different points of view and complex philosophical ideas. Grounded in a distinctly Jewish tradition, and drawing on Neoplatonic philosophical structures and Arabic sources, the work offers a useful compendium of classical and contemporary thought, yet was not incompatible with Christian doctrine. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Good and Bad Ways to Think about Religion and Politics by Robert Benne, and: The Way of Peace: Christian Life in the Face of Discord by James M. Childs Jr.Bruce P. RittenhouseGood and Bad Ways to Think about Religion and Politics Robert Benne Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2010. 127 pp. $14.00The Way of Peace: Christian Life in the Face of Discord James M. Childs Jr. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, (...) 2008. 149 pp. $19.00A comparison of Robert Benne’s Good and Bad Ways to Think about Religion and Politics and James Childs’s The Way of Peace illustrates the current divisions in political theology in the US Lutheran tradition. Benne’s book is a polemic aimed at the leadership of the mainline Protestant denominations and their mode of engagement with the American political process. In Benne’s account, these denominations draw too direct and exclusive a line between Christian faith and liberal political commitments; conversely, he sees greater agreement between core Christian norms and conservative political concerns. By contrast, Childs’s book provides an exegetical development of Christian norms of peace and peacemaking, followed by direct applications of Christian norms to public issues of economic justice and war that parallel the positions of secular liberals.Benne seeks to explore anew the issue of how Christians should interact with the political process. Unlike H. Richard Niebuhr, who undertook a similar project in Christ and Culture, Benne engages contemporary secular interpretations and critiques of religious engagement in politics. Benne rejects the strict separationist positions of the new atheists such as Richard Dawkins and the fusionist positions he attributes to Paul Tillich and the leadership of the contemporary mainline denominations in favor of a critical engagement model based on the Lutheran two kingdoms doctrine. Benne’s passion is not matched by the strength of his arguments. There is a straw man quality to his characterization of his antagonists. For example, Benne describes Tillich as seeing no difference between the demands of the Christian faith and democratic socialism. But Tillich explicitly recognizes the limitations of democratic [End Page 195] socialism in expressing Christian ideals and makes clear that his preference for this form of government is conditioned on a historical situation in which the alternatives are laissez-faire capitalism, fascism, and communism. Benne displays epistemological hubris when he questions mainstream scientific judgments. For example, he mocks the “alleged global warming consensus” (35) without offering any evidence that he possesses the necessary evidence or expertise to judge that consensus. He adds questionable historical claims, exaggerating Nazi persecution of Christians and minimizing the religious motivation of the European wars following the Reformation.Childs’s treatment of the question of how Christians are to engage in the US political process is even more problematic than Benne’s. His political prescriptions are written as if the problem did not exist, as if there existed a unified Christian polity fully faithful to its ideals that could express those ideals directly in the nation’s public policies. In this, there is a lack of the moral realism that Lutherans traditionally express through the doctrine that Christians are simul justus et peccator (at the same time justified and sinner). It is telling that the only sins that Childs acknowledges in the church are those that correspond to secular liberal norms: “racism, sexism, classism, and other forms of discrimination” (110). Childs’s representations of the church as holy, a community of peacemakers, and a sign of peace are normative not descriptive, effacing the traditional Lutheran distinction between the visible and invisible church. Childs also demonstrates a lack of political realism with respect to the influence of Christians in the American political process. In proposing that public policy be directed by Christian ideals, Childs either presupposes a significant conversion of our pluralistic society or he imagines that those not presently acting in the political process according to Christian moral principles can be persuaded to selflessness without conversion. The former position is not an empirical reality, and the latter contradicts the traditional Lutheran understanding of original sin, which holds that in the absence of faith human beings are curvatus in se, curved in upon themselves.Benne makes a... (shrink)

ABSTRACT The individual-community relationship has always been one of the most fundamental topics of social sciences. In sociology, this is known as the micro-macro relationship while in economics it refers to the processes, through which, individual actions lead to macroeconomic phenomena. Based on philosophical discourse and systems theory, many sociologists even use the term "emergence" in their understanding of micro-macro relationship, which refers to collective phenomena that are created by the cooperation of individuals, but cannot be reduced to individual actions. (...) "Emergence" theories attempt to explain the nature of society as a complex system by examining how individuals and their relationships lead to the creation of integrated and macro-social phenomena such as markets, educational systems, cultural beliefs, and shared social practices. As a prelude to activity, every researcher has to answer the question from the methodological point of view, how is it possible to study the behavior of social groups and how can we gain knowledge about the laws related to social groups? Anyone who deals with humanities and social sciences or any reality and phenomenon that affects human beings, inevitably deals with the reality that is emerging. In fact, emergence occurs when one level of reality emerges radically from another level. Examples of emergent levels of reality include how the mind emerges from the body; or the way society emerges from human beings. Therefore, when there is an emerging factor, different scientific disciplines should be used, because it is inevitable to talk about social affairs, psychology and neurobiology, as well as physical and even chemical. -/- INTRODUCTION Since its beginning in the 19th century, sociology has faced the fundamental question of what a social phenomena stands for? At a glance, sociologists deal with the study of social groups, collective behavior, institutions, social structures, social networks, and social dynamics, and ultimately all such phenomena are composed of individuals. Therefore, social phenomena seem to have no independent ontological status, and in this case, sociology is ultimately about reducible individuals. Different approaches about the micro-macro relationship, using the concept of "emergence", argue that although collective phenomena are created by individuals, they cannot be reduced to individual action. The term "emergence" is used to distinguish "emergent results" from " Procedural results". Results are called Procedural that can only be calculated by adding or subtracting the causes that act together. On the contrary, they are emergent outcomes that are qualitatively novel compared to the causes from which they originate. An example of such emergent results is mental characteristics that emerge from neural processes, but are not considered among the characteristics of neural processes of components - which are their origin. Philosophical debates about emergentism and reductionism focus on the mind-brain relationship, but as many philosophers have noted, they can be generalized to apply to any hierarchical set of features. The cognitive revolution reactivated a 19th century controversy between theorists of Identity and dualism. The theorists of Identity believe in reductionist materialism and elimination of metaphysics, according to which the mind is nothing more than the biological, while the dualists believe that the mind and the brain are distinct from each other. Emergence has been considered as a third way between the theories of Identity and dualism. -/- METHODOLOGY Interdisciplinarity Is fundamentally indicated by the dominance of open systems as well as social and emerging systems at different levels. Therefore, as long as we are facing a new emergentism, there will necessarily be different fields and an interdisciplinary method. The commonality of social sciences and cognitive sciences on the issue of emergence provides the possibility of interaction and exchange of concepts between these two for deeper research. Therefore, in this research, apart from the concepts of Subvenience and downward causation, we have used multiple realization and wildly disjunctive, which are used to explain the emerging concept in cognitive sciences, including neurobiology, psychology, and philosophy. For analytical and interdisciplinary approaches, after examining the concepts of subvenience, and wildly disjunctive, Individualistic and collectivist emergentism have been reviewed. And then their adequacy is criticized and evaluated in meeting strong emergence conditions. -/- FINDINGS Philosophers of the mind have been able to define the conditions of irreducibility and downward causation, which are essential for strong emergence, by using the principle of subvenience with the help of multiple realization and wildly disjunctive principles. Therefore, by definition, emergentist individualism suffers from the problem of how to explain downward causality and irreducibility, and emergentist collectivism faces the challenge of reification. The analysis of the challenges facing the two methodological approaches of individualism and collectivism leads us to three unresolved issues about the emerging phenomenon, which are realism, downward causality, and mechanism. Despite the differences in the stances of these two approaches regarding the aforementioned triple problems, individualists and collectivists both agree that some social characteristics are reducible; and some others are irreducible due to their complexity, the determination of which, depends on the case study of the mechanism of emergence of each social characteristic. -/- CONCLUSION An emergence that is consistent with reductionism is called a weak emergence. And strong emergence includes the principle of irreducibility and downward causality. According to strong emergence, the characteristics of social phenomena have downward causal power, which cannot be reduced to the causal forces. The principle of subvenience, together with multiple realization and wildly disjunctive, can provide the conditions of irreducibility and downward causality, which are essential conditions of strong emergence. Based on the philosophical analysis of two methodological approaches, individualist and collectivist, it can be concluded that emergentist individualism suffers from the problem of how to explain downward causality and irreducibility, and reification collectivism faces the challenge of reification. The analysis of the problems faced by these two approaches leads us to three unresolved issues, which are realism, downward causality, and mechanism. individualist emergentists acknowledge the existence of emergent social characteristics, but despite this, they believe that these characteristics are not real but merely analytical constructs that require explanation based on individuals and their mutual actions. But collectivists argue that emergentism yields a categorical ontology and supports social realism. They accept the dependence of social characteristics on individuals, but claim that social entities and structures are ontologically independent. Individualists and collectivists both agree that some social characteristics are reducible; and others are irreducible due to their complexity; and the only way to recognize this is to engage in empirical studies of the mechanisms and temporal processes of "emergence" that create social characteristics. -/- NOVELTY The newness of this compact article is as follows: a) Presenting an interdisciplinary approach using the analysis of philosophy of cognitive sciences, including the philosophy of mind, neurobiology and psychology to formulate the issue of social emergence; b) Criticizing individualist and collectivist methodological approaches to the issue of social emergence and explaining the sufficiency and shortcomings of both in providing weak and strong emerging conditions; c) Explaining and categorizing the challenges facing methodological approaches in explaining the phenomenon of social emergence, in three categories: realism, downward causality, and mechanism. BIBLIOGRAPHY Beckermann, A., Flohr, H., & Kim, J. (eds.) (1992). Emergence or reduction? Essays on the prospects of nonreductive physicalism. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Bhaskar, R. (1979). The possibility of Naturalism. New York: Routledge. Bhaskar, R., Danermark, B. & Price, L. (2018). Interdisciplinarity and wellbeing: A critical realist general theory of interdisciplinarity. London and New York: Routledge. Blau, P.M. (1981). Introduction: diverse views of social structure and their common denominator. In Blau, P.M. & Merton, R.K. (eds.), Continuity in Structural Inquiry (pp. 1–23). Beverly Hills: Sage. Blau, P.M. (1987). Microprocess and macrostructure. In K.S. Cook (ed.), Social Exchange Theory (pp. 83–100). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Brooks, R.A., & Maes, P. (eds). (1994). Artificial life IV; proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. Clark, A. (1997). Being there: Putting brain, body, and world together again. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Coleman, J. S. (1987). Microfoundations and macrosocial behavior. In: J. C. Alexander, B. Giesen, R. Munch, & Neil J. Smelser (Eds.). The Micro-Macro Link (pp. 153–73). Berkeley: University of California. Coleman, J. S. (1990). Foundations of social theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Elster, J. (1985). Making sense of Marx. New York: Cambridge University Press. Fodor, J.A. (1974). Special sciences (Or: The disunity of science as a working hypothesis). Synthese, 28(2), 97–115. Fodor, J.A. (1989). Making mind matter more. Philosophical Topics, 17, 59-79. Giddens, A. (1984). The constitution of society: Outline of the theory of structuration. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hempel, C.G. (1965). Aspects of scientific explanation and other essays in the philosophy of science. New York: The Free Press. Horgan, T. (1993). From supervenience to superdupervenience: meeting the demands of a material world. Mind, 102, 555-586. Humphreys, P. (1997). How properties emerge”. Philosophy of Science, 64, 1-17. Kim, J. (1999). Making sense of emergence. Philosophical Studies, 95, 3–36. Kincaid, H. (1997). Individualism and the unity of science. New York: Rowman & Littlefield. Lewis, D.K. (1986). The plurality of worlds. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nigel, G., & Conte, R. (eds.) (1995). Artificial societies; The computer simulation of social life. London: UCL Press. O’Connor, T. (1994). Emergent properties. American Philosophical Quarterly, 31, 91-104. Popper, K.R. (1968). Conjectures and refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge. New York: Harper & Row. Sawyer, R. K. (2001). Emergence in sociology: contemporary philosophy of mind and some implications for sociological theory. American Journal of Sociology, 107, 551-585. Sawyer, R. K. (2004). The mechanisms of emergence. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 34, 260–282. Sawyer, R. K. (2005). Social emergence: societies as complex systems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sawyer, R.K. (2003). Nonreductive individualism: Part 2, Social causation. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 33, 203–224. Winch, P. (1993). The idea of a social science and its relation to philosophy‭ (SAMT, Trans.). Tehran, Iran: SAMT. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ronald Shusterman IN DEFENSE OF ELITISM I One recent trend in criticism, starting notably widi die work of Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels,1 has suggested diat literary theory is either useless, harmful, or bodi. This pragmatist line ofargument can be seen to go hand in hand widi contemporary attacks on the distinction between "high" and "low" art, claiming that a rap text deserves die same attention or esteem (...) as a poem by Eliot. My purposes here are predetermined by die polemical nature of this debate. I shall endeavor to show diat tiieory is useful and diat diere is a valid distinction between low and high. I intend to do so, somewhat negatively, notby giving examples—diough diis would be easy enough— but rather by underlining die contradictions inherent in some of these arguments. I shall also deal widi anodier debate, which may at first appear unrelated, concerning die limits of interpretation. I diink it can be noted that the criteria of judgment involved in distinguishing between high and low are connected to die criteria of interpretation which, though diey do not close die open work, do permit the identification of misreadings. If judgment involves refined analysis, then theory is necessary as an instrument of refinement. If misreadings exist, dien absolute interpretive relativism cannot be justified. One might expect me to begin by defining "literary tiieory," but one of my main points is that such a definition is futile. The dieoretical endeavor is myriad. The term theory can be fruitfully used to designate a wide continuum of discourses about literature diat range from pure explication to pure philosophy. I see no need to find a common denominator diat would bring togedier under a single description narratology, stylistics, deconstructionist criticism, and so on. Philosophy and Literature, © 1994, 18: 242-252 Ronald Shusterman243 Indeed, in dieir original attack on literary theory, Knapp and Michaels were careful to set aside the more "empirical" approaches such as narratology as not relevant to their criticisms (p. 11). Their basic complaint has to do widi theories of interpretation, and they conclude:... theory is nothing else but the attempt to escape practice... theory is notjust another name for practice. It is the name for all the ways people have tried to stand outside practice in order to govern practice from without. Our thesis has been that no one can reach a position outside practice, that theorists should stop trying, and that the theoretical enterprise should therefore come to an end. (p. 30) The point seems to be that criticism, as a practice, can and must be undertaken widiout die interference of a supposed realm of independent principles or axioms. That was ten years ago. Joel Weinsheimer has recently defended similar conclusions in an article entitled "Suppose Theory Is Dead."2 He invokes Gadamer to argue diat "understanding can and does succeed even widiout die imprimatur of theoretical self-consciousness" (p. 252). Weinsheimer refuses what he sees as the "first principle of the first theorist of literature: that only theory counts as knowledge" (p. 263). This, of course, echoes pragmatist philosophy's new emphasis on praxis as a valid form of knowledge: The kind of knowledge involved in acting or story-telling or teaching or practical criticism is practical knowledge, and if it cannot satisfactorily explain orjustify from principles what it practices, that is not its fault but its nature—even its particular significance.... Literature is to be practiced, is the practice of it, its own practice, and in this light at least theory is merely the self-defeating attempt to abstract literature from its presentations, from the concrete practice diat is itself. (Weinsheimer, p. 263) To those who would argue that any practice presupposes theoretical principles, Weinsheimer retorts that such presuppositions need not be considered as tiieory: "Interpretation supposes a form of life, perhaps, but a form of life is not a theory" (p. 255). I admit to being somewhat confused when he writes that practical criticism "involves tacit knowledge, certainly, but such knowledge is not necessarily dieoretical" (p. 255). I do not think diat what we do when 244Philosophy and Literature reading critically can be assimilated to what we do when, say, riding a bicycle... (shrink)

The process of transmission and translation of texts has similarities with crossing borders into foreign territory, as immigrant or refugee. Not everything can be taken along, and finding acceptance in the new environment is sometimes difficult. Martin Luther’s hymn A mighty fortress has found a place in most denominational hymnals, but there are many disagreements about how it should be sung and what its meaning is. Has it really found a ‘home’ in the new settings, or is it still a (...) foreigner? Does it have a ‘home’ even in its original language in the 21st century? Can this hymn be a unifying factor in the Reformation celebrations in 2017? This article analyses various translations and discusses issues of interpretation of this well-known Reformation hymn. (shrink)

According to the Principle of Techno-Geek Proportionality, for every million times a nerd gets excited about “the latest thing” the world might change once. Central bank digital currency (CBDC) may be that once. There is nothing new about digital money, but there may be many profoundly new things about CBDC. This is especially so for “retail” CBDC – that is, CBDC freely available to the public rather than “wholesale” CBDC, which is restricted to some registered users and central bank systems. (...) At the moment, the vast majority of money in existence takes the form of deposits at Santander, Barclays and the other commercial banks. As the Bank of England makes clear, most of this is originally produced when a bank extends a loan and creates a sum as a deposit which the borrower can then spend. This money flows around our payments system and the money supply, albeit there is more to money supply than just this, grows as cumulative debt grows and shrinks as debt is paid down. In the UK (and equivalents apply in any modern economy that has commercial banks), though we rarely think about it, since the money is denominated in s and the central bank essentially guarantees that it will exchange at par for central bank money, most of what we think of as money is really Santander or Barclays etc. credit units. Retail CBDC could change this state of affairs and the issues are sufficient to require public debate – not only regarding the scope of the technology but also the role and adequacy of central banks. This, in turn, provides an opportunity to discuss the nature of process. (shrink)

The question whether the fusion of the musical traditions of different cultures is a good thing or not is irrelevant in practical terms, since there is no realistic possibility of preventing it, but the advantages and disadvantages that the process brings are worth considering nevertheless. The loss of diversity that results when one tradition is overwhelmed by its contact with a more influential one is not redressed by the increased variety that comes about within the dominant tradition, since the latter (...) are variations within a tradition rather than traditions of distinct origins. But the common denominator that allows different traditions to interact meaningfully with one another points to the ability of music to bring us in touch with our common humanity. (shrink)

The present contribution offers an overview of the main problems concerning the representation of the planets in the pre-Islamic Iranian world, the origin of their denominations, their astral roles and the reasons behind their demonization in the Zoroastrian and Manichaean frameworks. This is a preliminary attempt to resume the planetary iconography and iconology in western and eastern Iranian sources, involving also external visual data, such as those coming from Dunhuang and the Chinese world. The article offers an intellectual journey (...) into a net of mutual cultural and spiritual relations, focusing on the image of the heaven (and of its celestial beings), thereby proposing a new synthesis and highlighting a number of intercultural contaminations. (shrink)

The article reveals the nature and manifestations of Ukrainian religious pluralism. Despite the constant interest in the topic - the plurality of religious life in Ukraine, science has not yet clarified the causes and roots of this phenomenon. The author analyzes the historical, psychological, socio-political factors that caused the religious diversity of Ukraine. The presence of many religious traditions within one ethnic and state territory promotes tolerant relations between bearers of different religious beliefs. Ukraine's religious plurality distinguishes Ukrainians from other (...) nations. This gives grounds to consider Ukraine a unique religious phenomenon of the European level. Religious plurality is a condition for the establishment of the principles of freedom of religion, freedom of choice. The author derives worldview plurality and polydenominationalism in Ukraine from the history of the Ukrainian people, looking for their origins in the pre-Christian and later early Christian era. The presence of heresy in Ukraine as a generalized form of coexistence of different worldviews explains the current richness of religious traditions, their syncretization. The article makes an intermediate conclusion that the history itself, living conditions, national character of the people formed Ukraine denominationally plural. Based on such a historical foundation, since gaining state independence in 1991, Ukraine has been self-determined in its priorities regarding the country's spiritual / religious development. The Law “On Freedom of Conscience and Religious Organizations” adopted by the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine created a legal basis for the equal existence and development of different religions in Ukraine. The plurality of Ukrainian society is enshrined in law. The basic principles of the plurality of religious life are confirmed by specific digital data that illustrate the richness of religious traditions in Ukraine quantitatively and qualitatively. The author provides statistics on all religions and denominations that exist in Ukraine, giving the number of communities, monasteries, schools, priests, publications and more. Detailed information seeks to form a holistic picture of the religious life of Ukraine. The analyzed data give grounds to single out the factors that determine the religious plurality of Ukraine. According to the author, at the beginning of the XXI century the denominational network of Ukraine has largely already formed. The mass emergence of new religious movements is unlikely. Nevertheless, Ukraine has not yet exhausted all the possibilities of religious pluralism. It can grow not only due to the emergence of some exotic, technological, syncretic religions, but also because of intra-confessional division or unity of communities. In Ukraine, there are structures that cultivate interreligious tolerance, which will ensure a high level of religious freedom. However, religious pluralism in Ukraine is periodically threatened by various circumstances - internal and external, general and local, collective and personal. In conclusion, religious pluralism is determined as a guarantor of religious freedom, the right of everyone to profess his chosen system of spiritual values. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:John Henry Newman and the Development of Doctrine: Encountering Change, Looking for Continuity by Stephen MorganReinhard HütterJohn Henry Newman and the Development of Doctrine: Encountering Change, Looking for Continuity by Stephen Morgan. Foreword by Ian Ker (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2021), xvi + 315 pp.St. John Henry Newman was controversial during much of his lifetime—as an Anglican as well as a Catholic. Nothing has changed (...) since. There has been an eagerness to silence his voice, and with it the challenge of his theological insights then, and there is such an eagerness to do so also now—in ways more or less subtle. There are historians whose chosen object of study happens to be the Victorian Newman in the Victorian age and who take the immanent frame they tacitly presuppose as normative horizon and their assumed attitude of scientific detachment as indispensable precondition for historical objectivity, and who dismiss all interpretations of Newman that happen to display signs of substantive agreement with his insights and tenets as "Newman hagiographies" lacking the allegedly requisite scientific distance from their object of investigation. This principle of critical detachment would, of course, entail that Platonists are disqualified from investigating reliably Plato's thought, and the same would obtain presumably for Aristotelians regarding Aristotle, for Thomists regarding Thomas Aquinas, for Marxists regarding Karl Marx, for Foucaultians regarding Foucault, and so on and so forth—and last but not least, for historians committed to the immanent frame and historicist tenets regarding their interpretations of Troeltsch and Mannheim. Such an assumption, when consistently applied, carries itself, of course, sooner or later ad absurdum, but the derogatory denomination "Newman hagiography" survives and is conveniently attachable to whatever interpretation one likes to disqualify as scholarly serious and academically reputable work on Newman. Next to the "unmaskers" of "Newman hagiographies" there are those Newman scholars of a primarily evangelical and Anglican provenance eager to demonstrate that Newman's self-characterization, primarily [End Page 1335] in his Apologia Pro Vita Sua, is at best an ex post facto retro-projection, and hence an inherently unreliable, if not an intentional, re-composition of his intellectual past meant to be deceptive and hence bordering on the mendacious—in short, a renewal of Kingsley's charge. Things are not necessarily better on the Catholic side—since Orestes Brownson's attack, there continue notions, popular among Catholic traditionalists as well as Lefebvrists, that Newman's theory of the development of doctrine, if not outright modernist, is at best crypto-modernist, a view sadly encouraged by Catholic neo-modernists who instrumentalize Newman's account as a justification for interpreting "change" as an interminable but allegedly unavoidable sequence of ruptures and "development" as the intentional activity of progressive developers of doctrine establishing an ongoing praxis of pre-projected desired transmutations of faith, doctrine, and practice.It takes so-called "Newman hagiographers" to set the record straight and to save Newman's ongoingly pertinent and indeed salutary insights from multiple distortions and instrumentalizations, let alone attempts of effectively silencing Newman by way of a more or less subtle character assassination. It requires painstaking archival work and a close, careful, and comprehensive reading of Newman's published letters, diary entries, and works (in their original unrevised versions) as well as letters and works of his interlocutors and collaborators in the Oxford Movement to set the record straight, to unearth Newman's authentic voice, and first and foremost, to acquit him of the charge of systematic disingenuity, if not duplicity, in putting together his own account of the development of his religious opinions.John Henry Newman and the Development of Doctrine comprises, next to an introduction and a conclusion, four substantive chapters of about equal length: the first covering the years up to 1833, with a focus on Newman's first monograph, The Arians of the Fourth Century; the second considering the period from 1833 to 1838, with a focus on the Oxford Movement, the Tracts for the Times, and the Via Media; the third covering the period from 1839 to 1842, with a focus on Tract 90 and its aftermath; the fourth and final chapter advancing close... (shrink)

Cognitive reflection is the tendency to override an intuitive response so as to engage in the reflection necessary to derive a correct response. Here, we examine the emergence of cognitive reflection in a culture that values nonanalytic thinking styles, Chinese culture. We administered a child‐friendly version of the cognitive reflection test, the CRT‐D, to 130 adults and 111 school‐age children in China and compared performance on the CRT‐D to several measures of rational thinking (belief bias syllogisms, base rate sensitivity, denominator (...) neglect, and other‐side thinking) and normative thinking dispositions (actively open‐minded thinking and need for cognition). The CRT‐D was a significant predictor of rational thinking and normative thinking dispositions in both children and adults, as previously found in American samples. Adults’ performance on the CRT‐D correlated with their performance on the original CRT, and children's performance on the CRT‐D predicted rational thinking and normative thinking dispositions even after adjusting for age. These results demonstrate that cognitive reflection, rational thinking, and normative thinking dispositions converge even in a culture that emphasizes holistic, nonanalytic reasoning. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophies versus Philosophy:In Defense of a Flexible DefinitionRein RaudIt is strange that no one has taken up Carine Defoort's clearly formulated and timely argument about the intercultural tensions in interpreting what philosophy is, although the issue deserves at least a roundtable, if not an international conference.1 I doubt that this is because there is a general consensus that the matter is now settled, and I would therefore like to (...) develop the argument a bit further and offer a few additional factors to consider. It is also obvious that the problem is not limited to the subject of Chinese philosophy alone: all traditions of thought from all over the world, but most notably the Indian, Islamic, and Japanese heritages, are affected by the positions we adopt. As in most debates about the commensurability of cultural traditions, we can find differences when we look for them, and similarities if these are what we would like to see, so the "conflict of sensitivities"2 is also a matter of attitudes. My own position is that regardless of what we prefer to call the practice of deeper thought (and 'philosophy' is a very good name), it would be extremely useful for all of its participants, whatever their origin and upbringing, to find a common denominator for them to be able to exchange ideas and mutually enrich each other on its basis. In what follows I shall try to sketch a perspective from which this could, in my opinion, be theoretically grounded.Four PositionsDefoort has identified four possible points of view on the problem of whether classical Chinese thought could or should be called 'philosophy,' which could be summarized as follows.1. Chinese classical thought is not philosophy, because it does not satisfy the conditions of philosophy as it is generally and traditionally understood in the West.2. Chinese classical thought is philosophy, because it reveals the necessary characteristics if analyzed with the help of an appropriate (Western-type) observation language.3. Chinese classical thought can be called philosophy, but only if we redefine philosophy in order to accommodate some of its nontypical or clearly deviant features.4. Chinese classical thought should not be called philosophy, because philosophy is a culturally closed Western phenomenon with a limited scope and incapable of understanding fundamentally different modes of thought. [End Page 618]If we dismiss the birthright variety of the first position, we could label it essentialist, and its weakest point is certainly that Western philosophy has not remained unchanged during the course of history. It is highly doubtful that Socrates, Diogenes, scholastics, Nietzsche, and Gareth Evans could all be members of the same set if the same strict criteria were applied to all periods and all cultural settings in the same way, and, as Defoort herself stresses,3 the fact that seventeenth-century Jesuits (the basis of whose original worldview, we should think, was much farther from the Chinese than ours) had no problem in calling Chinese thought philosophy should show us that the paradigm shift of the thing called 'philosophy' has occurred in the West and is, so to speak, our problem and not theirs.Now, it is also possible that in some circles even some prominent names in the Western tradition do not qualify as real philosophers, in the sense in which Hegel was treated by Bertrand Russell4 and Heidegger was dismissed by Alfred Ayer5 in their respective histories of philosophy (while they nevertheless felt compelled to include chapters or passages on them). A definition of philosophy that puts forward such criteria that a considerable number of thinkers would have to remain outside its borders should be labeled sectarian-and it can still be met, even if ever less often, in some analytical schools of philosophy. It is my conviction, however, that in our globalizing world any definition that would leave non-European philosophy outside the borders of 'philosophy proper' should be considered sectarian in nature. The main problem that I have with Defoort's family model6 is precisely that in it the head of the family, who makes the decisions as to who can be adopted and who cannot, is always Western, and the... (shrink)

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to suggest a definition of genetic information by taking into account the debate surrounding it. Particularly, the objections raised by Developmental Systems Theory to Teleosemantic endorsements of the notion of genetic information as well as deflationist approaches which suggest to ascribe the notion of genetic information a heuristic value at most, and to reduce it to that of causality. Design/methodology/approach The paper presents the notion of genetic information through its historical evolution and analyses (...) it with the conceptual tools offered by philosophical theories of causation on one side and linguistics on the other. Findings The concept of genetic information is defined as a special kind of cause which causes something to be one way rather than another, by combining elementary units one way rather than another. Tested against the notion of “genetic error” this definition demonstrates to provide an exhaustive account of the common denominators associated with the notion of genetic information: causal specificity; combinatorial mechanism; arbitrariness. Originality/value The definition clarifies how the notion of information is understood when applied to genetic phenomena and also contributes to the debate on the notion of information, broadly meant, which is still affected by lack of consensus. (shrink)

The catalogue entitled Lidai sanbao ji T2034, completed in 598, exerted a profound influence on the shape of the Chinese Buddhist canon. It also features a large number of new ascriptions for canonical texts. Subsequent tradition and modern scholarship have repeatedly found these ascriptions profoundly problematic. Scholarly opinion has been divided about whether the author, Fei Changfang, faithfully reported these suspect ascriptions from other sources, or was himself their originator. This study analyzes three highly suspect patterns in the treatment of (...) new ascriptions in the Lidai sanbao ji: 1) New ascriptions to the same supposed translator are arbitrarily assigned in batches to titles appearing in delimited, contiguous portions of much longer lists of anonymous texts in the earlier Chu sanzang ji ji. 2) Contradictory information is repeatedly given about the same titles in different parts of the work. 3) Information about titles affected by these two problems is ascribed to an implausibly wide range of earlier catalogues. These three patterns affect numerous separate portions of the Lidai sanbao ji. The Lidai sanbao ji, and not its putative earlier sources, is therefore the common denominator―the bottleneck where these problems collect. The most economical and plausible interpretation is that Fei himself was falsifying his information, whether deliberately or by a rather extreme scholarly negligence. These findings make it all the more imperative to critically evaluate all ascriptions appearing for the first time in the Lidai sanbao ji, including a large number of ascriptions still followed in the canon as it is used today. (shrink)

Paul Rateau traces the genesis and development of G.W. Leibniz's treatment of the problem of evil, from his earliest writings through the Essays on Theodicy (1710). By investigating Leibniz's early thinking about what evil is and where it comes from, Rateau reveals the deeply original nature of Leibniz's later work and the challenges it raises. Rateau explores the ways in which the Theodicy's theoretical project, which integrates numerous disciplines and various argumentative strategies, informs and is influenced by two more practical (...) aims-justifying the end of denominational divisions between Catholics and Protestants, and inculcating "true piety" in believers. By paying equal attention to both Leibniz's intellectual and personal development, Rateau offers a holistic view of Leibniz's most profound and sophisticated work of philosophy. Rateau shows how the young Leibniz moves from suggesting that the author of evil is God himself to later defending an original theory of necessitarianism (in The Confession of a Philosopher), which makes God the first link in the chain of beings that constitute the world, but which ultimately denies God's responsibility for sin. By examining Leibniz's theoretical development after 1673, he demonstrates how Leibniz comes to a revised framework that forms the basis for the project of theodicy. After having examined the defensive and the doctrinal aspects of the Theodicy, Rateau shows how human freedom can be reconciled with divine freedom in Leibniz's system. Newly translated from the original French edition, Rateau's book offers a novel and important new interpretation of Leibniz and will appeal to scholars both of Leibniz and of early modern thought generally. (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)

The doctrine of the immaculate conception, which is a dogma binding on all Roman Catholics and also held by members of some other Christian denominations, holds that Mary the mother of Jesus Christ was conceived without the stain of original sin as a result of the redeeming effects of Christ’s later life, passion, death, and resurrection. In this paper I argue first that, even on an orthodox reading of this doctrine, the immaculate conception seems to result in a kind of (...) causal time loop. I then consider several common philosophical objections to causal time loops, showing how each is either not a serious problem for causal time loops in general or is not a serious problem for the immaculate conception time loop in particular because of some particular features of that particular loop. The upshot of this discussion is that it shows that anyone who is committed to the dogma of the immaculate conception is also committed to the possibility, and, indeed, the actuality, of at least one causal time loop, but also that this is no reason to reject the dogma, since all of the major worries for causal time loops can be resolved in one way or another. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophies versus Philosophy:In Defense of a Flexible DefinitionRein RaudIt is strange that no one has taken up Carine Defoort's clearly formulated and timely argument about the intercultural tensions in interpreting what philosophy is, although the issue deserves at least a roundtable, if not an international conference.1 I doubt that this is because there is a general consensus that the matter is now settled, and I would therefore like to (...) develop the argument a bit further and offer a few additional factors to consider. It is also obvious that the problem is not limited to the subject of Chinese philosophy alone: all traditions of thought from all over the world, but most notably the Indian, Islamic, and Japanese heritages, are affected by the positions we adopt. As in most debates about the commensurability of cultural traditions, we can find differences when we look for them, and similarities if these are what we would like to see, so the "conflict of sensitivities"2 is also a matter of attitudes. My own position is that regardless of what we prefer to call the practice of deeper thought (and 'philosophy' is a very good name), it would be extremely useful for all of its participants, whatever their origin and upbringing, to find a common denominator for them to be able to exchange ideas and mutually enrich each other on its basis. In what follows I shall try to sketch a perspective from which this could, in my opinion, be theoretically grounded.Four PositionsDefoort has identified four possible points of view on the problem of whether classical Chinese thought could or should be called 'philosophy,' which could be summarized as follows.1. Chinese classical thought is not philosophy, because it does not satisfy the conditions of philosophy as it is generally and traditionally understood in the West.2. Chinese classical thought is philosophy, because it reveals the necessary characteristics if analyzed with the help of an appropriate (Western-type) observation language.3. Chinese classical thought can be called philosophy, but only if we redefine philosophy in order to accommodate some of its nontypical or clearly deviant features.4. Chinese classical thought should not be called philosophy, because philosophy is a culturally closed Western phenomenon with a limited scope and incapable of understanding fundamentally different modes of thought. [End Page 618]If we dismiss the birthright variety of the first position, we could label it essentialist, and its weakest point is certainly that Western philosophy has not remained unchanged during the course of history. It is highly doubtful that Socrates, Diogenes, scholastics, Nietzsche, and Gareth Evans could all be members of the same set if the same strict criteria were applied to all periods and all cultural settings in the same way, and, as Defoort herself stresses,3 the fact that seventeenth-century Jesuits (the basis of whose original worldview, we should think, was much farther from the Chinese than ours) had no problem in calling Chinese thought philosophy should show us that the paradigm shift of the thing called 'philosophy' has occurred in the West and is, so to speak, our problem and not theirs.Now, it is also possible that in some circles even some prominent names in the Western tradition do not qualify as real philosophers, in the sense in which Hegel was treated by Bertrand Russell4 and Heidegger was dismissed by Alfred Ayer5 in their respective histories of philosophy (while they nevertheless felt compelled to include chapters or passages on them). A definition of philosophy that puts forward such criteria that a considerable number of thinkers would have to remain outside its borders should be labeled sectarian-and it can still be met, even if ever less often, in some analytical schools of philosophy. It is my conviction, however, that in our globalizing world any definition that would leave non-European philosophy outside the borders of 'philosophy proper' should be considered sectarian in nature. The main problem that I have with Defoort's family model6 is precisely that in it the head of the family, who makes the decisions as to who can be adopted and who cannot, is always Western, and the... (shrink)

Gerontology together with its subfields, such as social gerontology, geragogy, educational gerontology, political gerontology, environmental gerontology, and financial gerontology, is still a relatively new academic discipline that is currently intensively developing, expanding research fields and combining various theoretical and practical perspectives. The interdisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity, and multidisciplinarity of research on ageing and old age, despite its vast thematic, methodological and theoretical diversity, have a common denominator, which is the focus of research work on improving the quality of life of older people. (...) It is the concern for the components of quality of life such as welfare and well-being as well as focus on learning about phenomena conditioning successful ageing that has become motivators and premises hidden or visible in many texts included in the Research Topic “Perspectives and Theories of Social Innovation for Ageing Population.” The Research Topic that we are presenting to our readers is unique not only because of its size but above all because of its novelty and social involvement, visible in the content of individual chapters. The presented collection includes 17 articles prepared in total by 76 authors from the following countries: China, Finland, Germany, Ghana, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Two journals were combined with this Research Topic: “Frontiers in Public Health” and “Frontiers in Sociology.” The presented Research Topic contains seven types of articles covering: two community case studies, eight original research articles, two perspective articles, one hypothesis and theory paper, one policy and practice review, one methods article, and two book reviews. The rationale to start work on this set of texts was the desire to continue and deepen the research analyses of the editors of this set, which concern the development of social innovations for the ageing population as well as changes of public policy on ageing. This Research Topic deals with topics covering issues such as social learning, intergenerational transmission, senior entrepreneurship, creative content creation by older adults, care services, raising the independence of older people in their living environments, dementia challenges, the image of the older generation in local social policies, new trends in qualitative research on old age, strategies for dealing with chronic diseases, the use of digital tools in health education, the silver economy/longevity economy, age-friendly environments, the diversity of structures and social services, preparation for old age, and food safety. The wide variety of submitted texts shows several selected and, according to the authors, current challenges that contemporary seniors have to face. The articles comprising this Research Topic are organized according to five themes. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 20 (2000) 282-287 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Wrestling with the Ox: A Theology of Religious Experience Wrestling with the Ox: A Theology of Religious Experience. By Paul O. Ingram. New York: Continuum, 1997. 276 pp. Paul Ingram has set out a formidable task for himself. Even though he identifies himself as an historian of religion, he has chosen to push beyond phenomenological description of the (...) religious enterprise to make a prescriptive proposal, a theology that can illuminate and guide the great faith traditions. Simultaneously, his proposal aims at interpreting the necessity and the outlines of interreligious dialogue. Such dialogue, he argues, is not a peripheral enterprise reserved for a handful of religious exotics. It is central to understanding any and all religious traditions in the postmodern world.All religions have been discovered to reflect inescapable historical and cultural relativization. The old assumptions of unconditional claims and absolute assertions are no longer tenable. The world shared by all the religions today is characterized by an unavoidable religious pluralism. It is in this context that religious affirmations must be expressed and religious life embraced. According to Ingram, this is no accident. It is an ontological inevitability. As process philosophy and its roots in modern physics [End Page 282] --and, interestingly, the Buddhist recognition of dependent co-arising (pratitya samutpada)--understand, reality is unending process. This entails the inevitable relativization and contextualization of everything--including the religions. The theological questions that emerge are crucial ones. Among them: Is there an ultimate unity underlying this diversity, generic features common to all conditioned forms of religious faith and practice? What does religious pluralism show about the nature of the Sacred and of being human? Is any one religious Way best or is this even a question worth pursuing?Ingram proposes that the answers to these questions and the only viable response to religious pluralism can be found in interreligious dialogue. He does not even consider religious exclusivism as a viable option. This means only "inclusivist" and "pluralist" approaches are worthy of consideration, approaches that he names the "theology-of-religions model" and the "primordial model" respectively. Both recognize the problem of the relativity of belief and seek to overcome it. Both see the importance of interreligious dialogue as fundamental to religious affirmation. But Ingram rejects the theology-of-religions model because, despite its openness to other religions and its willingness to have interreligious encounter shape the affirmations and life of the believing community, it is self-encapsulated. One moves out from a particular community of faith, "passing over"--to use the language of John Dunne--into another religious Way in order to be creatively transformed, but only to return once again to the original community of faith. One stays within "the theological circle" (Tillich), one does not get beyond it. Some Christians, accordingly, make a blanket assertion about the ultimate and unsurpassable lordship of Christ despite their indebtedness to the creative transformation that interreligious dialogue can produce.Ingram clearly prefers the "primordial model" even though he recognizes that some of its classical proponents have made it vulnerable to criticism. Aldous Huxley's "perennial philosophy" and Sri Ramakrishan's assertion that "all paths lead to the summit" will not do. Huxley assumes that the mystical recognition of the ineffable common root of all religion critiques the historical and culturally relative expressions of this ultimate reality. But Huxley's attempt to make an end run around the problems involved won't work. His approach is ahistorical, makes uncritical assumptions about the nature of mysticism and religious experience, and is totally undialogical. The particularities of the differing religious Ways are dissolved in a universal solvent that is anything but self-evident. The same holds true for Ramakrishnan's subtly imperialistic (and very Hindu) model. It too has no room for religious particularity and imposes a pre-conceived common denominator on the multiplicity of religious phenomena.Ingram derives his term "primordial model" from Huston Smith's argument that a "primordial tradition" can be discerned underlying the multiplicity and variety of religious expressions. His is... (shrink)

In this article, after retracing the main lines of Honneth’s The Idea of Socialism, I address two objections to it. Firstly, I question the marked substantiality of Honneth’s proposed socialist ‘community of fraternal life’, resulting from the conjunction of the idea of social freedom with the principle of fraternity he derives from the proto-socialists. On the basis of my objections, I then delineate an original theoretical model, denominated ‘socialism through convergence’. While based on Honneth’s concept of social freedom, STC can (...) abstract from the element of fraternity. It is, by consequence, immune to the excess of substantiality of Honneth’s perspective and potentially more attractive for the members of modern, pluralistic societies. Finally, I criticize Honneth’s perspective for under-determining the element of normative social conflicts in the sphere of democracy and normalizing their expression into the forms of an orderly democratic deliberation; consequently, I show how the STC perspective can more effectively account for social struggles and political conflicts. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Seventeenth-Century Catholic Polemic and the Rise of Cultural Rationalism: An Example from the EmpireSusan RosaIn Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems Sagre-do, an intelligent, cultivated, and well-traveled young man who is persuaded of the truth of arguments in favor of the Copernican opinion presented by the philosopher Salviati, dismisses the counter-arguments of the Aristotelian Simplicio with sympathetic condescension: “I pity him,” he proclaims,no less than I should (...) some fine gentleman who, having built a magnificent palace at great trouble and expense, employing hundreds and hundreds of artisans, and then beholding it threatened with ruin because of poor foundations, should attempt, in order to avoid the grief of seeing the walls destroyed, adorned as they are with so many lovely murals; or the columns fall, which sustain the superb galleries, or the gilded beams, or the doors spoiled, or the pediments and the marble cornices, brought in at so much cost—should attempt, I say, to prevent the collapse with chains, props, iron buttresses, and shores. 1 [End Page 87]This elegant simile, which suggests that the fine gentleman can only preserve his palace by destroying its beauty, is meant to evoke the dilemma of the scholastic philosopher who is confronted by the evident disintegration of his intellectual home. Like the desperate owner who seeks to shore up his real palace, he must rebuild a philosophical edifice whose apparent beauty and coherence have been achieved at the expense of substance and can only be preserved by recourse to means so ugly and inadequate that they destroy even the illusion of credibility.Such a dilemma, I would argue, was the legacy bequeathed to many defenders of traditional religion in the seventeenth century by more than one hundred years of confessional rivalry. To simplify a complex process, this lengthy period of controversy and apologetic, to say nothing of warfare and mutual persecution, had generated a discourse which objectified and prob-lematized religion, making it something to think about rather than to think with. 2 In other words, the formal statements of conviction issued in the wake of the Reformation by competing denominations within Christendom, like the Catechism of the Council of Trent, the Augsburg Confession, the Genevan Confession, or the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England had encouraged the development of the notion of religion as adherence to a set of propositions. As Peter Harrison has explained, this creation of a propositional religion in turnenabled discussion of the merits of other “religions” conceived to exist similarly as sets of beliefs. The truth or falsity of a religion had become a function of the truth or falsity of the propositions which constituted it. True religion... [had become]... a body of certain knowledge. 3Harrison’s remarks are significant because they suggest that the origins of rationalized discourse about religion and its consequent transformation from a way of thinking to an object of thought are to be found squarely within orthodoxy itself. 4To be specific, the competing content of official doctrinal pronouncements led not only to the comparison of the religions but implicitly to their emergence as subjects of a discourse which proposed reason as the norm, a [End Page 88] development clearly reflected in the wave of pamphlets, broadsides, printed disputations, and formal polemical treatises written in both Latin and the vernacular languages which poured from the presses of Catholic and mainstream Protestant denominations in England and on the continent throughout the seventeenth century. In this literature, Protestants accused Catholics of “superstition” and “idolatry,” while Catholics urged potential converts to compare the religions with a view to discovering their “marks of truth,” argued for the compatibility of Catholic faith and “natural light,” and identified heresy, on the contrary, with unreason, passion, lust, and self-contradiction. On both sides of the confessional fence, polemicists frequently insisted that religious discussion conform to the rules of logic, accusing one another of failing to argue from incontrovertible first principles, and of succumbing to the fatal dangers of petitio principii and circular reasoning. In other words, they claimed that in religious matters poor argumentation is a sure sign of error, and it would not be... (shrink)

This paper is an attempt to identify common factors which constitute the foundation of decolonization in indigenous African religions. Since such aspects need to be essentially constructive in order to effectively and positively replace Colonial ideas, this particular search for common ground concerning decolonization in indigenous African religions is going to be pursued through the concept of ecodomy, seen as constructive process. When applied to decolonization with this postulated positivity, ecodomy coagulates three distinct aspects of indigenous African religions into a (...) common reality. These three aspects are ancestry, goodness, and the relationship with Christianity; they can function therefore as common denominator for various attempts to provide indigenous African religions with specific methodology in dealing with decolonization. This article is going to investigate four such methodologies which can confer positivity as well as an ecodomic, constructive character to decolonization efforts throughout the spectrum of indigenous African religions as they are reflected in the writings of John Mbiti, Isiaka P. Lalèyê, Jakob K. Olupona, and Israel Kamudzandu, all intellectuals of different geographical origin, religious backgrounds, university training, and personal convictions. With Mbiti promoting the superiority of Christianity, Lalèyê accepting it as irrelevant, Olupona preferring to deal without it, and Kamudzandu seeing it as essential, decolonizing efforts in indigenous African religions have at least four different methodologies which all aim at providing African communities with positive and ecodomic, essentially constructive ways to move forward beyond Colonial intellectual paradigms by making sure that peace and goodness are secured for everybody, African or not. (shrink)

In this article, I am starting with a question which many years ago was at the center of the debate on structuralism. Are structures to be found in the object or in the subject ? If we take one of the famous analyses by Jakobson, we ascertain that as long as attention is brought to bear on the graphemic or phonological elements, or on rhymes and accents, then the objectivity of the examination is incontestable. The absolute or relative computation of (...) phonemes or groups of phonemes and the specification of their place in the text are independent of the critic's subjectivity. Subjectivity begins to impose itself when categories like "abstract" and "concrete" or "metaphor" and "symbol" are introduced, and even more so when these categories are grouped into classes the denomination of which does not have its basis in the data offered by the text but in nomenclative schemata developed by the critic . Cesare Segre, director of the Institute of Romance Philology at the University of Pavia and president of the International Association of Semiotic Studies, is coeditor of the journals Strumenti Critici and Medioevo Romanza and the series Critica e Filologia. His principal works of linguistic and semiotic criticism are Lingua, stile e società, Esperienze ariosteche, Semiotics and Literary Criticism , I metodi attuali della critica in Italia , La tradizione della Chanson de Roland, and Le strutture e il tempo . His editions of old Italian and French texts are Fornival's Li bestiaires d'Amours, Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, Giamboni's Libro de' Vizi e delle Virtudi, and the Chanson de Roland. "Narrative Structures and Literary History" originally appeared in Strumenti Critici . His contribution to Critical Inquiry, "Culture and Modeling Systems," appeared in Spring 1978. Rebecca West's previous contribution to Critical Inquiry was the translation of Guilio Carlo Argan's "Ideology and Iconology". (shrink)

Book 1 of Euclid's Elements opens with a set of unproved assumptions: definitions, postulates, and ‘common notions’. The common notions are general rules validating deductions that involve the relations of equality and congruence. The attested postulates are five in number, even if a part of the manuscript tradition adds a sixth, almost surely spurious, that in some manuscripts features as the ninth, and last, common notion. The postulates are called αἰτήματα both in the manuscripts of the Elements and in the (...) ancient exegetic tradition. It is not said, however, that this denomination is original, as it coincides with the nomen rei actae associated with the verbal form introducing the postulates themselves. Since antiquity it has been recognized that the postulates naturally split into two groups of quite different character: the first three are rules licensing basic constructions, the fourth and the fifth are assertions stating properties of particular geometric objects. I transcribe postulates 1–3 in the text established by Heiberg : ᾐτήσθω ἀπὸ παντὸς σημείου ἐπὶ πᾶν σημεῖον εὐθεῖαν γραμμὴν ἀγαγεῖνκαὶ πεπερασμένην εὐθεῖαν κατὰ τὸ συνεχὲς ἐπ᾽ εὐθείας ἐκβαλεῖνκαὶ παντὶ κέντρῳ καὶ διαστήματι κύκλον γράϕεσθαι. (shrink)

Logic has attained in our century a development incomparably greater than in any past age of its long history, and this has led to such an enrichment and proliferation of its aspects, that the problem of some kind of unified recom prehension of this discipline seems nowadays unavoidable. This splitting into several subdomains is the natural consequence of the fact that Logic has intended to adopt in our century the status of a science. This always implies that the general optics, (...) under which a certain set of problems used to be con sidered, breaks into a lot of specialized sectors of inquiry, each of them being characterized by the introduction of specific viewpoints and of technical tools of its own. The first impression, that often accompanies the creation of one of such specialized branches in a diSCipline, is that one has succeeded in isolating the 'scientific core' of it, by restricting the somehow vague and redundant generality of its original 'philosophical' configuration. But, after a while, it appears that some of the discarded aspects are indeed important and a new specialized domain of investigation is created to explore them. By follOwing this procedure, one finally finds himself confronted with such a variety of independent fields of research, that one wonders whether the fact of labelling them under a common denomination be nothing but the contingent effect of a pure historical tradition. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Philosophy of Peter Abelard by John MarenbonConstant MewsJohn Marenbon. The Philosophy of Peter Abelard. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Pp. xx + 373. Cloth, £40.Peter Abelard (1079–1142) has long provoked conflicting responses from readers. Even in his own lifetime opinions varied from the adulation of loyal disciples to a chorus of hostility from St. Bernard and others. Inevitably these debates have colored subsequent perception of Abelard’s achievement. (...) It was only through the pioneering efforts of Victor Cousin that Abelard’s writings on logic, as distinct from those on theology and scriptural exegesis, first began to see the light of day. As John Marenbon documents in a fascinating appendix to a magisterial volume, Cousin’s emphasis on Abelard as a dialectician tended to reinforce existing stereotypes about him as a critical rather than as a constructive thinker.Marenbon sets out to counter such perceptions. His book is structured in three separate sections: a historical survey of Abelard’s life and writings on logic and theology; [End Page 621] an analysis of his ideas on substance, language, epistemology and universals; and a study of the ethical foundations of his thought. This tripartite structure shapes his analysis in profound ways. The initial section has the merit of synthesizing recent research (including my own) about our understanding of the chronological evolution of Abelard’s writings with lucidity and perspicacity. The real originality of this book, however, emerges in its second section with the chapter ‘Logic, philosophy and exegesis.’ Here Marenbon presents a succinct account of the ontological framework inherited by Abelard through Aristotle’s Categories and Porphyry’s introduction to it, the Isagoge, as well as Abelard’s response to it. Marenbon’s comment (109) that nominalists did not think that there was no thing which was not a particular, but instead expounded the Isagoge and Categories as having to do with words rather than things sets the tone for his analysis of Abelard’s ontology, presented as being much more subtle than a naive rejection of universal things. His thesis is that this ontology combines three separate principles: nominalism, ‘strong naturalism’ (defined as Aristotle’s belief that every member of a given natural kind has the same basic structure of genera, species and differentiae), and a strict view of the separateness of particular things.To a modern eye, these principles might seem to be mutually exclusive. Marenbon shows how Abelard constructs an ontology taking its point of departure from the particularity of things, and so transforms Porphyry’s hierarchy of being into one which is based on individuals. Unlike earlier scholars, (notably Jean Jolivet, author of a brilliant study of Abelard’s semantics and its implications for theology), Marenbon is able to profit from a far deeper awareness of the evolution of Abelard’s thinking about specific logical problems. He is thus able to describe, sometimes in minute detail, how Abelard wrestled with intellectual inconsistencies inherited from the differing strands in his own tradition. Thus he shows how, after the Dialectica and early glosses on Porphyry and Aristotle, Abelard moves away from a simplistic semantics of denomination, by which words denote corresponding forms, and starts to interpret certain accidents (like whiteness) as not having a separate reality. This evolution in Abelard’s semantic thought is mainly known only through passages revised in his Christian Theology. Marenbon suggests that Abelard may have been influenced here by transferring ideas about the three divine persons as differing in attribute to the ordinary world.One difficulty with the structure Marenbon has chosen is that the reader sometimes has to keep backtracking in Abelard’s career. Thus while he provides an outstanding exegesis of Abelard’s theory of cognition (making full use of the long neglected De intellectibus), developed in the 1120s, he then backtracks to the issue of universals. The evolution of Abelard’s thinking on this topic is related, however, to that in other domains. While Marenbon avoids historicizing interpretations (having assigned historical analysis to the first part of his book), it does seem that the evolution of Abelard’s thought was influenced by a desire to distance himself from the categories of thought of his various teachers.Marenbon... (shrink)

The study of the problem of religious relations is of particular interest, since upon the annexation to Russia, during the years 1794-1796, and in some places until 1798, the almost complete elimination of the Uniate Church in Right-Bank Ukraine took place. This issue has been covered extensively in pre-revolutionary historiography, including at the local level. Thus, the history of the existence and liquidation of the Uniate Church in Podillya became the leading topic of research of the "Podolsky Diocesan Historical and (...) Statistical Committee". Another printed organ, where the church-historical information about Podolsk parishes, collected by priests, became Podilskie Eparchial Gazettes. The main idea behind the content of these studies was that Podillya was considered as originally Russian possession, and Orthodoxy was the only possible denomination of the land. (shrink)

It is known that there are different concentrations of Muslims in European countries. However, Germany has a special importance in these countries due to the numerical excess of Muslims and the existence of our compatriots due to the economic migration from Turkey to Germany that started in the 1960s. For this reason, in our article, the educational activity carried out on Islamic theology, in particular kalam, in the example of Germany will be discussed. In Germany, Islamic religious education departments were (...) opened in three different universities to train teachers to teach Islamic religion in primary, secondary and high school schools, and to provide Imam education in order to eliminate the language and adaptation problems experienced by mosque officials coming from abroad. The process that started with Osnabrück University, Westfälische Wilhelm Münster University and Friedrich-Alexander University has progressed beyond the initial aim of training Islamic religion teachers with the seven universities reached today. In addition to the influence of the German Islamic Conference on the formation of the theoretical infrastructure of this process, the impact of the 2010 recommendation of the Scientific Committee is also known. The originality, scientific impartiality and conformity of Islamic Theology in Germany are the issues that are emphasized in the discussions. As a matter of fact, for this reason, the discussion of the science of of kalām in these centers is of particular importance in the debates. Because kalām is a science that shapes the understanding of religion and offers the opportunity to develop a correct intellectual perspective on religion. It is possible to say that the content of kalām in these centers and the studies carried out will affect the understanding of Islam that will emerge in Europe, especially in Germany, in the next century. For this reason, in our article, the study areas of theology professors in seven Islamic Theology centers and theses which they supervise will be discussed, on the other hand, researches, projects and collaborations that reflect the intellectual perspective of the Islamic Theology center will be highlighted. This article aims not only to criticize the said centers in Germany, but also to determine what kind of mutual contributions they might have with the theological accumulation in Turkey. As a matter of fact, it is obvious that the courses given, the theses managed and the fields of study will shape the future of Islamic theology in Europe, as well as having an impact on Islamic theology in Turkey given that today global scientific interaction is at the highest level. It is not possible to think the issues currently studied in Islamic Theology in Germany independently of the realities and needs of the country in which they flourish. As a matter of fact, although there are historical studies on Islamic theology schools, especially Maturidism, Ash'arism and Mu'taziliism, in different universities, the existence of studies on subjects that can be called “practical theology” draws attention. In addition, due to the fact that Germany creates a multi-religious and multicultural environment, it is seen that a supra-denominational approach is adopted and thus it is aimed to ensure a pluralism that allows different views. (shrink)

It was a novel, among other things, which originated the atomic bomb. H. G. Wells dedicated The World Set Free, published in 1913, to Frederick Soddy, a pioneer in the exploration of radioactivity. Using Soddy’s research as a base, Wells predicted the advent of artificial radioactivity in 1933, the year in which it actually took place; and he foresaw its use for what he named the “atomic bomb.” In Wells’ novel these bombs are used in a world war that erupts (...) in mid-century and is so catastrophic that a world government is formed, initiating a new age powered by the peaceful use of the atom. The physicist Leo Szilard, a long-time admirer of Wells, read this novel in 1932, the year before he first intuited the possibility of a nuclear chain reaction. The novel seems to have become part of his own mental chain reaction. One that took place at an almost unconscious level during the spring that Szilard spent at the Strand Palace Hotel in London, by his own admission doing nothing. He would only monopolize the bath from around nine to twelve in the morning, since “there is no place as good to think as a bathtub.”1 The theories that resulted from this prolonged immersion were introduced by references to Wells; and Szilard, having realized the atomic bomb, spent the rest of his life trying to realize the world government which, in the Wells novel, was its consequence.Literature, which was part of the genesis of nuclear weaponry, continues to be an inextricable aspect of its nature. For Derrida, in fact, we are facinga phenomenon whose essential feature is that of being fabulously textual, through and through. Nuclear weaponry depends, more than any weaponry in the past, it seems, upon structures of information and communication, structures of language, including non-vocalizable language, structures of codes and graphic decoding. But the phenomenon if fabulously textual also to the extent that, at the moment, a nuclear war has not taken place: one can only talk and write about it.2The linguistic nature of the arms race, of peace talks and negotiations, has been thoroughly analyzed. Likewise there is a growing number of books on the nature of nuclear war. But there is also a growing body of novels, poems, and plays making up a literature of nuclear holocaust. As the example of Wells’ novel shows, this is not altogether unprecedented; nuclear literature predates Hiroshima. But the subject of nuclear war has, up till now, mainly served the purposes of science fiction; only rarely—as in the cases of A Canticle for Leibowitz and On the Beach—have science fiction authors risen above the lowest common denominator of that genre. In the 1980s, every year sees the publication of works which demand serious attention both as literature and as fictive strategies for comprehending a subject that is commonly called “unthinkable.” Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker, Bernard Malamud’s God’s Grace, Maggie Gee’s The Burning Book, Tim O’Brien’s Nuclear Age—these works explicitly preoccupied with nuclear holocaust may be supplemented by other works of the eighties with a persistent apocalyptic undertone, works such as Doris Lessing’s Canopus in Argos series, Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose, and Mario Vargas Llosa’s War of the End of the World. And these are only the literary manifestations of a widespread movement in all the arts aimed at expressing the dominant condition of our time.3 1. Leo Szilard, Leo Szilard: His Version of the Facts: Selected Recollections and Correspondence, ed. Spencer R. Weart and Gertrud Weiss Szilard , p. 19.2. Jacques Derrida, “No Apocalypse, Not Now ,” Diacritics 14 , p. 23.3. Examples can be found in painting , mixed media , opera , oratorio , dance , film , television , and popular music . Peter Schwenger is associate professor of English at Mount St. Vincent University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The author of Phallic Critiques: Masculinity and Twentieth-Century Literature, he is working on a book-length study of nuclear holocaust literature. (shrink)

Conversation is, first of all, an event, something that happens. But the concept of conversation has also been appropriated by various thinkers as a model or metaphor of hermeneutical experience, of communication, political discourse, the acquisition of knowledge, and so forth. As an event it has been analyzed within the hermeneutical tradition, from Schleiermacher to Gadamer, and in this analysis it has been tied to Romantic conceptions such as the universality of language, "linguistic heritage" (Angeborenheit der Sprache ), and what (...) von Humboldt called "the common denominator of human nature," the universal and spiritual humanity that we all share.1 So conceived conversation has been made a model of hermeneutical experience. Gadamer, as is well known, characterizes reading as a conversation or dialogue with a text. This is more than metaphor, he tells us. Interpretation means bringing the text "into the living present of conversation" (TM 368), restoring it to an original condition. (shrink)

Condillac's Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge, first published in French in 1746 and offered here in a new translation, represented in its time a radical departure from the dominant conception of the mind as a reservoir of innately given ideas. Descartes had held that knowledge must rest on ideas; Condillac turned this upside down by arguing that speech and words are the origin of mental life and knowledge. He argued, further, that language has its origin (...) in human interaction and in our natural capacity to react spontaneously and instinctively to the expression of emotions and states of mind in others. The importance of this pointedly anti-Cartesian view, and its relevance to both aesthetics and epistemology, were quickly understood, and Condillac's work influenced many later philosophers including Herder, Rousseau, and Adam Smith. His conception also anticipated Wittgenstein's view of language, its usage, and its relation to mind and thought. (shrink)