Les travaux coraniques de Guglielmo Raimmondo Moncada, alias Flavius Mithridate (circa 1440-1489 ?), converti judéo-sicilien au parcours complexe et maître d'hébreu, d'araméen et d'arabe de Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, ont fait l'objet d'appréciations contradictoires, oscillant entre l'exaltation et la dépréciation. Une analyse de l'activité de collation, de traduction et de commentaire effectuée par Moncada (et d'autres mains) sur le coran « judéo-arabe » Vat. Ebr. 357 dévoile l'association étroite entre les aspects a priori les plus déroutants de la coranologie (...) « moncadienne » et son contexte de formation linguistique et culturelle, entraînant un réexamen de ce qui reste probablement le dossier le plus riche concernant l'étude du Coran en contexte italien à la fin du XVe siècle. (shrink)
After his return from exile in A.D. 96 Dio of Prusa claims that even before it he had known the homes and tables of rich men, not only private individuals but satraps and kings . Following the lead of Philostratus modern scholars have seen Dio as a confidant of the Flavian dynasty: amicus to Vespasian, possibly a special envoy of Vespasian to the Grek east, amicus to Titus, and friend and adviser to a minor member of the house T. (...) class='Hi'>Flavius Sabinus. These views are important not only for the biography of Dio, but also for the general question of relations between powerful Romans, above all emperors, and Greek philosophers and other intellectuals. (shrink)
Pierluigi Piovanelli | : Tacite est le seul témoin explicite d’une persécution des « chrétiens » de Rome à la suite du célèbre incendie de la capitale, en 64 de notre ère, une catastrophe dont la population aurait attribué la responsabilité criminelle à l’empereur Néron, si les adeptes de cette « superstition pernicieuse » originaire de la Judée n’avaient pas été opportunément identifiés comme les coupables. Si, d’un côté, il est facile de comprendre la nécessité pour le pouvoir impérial de (...) trouver rapidement des boucs émissaires, de l’autre, il n’est pas aisé de concevoir les raisons qui firent que le choix se porte sur les membres d’un groupe sectaire judéen tout à fait marginal. L’examen de quelques textes clés de Flavius Josèphe et des écrits apocalyptiques contemporains permet de mieux comprendre quelles étaient les attentes des milieux radicaux judéens et quelle était la perception que les Romains pouvaient avoir de ceux qui, à leurs yeux, n’étaient que des agitateurs et des brigands. | : Tacitus is the only witness to the persecution of the “Christians” in Rome following the famous fire of 64 CE that severely burned the capital city ; a catastrophe for which Nero would have been considered responsible had the followers of that “most mischievous superstition” of Judean origins not been identified as the culprits. If, on the one hand, it is easy to understand the urgency for the imperial power to find scapegoats, on the other hand, it is not so easy to imagine the reasons why the members of a Judean sectarian, marginal group were eventually chosen. A new look at a series of key passages from the writings of Josephus and contemporary apocalyptic texts allow us to have a better understanding of the expectations at work among the members of Judean radical groups, as well as the perception that Romans could have had of those who, in their opinion, were simply agitators and bandits. (shrink)
It is natural for those with permissive attitudes toward abortion to suppose that, if they have examined all of the arguments they know against abortion and have concluded that they fail, their moral deliberations are at an end. Surprisingly, this is not the case, as I argue. This is because the mere risk that one of those arguments succeeds can generate a moral reason that counts against the act. If this is so, then liberals may be mistaken about the morality (...) of abortion. However, conservatives who claim that considerations of risk rule out abortion in general are mistaken as well. Instead, risk-based considerations generate an important but not necessarily decisive reason to avoid abortion. The more general issue that emerges is how to accommodate fallibilism about practical judgment in our decision-making. (shrink)
In this article, we develop an approach for the moral assessment of research and development networks on the basis of the reflective equilibrium approach proposed by Rawls and Daniels. The reflective equilibrium approach aims at coherence between moral judgments, principles, and background theories. We use this approach because it takes seriously the moral judgments of the actors involved in R & D, whereas it also leaves room for critical reflection about these judgments. It is shown that two norms, namely reflective (...) learning and openness and inclusiveness, which are used in the literature on policy and technological networks, contribute to achieving a justified overlapping consensus. We apply the approach to a case study about the development of an innovative sewage treatment technology and show how in this case the two norms are or could be instrumental in achieving a justified overlapping consensus on relevant moral issues. (shrink)
Le sujet de cet article est Flavius Hypathius, neveux le plus âgé de l'empereur Anastase Ier , et la gestion de sa carrière de magister militum per Orientem, dans le contexte politique et religieux général de l'époque et des carrières de ses contemporains, militaires, politiques et religieux, sous le règne de son oncle, puis sous celui de Justin Ier.
An appropriate kind of curved Hilbert space is developed in such a manner that it admits operators of $\mathcal{C}$ - and $\mathfrak{D}$ -differentiation, which are the analogues of the familiar covariant and D-differentiation available in a manifold. These tools are then employed to shed light on the space-time structure of Quantum Mechanics, from the points of view of the Feynman ‘path integral’ and of canonical quantisation. (The latter contains, as a special case, quantisation in arbitrary curvilinear coordinates when space is (...) flat.) The influence of curvature is emphasised throughout, with an illustration provided by the Aharonov-Bohm effect. (shrink)
How does the study of society relate to the study of the people it comprises? This longstanding question is partly one of method, but mainly one of fact, of how independent the objects of these two studies, societies and people, are. It is commonly put as a question of reduction, and I shall tackle it in that form: does sociology reduce in principle to individual psychology? I follow custom in calling the claim that it does ‘individualism’ and its denial ‘holism’.
There have in recent years been at least two important attempts to get to grips with Aristotle's conception of dialectic. I have in mind those by Martha C. Nussbaum in ‘Saving Aristotle's appearances’, which is chapter 8 of her The Fragility of Goodness , and by Terence H. Irwin in his important, though in my opinion somewhat misguided, book Aristotle's First Principles . There is a sense in which both of these writers are reacting to the work of G. E. (...) L. Owen on cognate matters, particularly his well-known paper ‘ Tithenai ta phainomena ’. Owen himself was in part reacting to what I suppose is the traditional view of how Aristotle regarded dialectic, as revealed in Topics I. 1. On that view dialectic is for Aristotle a lesser way of proceeding than is demonstration, the method of science. For demonstration proceeds from premises which are accepted as true in themselves and moves from them to conclusions which follow necessarily from those premises; and the middle term of such a demonstrative syllogism then provides the ‘reason why’ for the truth of the conclusion. Dialectic proceeds from premises which are accepted on a lesser basis ‘by everyone or by the majority or by the wise, i.e. by all, or by the majority, or by the most notable and reputable of them’ , and proceeds deductively from them to further conclusions. (shrink)
Science naively presupposes the intelligibility of the universe, necessary laws, and a universal truth. The author reflects on these presuppositions to arrive at a demonstration of God's existence. In a vigorous and exclamatory style, he condemns the alternative views of idealism, phenomenology, and philosophies of science which cannot rationally justify their faith in a universal truth. The only rational basis for these presuppositions is a theistic God--the "Vérité mesurante" and "Pensée fondatrice" of scientific reason.--A. B. D.
An infinite lottery machine is used as a foil for testing the reach of inductive inference, since inferences concerning it require novel extensions of probability. Its use is defensible if there is some sense in which the lottery is physically possible, even if exotic physics is needed. I argue that exotic physics is needed and describe several proposals that fail and at least one that succeeds well enough.
Entities of many kinds, not just material things, have been credited with parts. Armstrong, for example, has taken propositions and properties to be parts of their conjunctions, sets to be parts of sets that include them, and geographical regions and events to be parts of regions and events that contain them. The justification for bringing all these diverse relations under a single ‘part–whole’ concept is that they share all or most of the formal features articulated in mereology. But the concept (...) has also prompted an ontological thesis that has been expressed in various ways: that wholes are ‘no ontological addition’ to their parts ; that to list both a whole and its parts is ‘double counting’; and that there is ‘no more’ to a whole than its parts: for example, that there is no more to a conjunction than the conjuncts that are its parts, and whose truth or falsity determines whether it is true or false. For brevity, I shall express the thesis in the last of these ways, as the claim that entities with parts are ‘nothing but’ those parts. (shrink)
We investigate a possible form of Schrödinger’s equation as it appears to moving observers. It is shown that, in this framework, accelerated motion requires fictitious potentials to be added to the original equation. The gauge invariance of the formulation is established. The example of accelerated Euclidean transformations is treated explicitly, which contain Galilean transformations as special cases. The relationship between an acceleration and a gravitational field is found to be compatible with the picture of the ‘Einstein elevator’. The physical effects (...) of an acceleration are illustrated by the problem of the uniformly-accelerated harmonic oscillator. (shrink)
Social scientists could learn some useful things from philosophy. Here I shall discuss what I take to be one such thing: a better understanding of the concept of utility. There are several reasons why a better understanding may be useful. First, this concept is commonly found in the writings of social scientists, especially economists. Second, utility is the main ingredient in utilitarianism, a perspective on morality that, traditionally, has been very influential among social scientists. Third, and most important, with a (...) better understanding of utility comes, as I shall try to show here, a better understanding of “personal welfare”. or, in other words, of what may be said to be in people's best interests. Such an understanding is useful to social scientists and philosophers alike, whether for utilitarian purposes or not. (shrink)
This paper presents a new formal model for D–N explanation that gives intuitive criteria of acceptability, avoids the known trivializations, and links explanation with confirmation theory. Although set in the twenty-five year tradition of attempts to formalize D–N explanation, it proposes a new direction for the model that is to be distinguished from the syntactical and informational approaches by its introduction of restrictions which derive from the use which the D–N model can have in hypothesis testing. This model, illustrating the (...) verificational approach, revises the classic H–O requirements and amends the notion of partial self-explanation to meet a criticism to which the H–O notion is vulnerable. (shrink)
