In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:FDA Releases Draft Guidance on Regulation of Genetically Engineered AnimalsJohn P. Gluck (bio) and Mark T. Holdsworth (bio)On 18 September 2008, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued a draft set of guidelines for those involved in developing genetically engineered animals with heritable recombinant DNA (rDNA) constructs and is requesting comment from industry and the public about their content. The document does not impose new regulations (...) but details how existing laws and regulations apply to genetically engineered (GE) animals and offers advice to developers on how to negotiate the laws in the most efficient and productive manner. The draft guidance document is not legally enforceable at this juncture, but the guidelines are recommendations reflecting the FDA's "current thinking on a topic."The modification of GE animals being developed for commercialization, which are the focus of the document, fall into six categories: modifications intended to (1) enhance food quality—e.g., faster growing fish and meats with better nutritional profiles; (2) improve animal health via increased resistance to disease—e.g., mastitis in dairy cattle and Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE); (3) create so-called "biopharm" animals capable of producing therapeutic products such as insulin, clotting factors, and tissues for human transplantation; (4) reduce the barriers to human animal interaction—e.g., hypoallergenic pets; (5) develop valid animal models of human disease—e.g., Parkinson's disease, Lesh-Nyhan's syndrome, and cancer; and (6) improve production of industrial or consumer products such as fiber. The timing of the guidelines coincides with the FDA's belief in an expected boon in the number of GE animals approaching the stage of commercialization.The FDA's involvement in the approval process emerges from the new animal drug provisions of the Federal Food Drug and Cosmetic Act and the definition of what constitutes a drug. The Act defines a new animal drug as "an article (other than food) intended to affect the structure or any function of the body of... animals." A rDNA construct intended to affect the structure or function of an animal meets the definition of a new animal drug, regardless of whether the resulting GE animals are intended for human food or the production of pharmaceuticals or any other substances. [End Page 393]Before proceeding to a review of the draft guidelines, it is important briefly to set the controversies around GE animals in historical and ethical context.The Ethical DebateFrom its inception, the intentional genetic modification or genetic engineering of molecules, plants, and animals by the techniques of gene splicing has consistently elicited strong responses from both the scientific community and the public. There are some data to suggest that although the concerns of scientists fall primarily into the category of possible biohazards, those of the public also reflect great concern about the intrinsic moral issues, such as whether there is something fundamentally wrong with this line of work, making it a form of forbidden knowledge (see, e.g., Gaskell 1997). When news of Paul Berg's attempts in 1970 to graft the primate tumor virus (SV 40) onto the intestinal tract bacteria Escherichia coli for the purpose of studying how normal cells may be transformed into cancerous cells was shared with colleagues, he was strongly encouraged to reflect on the potential public health risks if somehow the altered bacteria broke containment and entered the environment. Thanks to Berg's leadership, these concerns soon resulted in conferences held in Asilomar, California, and New Hampton, New Hampshire, where the ethical responsibilities of microbiologists involved in this research were discussed. These initial discussions resulted in what has come to be known as "The Moratorium Letter" (Shattuck 1996) published in the journal Science in 1974. This letter, signed by 11 leaders in the field, actually recommended restrictions on several types of experiments that were considered to be particularly risky and stated "that adherence to our major recommendations will entail postponement or possibly abandonment of certain types of scientifically worthwhile experiments" (Berg 1974). An international conference on the issues came to similar conclusions about the need for a research moratorium for the sake of public safety. Recommendations arising from conference participants led to the formation of the National Institutes... (shrink)

How far does a researcher’s responsibility extend when an incidental finding is identified? Balancing pertinent ethical principles such as beneficence, respect for persons, and duty to rescue is not always straightforward, particularly in neuroimaging research where empirical data that might help guide decision making are lacking. We conducted a systematic survey of perceptions and preferences of 396 investigators, research participants, and Institutional Review Board members at our institution. Using the partial entrustment model as described by Richardson, we argue that our (...) data supports universal reading by a neuroradiologist of all research MRI scans for incidental findings and providing full disclosure to all participants. (shrink)

ces, learning facts and gaining conceptual knowlge, recognizing objects and people, and acquiring ills and habits. Scientific thinking about memory was minated for many years by the assumption that mory is a unitary or monolithic entityRi2;a single ulty of the mind and brain. However, the assumpri of a unitary memory has been challenged by conging evidence from psychology and neuroscience inting toward multiple memory systems that can be sociated from one another. This chapter provides a torical introduction to the issue (...) and summarizes.. (shrink)

The next steps in health reform, like all such efforts before it, will have to engage the issue of American health care federalism – the relationship between the federal and state governments in the realm of health law and policy. Since its enactment in 2010, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act has offered a robust example of modern federalism and revealed new complexities. This article recounts the findings of our five-year study of the federalist and nationalist features of ACA (...) implementation. Contrary to the claims of ACA opponents that the law marked a federal “takeover,” the ACA's governance structures have advanced rather than suppressed state power. But we also found that the advances in state power occurred seemingly independently of the statute's structural arrangements; that is, the ACA's nationalist and federalist features both enhanced state power over health policy. These findings raise questions about whether cherished American federalism values are unique to federalist structures; they also raise the question of what exactly health care federalism is for, and why we continue to design health policy with federalism front and center. It is not clear that enhanced state power has brought better health policy. If it has not, is federalism for its own sake worth the trade-off? (shrink)

This chapter explores a case study in contemporary fanaticism. We adopt Katsafanas’s conceptualization of fanaticism to make possible an in-depth discussion of and evaluation of a diffuse but important social movement — the anglophone manosphere. According to Katsafanas, fanatics are fruitfully understood as members of a group that adopts sacred values which they hold unconditionally to preserve their own psychic unity, and who feel that those values are threatened by those who do not accept them. The manosphere includes several social (...) movements, including incels, men’s rights activists, and men-going-their-own-way. We show that many members of these groups are well-characterized by Katsafanas’s theory of fanaticism, and that they have forged their fanatical group identity using tools that philosophers have tended to associate with more benign social movements and the task of “conceptual engineering.” Indeed, we think that manosphere groups have in many cases been more successful than more palatable liberationist movements, and that this case study in the dark side of conceptual engineering may be both sobering and informative. (shrink)

This book does two things. First, it introduces a novel kind of non-factualist view, and it argues that we should endorse views of this kind in connection with a wide class of metaphysical questions, most notably, the abstract-object question and the composite-object question (so, more specifically, the book argues that there’s no fact of the matter whether there are any such things as abstract objects or composite objects—or material objects of any other kind). Second, the book explains how these non-factualist (...) views fit into a general anti-metaphysical view called neo-positivism, and it explains how we could argue that neo-positivism is true. Neo-positivism is (roughly) the view is that every metaphysical question decomposes into some subquestions—call them Q1, Q2, Q3, etc.—such that, for each of these subquestions, one of the following three anti-metaphysical views is true of it: non-factualism, or scientism, or metaphysically innocent modal-truth-ism. These three views can be defined (very roughly) as follows. Non-factualism about a question Q is the view that there’s no fact of the matter about the answer to Q. Scientism about Q is the view that Q is an ordinary empirical-scientific question about some contingent aspect of physical reality, and Q can’t be settled with an a priori philosophical argument. And metaphysically innocent modal-truth-ism about Q is the view that Q asks about the truth value of a modal sentence that’s metaphysically innocent in the sense that it doesn’t say anything about reality and, if it’s true, isn’t made true by reality. (shrink)

Quietist Moral Realists accept that there are moral facts and properties, while aiming to avoid many of the explanatory burdens thought to fall on traditional moral realists. This chapter examines the forms that Quietist Moral Realism has taken and the challenges it has faced, in order to better assess its prospects. The best hope, this chapter argues, lies in a pragmatist approach that distinguishes the different functions of diverse areas of discourse. This paves the way for a form of Quietism (...) that does not simply remain quiet about the explanatory demands of metaethics, but rather is able to diagnose where they go wrong. By combining a neopragmatic analysis of the discourse with an easy approach to ontology, , we can develop a form of Quietist Moral Realism that is far stronger than critics of quietism have appreciated. (shrink)

Unfortunately, many people today see the regulation of lies, disinformation, hate speech, and fake news as an infringement of free speech, at least when such speech is ‘political,’ despite the damage that such speech can do. But this very protective attitude toward speech rests on a mistaken understanding of the role of free speech in a liberal society. The right to free speech is based on the liberal value of freedom, and as such can be no broader than freedom itself. (...) And freedom has always been subject to reasonable limits in a liberal society. Indeed, while the principles of toleration and neutrality are often cited as supporting a broad interpretation of the right to free speech, they also tell us that certain limits apply to that right. We need not tolerate speech that encourages intolerance, and while government should be neutral between reasonable conceptions of the good, it need not be neutral between reasonable and unreasonable conceptions. These ideas form the framework of liberal society, and as I shall show, also provide a guide for understanding what kind of speech is protected in a liberal society and what it is not. (shrink)

In this paper I explore how and why personal identity might be essentially narrative in nature. My topic is the question of personal identity in the strict sense of identity—the question of which person you are, and how that person is extended in space, time, and quality. In this my question appears to contrast with the question of personal identity in the sense sought by teenagers and sufferers of mid-life crises who are trying to ‘find themselves’. But in fact it (...) will be key to my argument that these questions are not distinct and independent. Whereas Parfit was concerned, in his work on personal identity, with how he was extended over time, the teenager who is finding themselves is concerned with how they are extended in quality. Indeed, the core of my argument is that because narrative is the key to understanding how we are extended in quality, and quality is just one more dimension along which we are extended, along with space and time, narrative must also be the clue as to how we are extended in space and time. You, I will argue, are the protagonist in the best story of your life. (shrink)

This paper takes up Nietzsche’s contrast between a relatively enduring ‘drama’ of punishment, which consists in sequences of procedures, and a congeries of often discrepant meanings and purposes of the drama and contrasts it favorably with the distinction between a definition of punishment and a justification for it which received a good deal of attention in the middle of the twentieth century in anglophone philosophical circles. My chief thesis is that the philosophical lesson to be drawn from the widely acknowledge (...) failure of efforts to further the philosophical understanding of punishment by the latter route is Nietzsche’s: that the concept in question and the practices that fall under it are fundamentally insusceptible to ahistorical methods. I argue for the thesis proper in the first section of the paper, and explore consequences of it for our understanding of the connection between punishment and justice in the second. (shrink)

According to the thesis of the guise of the normative, all desires are associated with normative appearances or judgments. But guise of the normative theories differ sharply over the content of the normative representation, with the two main versions being the guise of reasons and the guise of the good. Chapter 6 defends the comparative thesis that the guise of reasons thesis is more promising than the guise of the good. The central idea is that observations from the theory of (...) content determination can be used in order to constrain possible theories of the representational contents associated with desire. The authors argue that the initially most promising versions of the guise of the good fail to meet these constraints, and then explain the steep challenge confronting any who wish to craft a new guise of the good theory which meets the constraints while also preserving the initial motivations for adopting any guise of the normative theory at all. But a simple version of the guise of reasons not only avoids the troubles besetting the guise of the good but proceeds immediately from a deep diagnosis of the source of its difficulties. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:72 Reviews RUSSELL VERSUS THE HAPPINESS INDUSTRY Chad Trainer 1006 Davids Run Phoenixville, pa 19460, usa [email protected] Tim Phillips. Bertrand Russell’sThe Conquest of Happiness; a Modern-Day Interpretation of a Self-Help Classic. Oxford: Infinite Ideas, 2010. Pp. 118. 978-1906821 -27-2 (pb). us$11.95. German translation as Bertrand Russells Eroberung des Glücks in a “Business Classics” series (gabal Verlag, 2012). he popular writing Bertrand Russell undertook to make money has long roused (...) the indignation of those interested in his more technical specialized work, and his 1930 The Conquest of Happiness ranks among the more extreme examples of this pot-boiling genre. Ludwig Wittgenstein denounced Russell’s Conquest of Happiness as a “vomitive.” And the best ways of understanding Russell’s own assessments of his book are unclear, owing to the various sentiments his biographers report. According to Ronald Clark, he said: “… The Conquest of Happiness … I am not very proud of”;1 whereas Caroline Moorehead reports “he was later to say that, of all his books, he felt this had done the most good”.2 In his autobiography, Russell allows us how he wrote The Conquest of Happiness at a stage in his life “when I needed much self-command and much that I had learned by painful experience if I was to maintain any endurable level of happiness.”The emotional challenges to which he was subjected at the time he wrote the book “introduced an intolerable tension into every moment of daily life.” Beacon Hill School, which Russell had started with his second wife, Dora, in 1927, was in such dire straits financially by 1930 that Russell was compelled to resort to much popular writing and lecturing in order to remain solvent. In 1930, Dora gave birth to a daughter fathered by the American journalist Grif- fin Barry.This marked the beginning of the end to Russell’s marriage to Dora. Add to the foregoing Russell’s strained relations with Wittgenstein, when the ______ 1 The Life of Bertrand Russell, p. 448. 2 Bertrand Russell, p. 383. q= Reviews 73 former was asked to be one of the examiners for Wittgenstein’s phd at Cambridge. Although the phd was awarded and Wittgenstein secured a grant to conduct research at Trinity College, Cambridge for five years, Russell and Wittgenstein’s interaction at the time resulted in an end to their friendship. In general, however much control Russell may have had over matters at earlier points in his life, 1930 was a time he was largely at the mercy of unstable circumstances.The repose and leisure on which he had depended for his philosophic activity were not then available to him. Personal problems came to the fore and he was more prone to depression than usual. About The Conquest of Happiness, written primarily with the American market in mind, he remarked to the publisher Stanley Unwin: “I think they [Americans] mostly share Al Capone’s ideas of happiness, which are in a somewhat different vein from mine.”The book became a bestseller in America. Tim Phillips writes on business, technology, social change and innovation, and he has published more than a dozen expositions of other famous authors’ works. His book Bertrand Russell’s The Conquest of Happiness is a faithful tour through this Russell classic. Phillips provides a readable account of the original ’s lucid points. The treatment is certainly not pretentious or obfuscatory, as it abounds with examples of Russell’s points from contemporary pop culture. It features corroborating quotations from other authors and is salted with some results of modern surveys. Bertrand Russell’s The Conquest of Happiness has good reminders of the differences between the nature of Russell’s times and lifestyle and that of our own, the most notable being the absence during Russell’s day of a happiness industry. Nowadays, we are bombarded with “self-help” books “encouraging us to obsess about ourselves or manipulate others” (p. 9). Moreover, when Russell wrote The Conquest of Happiness, “the idea of an antidepressant pill was as likely as someone walking on the moon and the idea that people could ‘suffer from stress’ was thirty years into the future. For all... (shrink)

Electronic media present tremendous opportunities for improving the nature of society. I will address how discourse affects society, and how changes in media may improve societal discourse.

A characteristic of the modern mind is a disdain for tradition. Polanyi argues that neglecting the role of tradition leads to philosophical incoherence as well as moral and political chaos. Polanyi’s postcritical philosophy represents an attempt to show how tradition plays a vital role in the process of discovery. Ultimately, a coherent account of the sciences, as well as the humanities, is only possible when tradition is acknowledged as indispensable.

Contents -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: surveying the landscape and defining terms -- The seventeenth-century denigration of tradition and a nineteenth-century response -- Michael oakeshott and the epistemic role of tradition -- Alasdair macintyre's tradition-constituted inquiry -- Michael polanyi and role of tacit knowledge -- The incoherence of liberalism and the response of tradition -- Afterword: a conservatism worth conserving, or conservatism as stewardship -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.

People live in distinct groups, notably territory-holding societies, whose boundaries aren't neatly defined by the traits that Pietraszewski describes for his socially aligned groups, as I propose calling them, which occur both within and between our societies. Although studying SAGs could prove enlightening, societies are essential human groups that likely existed long before the complex SAGs of today.

I submit the need to establish a comparative study of societies, namely groups beyond a simple, immediate family that have the potential to endure for generations, whose constituent individuals recognize one another as members, and that maintain control over access to a physical space. This definition, with refinements and ramifications I explore, serves for cross-disciplinary research since it applies not just to nations but to diverse hunter-gatherer and tribal groups with a pedigree that likely traces back to the societies of (...) our common ancestor with the chimpanzees. It also applies to groups among other species for which comparison to humans can be instructive. Notably, it describes societies in terms of shared group identification rather than social interactions. An expansive treatment of the topic is overdue given that the concept of a society (even the use of such synonyms as primate “troop”) has fallen out of favor among biologists, resulting in a semantic mess; while sociologists rarely consider societies beyond nations, and social psychologists predominantly focus on ethnicities and other component groups of societies. I examine the relevance of societies across realms of inquiry, discussing the ways member recognition is achieved; how societies compare to other organizational tiers; and their permeability, territoriality, relation to social networks and kinship, and impermanence. We have diverged from our ancestors in generating numerous affiliations within and between societies while straining the expectation of society memberships by assimilating diverse populations. Nevertheless, if, as I propose, societies were the first, and thereafter the primary, groups of prehistory, how we came to register society boundaries may be foundational to all human “groupiness.” A discipline-spanning approach to societies should further our understanding of what keeps societies together and what tear them apart. (shrink)

It is an honor to receive such careful and attentive criticism. In this response, I attempt to put the criticisms of the reasons latesters into the context of my argumentative aims in the book and to point toward how they might be answered.

In recent years, there has been tension between farmers and the Dutch government regarding sustainability policy (in the efforts to reduce the harm caused by manure surplus) and how implementing this policy affects farmers (in the form of justice concerns). We interviewed Dutch farmers to uncover how they view manure policy. We identified four types of injustices: procedural, contributive, distributive, and intergenerational. We propose that a multi-tiered approach is required to overcome these kinds of ‘wicked problems’, avoid paralysis from lack (...) of action, and overcome the flaws by overestimating the effectiveness of top-down policy. (shrink)

This is an overview of the main themes and theses of _Reasons First_ for a book symposium, and intended to be read alongside the other contributions to that symposium.

Jack Miles, a former member of the Society of Jesus (Jesuits), and Mark Taylor, a philosophical atheist, have both in different ways brought religious and philosophical concerns into the wider world. Approaching the end of their careers as well as the end of their lives, they were prompted by the advent of a deadly pandemic amid worldwide political crises to think through matters of "ultimate concern": what is the human self, embedded as it is in a cosmos of nonhuman (...) and artificial intelligences? Within this larger ecology, what is the meaning of individual death? And can philosophy help us intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually understand and accept our fundamental impermanence? The authors' sense of urgency about their impending mortality, the worth of a life, the grief of loss and what was left undone, the fragility of existence, the uncertainty of the ending permeate their conversations. Readers will be drawn into the inner lives, the hidden fears and emotions, the existential dread experienced by these two exceptional philosophers facing life's close in extraordinary times when both annihilation and revolutionary new beginnings seem equally possible. The authors glean insight from Kierkegaard and Weil, Dickinson and Baldwin, Nagarjuna and Mahavira, Bateson and El Greco, leavened with a little Gluck, Auden, Borges, Ella Fitzgerald, and Hamilton. Reminiscent of the intimate conversations in "My Dinner with Andre," they confront an unknown future. Combining the diary's closeness to the self with the reflection of the personal letter much as Karl Ove Knausgaard combines diary with novelistic realism, these two distinctive voices are uncompromising, immediate, and raw. At the book's end they decide that their dialogue "will continue to change us even after one of us, perhaps both of us, dies." Ghosts may not be holy spirits, but even an atheist can believe that they are real. (shrink)

Is PDP Connectionism compatible with Cognitive Linguistics? It is unfortunate that this question has not received the attention it deserves, since at stake is the very possibility of a unified "West Coast Cognitive Science" approach to language. Part I of this paper argues that a systematic approach to the question of compatibility must involve an enumeration and analysis of the general principles used by each research program in their linguistic explanations. This approach is carried out in Parts II and III, (...) and the conclusion is that the explanatory principles of PDP Connectionism are fundamentally data-driven, whereas those of Cognitive Linguistics rely essentially on structure that the mind contributes to language use. Part IV presents several computational models of metaphor and analogy as case studies of the practical difficulties involved in reconciling these two frameworks. Finally, Part V examines the philosophical foundations of their respective explanatory strategies in order to get a clearer view of the theoretical obstacles to a unified account. (shrink)

Vaccine mandates can take many forms, and different kinds of mandates can implicate an array of values in diverse ways. It follows that good ethics arguments about particular vaccine mandates will attend to the details of individual policies. Furthermore, attention to particular mandate policies—and to attributes of the communities they aim to govern—can also illuminate which ethics arguments may be more salient in particular contexts. If ethicists want their arguments to make a difference in policy, they should attend to these (...) kinds of empirical considerations. This paper focuses on the most common and contentious vaccine mandate reform in the contemporary United States: the elimination of nonmedical exemptions (NMEs) to school and daycare vaccine mandates. It highlights, in particular, debates about California's Senate Bill 277 (SB277), which was the first successful recent effort to eliminate NMEs in that country. We use media, secondary sources, and original interviews with policymakers and activists to identify and evaluate three ethics arguments offered by critics of SB277: parental freedom, informed consent, and children's rights to care and education. We then turn to one ethics argument often offered by advocates of SB277: harm prevention. We note, however, that three arguments for mandates that are common in the immunization ethics literature—fairness/free-riding, children's rights to vaccination, and utilitarianism—did not play a role in debates about SB277. (shrink)

This book addresses a lacuna in scholarship concerning Hannah Arendt's Augustinian heritage that has predominantly focused on her early work. It de-canonises the sources that political theology has appealed to by shifting the interpretive focus to her mature treatment in The Life of the Mind. Arendt's initial criticism of Augustinian desiring is that it generates worldlessness. In her later works, Arendt develops a more nuanced reading of the movements of thinking, desiring, and loving in her engagement with Augustine. This study (...) attends to these movements and inspects the spatio-temporal framework which structure Arendt's conception of the political. The author assesses the claim that Arendt's conception of the political is drawn from a pedagogy of desiring and thinking from Augustine severed from his mystagogy. Although respecting the method of political theory, the author contends that Arendt's severing of Augustinian pedagogy from mystagogy brings her to an insurmountable aporia. Instead, the author embeds these pedagogical practices within Augustine's theology and suggests how that aporia might be overcome and used to develop a mystagogy for contemporary political life. The book will be of particular interest to scholars of political theology, as well as political theory, and political philosophy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Note on Thomas and the Divine MercyMark JohnsonA PUZZLING THING about the topic of the divine mercy as presented in the early part of the Prima pars, especially in light of the detailed commentaries presented by Cessario and Cuddy, 1 is how relatively little Thomas speaks about it. Pope Francis devoted the entire 2016 year to a Jubilee of Mercy. The Catholic Theological Society of America followed suit (...) by devoting its 2016 conference to the topic. Yet Thomas does not devote a single Scholastic question to it in the Summa. The topic of the divine names gets question 13 (12 articles), the divine knowledge gets question 14 (16 articles), and the divine will gets question 19 (12 articles). Our anchor text, question 21, is a four-article-long question that emerges from the larger issue of God’s will in itself (absolute). Yet the question is not about the divine mercy on its own, but is rather about features or properties of the divine act of love, a topic to which the whole of question 20 is devoted. God’s justice and mercy are considered in question 21 as quasi-virtues that perfect the divine act of love (question 20), which in turn is the proper act of God’s will (question 19).2 The divine will of question 19 [End Page 355] is Halley’s Comet, and mercy is the tail of dust trailing in its wake. When God’s mercy does appear it seems to vie with God’s justice for our attention.Cessario and Cuddy help us understand why this is, both with their two-part structure and with the sources they employ, the commentators. My focus here will be on the original text in its own light, before the varnish of the commentators. Thomas’s original is a dense chiaroscuro, which both raises questions and offers opportunities.First, while Thomas is still well within the consideration of the divine being and action (STh I, qq. 3–26), he is sensitive to our human understanding. For us humans an element of suffering seems to be built into any consideration of mercy. It is the first hurdle that needs to be jumped in question 21, article 3; objection 1 frets about mercy because it is a subset, a species, of sorrow—and that cannot be in God. In the body of the article, Thomas alludes to sorrow via a consideration of the quid nominis of mercy. The term misericordia means having a miserum cor, a heart afflicted by the sufferings of another. Thomas dismisses this right away; in the body of the article he says “being saddened at the misery of another does not befit God” (tristari... de miseria alterius non competit Deo). He does not say more. Similarly, in addressing the first objection he notes that the objection was invoking mercy as a kind of “being affected by suffering” (obiectio illa procedit de misericordia, quantum ad passionis affectum). Again, he gives no further commentary.3 [End Page 356]With the concern about God’s “co-suffering” with us dispatched, Thomas addresses a second objection, the satisfying of which will allow for the existence and procedure of the next article (a. 4). The objection focuses upon the divine justice and worries that mercy seems to mean some kind of “loosening up” of the divine justice (relaxatio iustitiae), in which God seems to act contrary to himself, to his utterances or dictates (dicta sua). Thomas addresses this concern head-on; there is no loss or relaxation of the divine justice, but rather a fulfilling and indeed exceeding of the dictates of divine justice. An example both explains and foreshadows: the man who owes someone a hundred dollars but who fulfills the debt when he pays him two hundred dollars of his own money, has both met the demands of justice and acted with liberality and mercy. He has acted above and beyond justice (supra iustitiam operando). 4 Remembering that objection 2 had included a concern about acting against one’s own self and dictates, Thomas adds that remitting an offense made against oneself by another—he may have had peccatum originale originans in mind—has the... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:166 BOOK REVIEWS Those who read this handsome book and study the paintings and sculptures of Zarlenga in excellent color will be able to follow the phases of his artistic development and find many subjects for medita· tion and enjoyment. Aquinas Institute of Theology St. Louis, Missouri BENEDICT M. ASHLEY, O.P. The Thought of Thomas Aquinas. By BRIAN DAVIES, O.P. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992 (cloth); Oxford: Clarendon Press, (...) 1993 (paper). Pp. xv + 391. An establishing circumstance of the ' restoration ' of Christian philosophy at the end of the last century, and the turn of this century, was that the medieval authors whom Christian philosophers turned to were, by profession, theologians whose appropriation of philosophy was for explicitly theological ends. By and large, however, the modern authors who set about retrieving medieval thought had an agenda quite different from that of their medieval luminaries. Still reeling from the philosophical fall-out of the Enlightenment, and encountering rationalism, idealism, and empiricism on all sides, committed Christian thinkers sought a source of philosophical reflection and, perhaps more importantly, justification, that could buttress the claims made by Christianity for those who were within the believing community, and defend the faith from the intellectual attacks of those who were not. The enduring philosophical inheritance of the Middle Ages, and particularly the philosophia perennis of St. Thomas Aquinas, was that source, wrote Leo XIII in his Aeterni patris, and Catholic philosophers soon collected. But the inheritance was not fully collected. With distinctive philosophical goals in mind, Christian philosophers focused upon the putative philosophy of medieval writers, particularly Aquinas, and largely left theological reflection alone. And, when theological contentions on the part of medieval authors did make their way into the discussion, they were almost inevitably appropriated as a legitimate incorporation of revealed teaching into what somehow remained the philosophical project. The result was 'Christian Philosophy.' Although this resulted in the flurry of Catholic philosophical study during the first half of this century, the picture that emerged of the medieval authors, and of Thomas in particular, was inevitably one-sided, and incomplete. An overly pessimistic assessment of the situation would be to say that, for all the hard work of the Gilsons and Maritains, Van Steenberghens and DeKonincks, we are no nearer to Thomas today than we were in the 1870s. BOOK REVIEWS 167 Brian Davies's endeavor seeks to change that, because it attempts to provide the modern reader with a comprehensive introduction to the great expanse of Thomas's thought according to the manner in which Thomas himself presented it in his mature theological masterpiece, the Summa theologiae. Fr. Davies has succeeded magnificently, and his book will become, as it should, a mainstay on the bookshelves of university libraries, students, and teachers alike. Professional philosophers whose work never leads them to Thomas's discussion on Christ, say, can readily get a good working knowledge of how Thomas approaches this center of Christian faith and practice. And the student who is altogether new to Aquinas can grasp something of the ' movement ' of Thomas's thought by reading, and re-reading, Davies judicious renderings of Thomas's doctrine on human acts. This is a book of many uses, all of them instructive and helpful. Considering this book to be an introduction, as Fr. Davies does (p. viii), does not do justice to the quantity of his achievement in writing it, or of the student's investment in reading it. The work occupies some 391 pages, reading made difficult by the tightly-knit character of Thomas's thought, though Davies' easy writing helps to allay the burden. The physical constitution of the book, in slightly off-white octavo paper and an 11-point base font, makes for comfortable reading. Davies has avoided excessive footnoting, giving references to Thomas's text judiciously, and he also provides a well-tailored and impressively diverse bibliography at the end.of the volume which can be effectively consulted by his reader. The author himself is a foundational theologian at Blackfriars in Oxford, so one might expect him instinctively to address the particular audience he encounters in his work. But, save on a very few occasions, Fr. Davies is mindful that in... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 68J The Theology of Henri de Lubac: An Overview. By HANS URS VON BALTHASAR. Translated by Joseph Fessio, S. J., Michael M. Waldstein (Preface), and Susan Clements (Conclusion). San Fran· cisco: Ignatius Press/Communio, 1991. Pp. 127. $9.95 (paper). Except for the preface and conclusion, Hans Urs von Balthasar's The Theology of Henri de Lubac first appeared as the long essay, "Henri de Lubac-L'oeuvre organique d'une vie," in (...) Nouvelle Revue Theologique 97 (1975), 897-913 and 98 (1976), 33-59, and translated by Joseph Fessio, S.J., as "The Achievement of Henri de Luhac" in Thought 51 (1976), 7-49. The preface was added soon after for the German edition, Henri de Lubac: Sein organisches Lebenswerk (Frei· burg im Breisgau: Johannes Verlag, 1976). The conclusion was added for Balthasar's and Jesuit Georges Chantraine's Le Cardinal de Lubac: L'Homme et son oeuvre (Paris: Ed. Lethielleux, 1983). While de Lubac denied " a true, personal philosophical or theo· logical synthesis " in the multiplicity of his oeuvre, he did believe that there could he found " a pattern that constitutes its unity " (de Luhac on p. 10). A more systematic work had been planned with Bruno de Solages, Peres Congar, Chenu, and others. In de Luhac's words, " the lightning bolt of Humani Generis killed the project" (p. 11). We can only wonder at what might have been. At the center of de Lubac's thought is a spiritual perception of "the essence of Christian mysticism" (p. 11). A hook on this subject was planned hut never completed; its fundamental importance was indicated by de Luhac in 1956: "I believe my hook on mysticism has inspired me for a long time in everything I work on; in its light I make my judgments and gain the criteria for ordering my thoughts and ideas" (p. 11). The purpose of Balthasar's little book is to trace these "great spiritual options of the master" (p. 26). Balthasar wrote his preface after he had received from de Luhac the manuscript that would he published as his Memoire sur l'occasion de mes ecrits (1989; ET: At the Service of the Church (1993]). Accord· ing to Balthasar, this "meandering" text has great value in display· ing the organic unity of de Luhac's writings in the contexts which occasioned them-" as well as the legendary condemnations and banish· ments prepared for him by his order and by the Church" (p. 9). De Luhac adopted the " fundamental elan " (p. 13) of Blondel, Marechal, and Rousselot. They enabled de Lubac to see in Thomas Aquinas " the paradox of the spiritual creature that is ordained beyond itself by the innermost reality of its nature to a goal that is unreachable for it and that can only he given as a gift of grace " (p. 13). Balthasar is unambiguous in his belief in the correctness of their interpretation. 684 BOOK REVIEWS Blondel, Marechal, and de Lubac were " martyrs for truth " (p. 13). De Lubac " exposed himself to the attacks of a tutiorist scholastic theology, armed with nothing but the historical and theological truth" (p. 13). Of the three, de Lubac was the most persecuted. The conflict with scholasticism is presented in all its sharpness. One must go back to Thomas himself, over the commentatorial tradition of John of St. Thomas and Cajetan, whose work represents, in the words of Gilson, " a successful ' corruptorium Sanctae Thomae.'... Thomas has been castrated by it" (p. 14). Gilson's "unqualified assent" to de Lubac's Thomistic conclusions means much to Balthasar, because it is "the assent of the greatest authority in the field of the history of phi· losophy" (p. 15). Upon reading Sumaturel (1946), Gilson wrote to de Lubac that the difference between the scholastic and the humanist theologians, like de Lubac, in part lies in the way they understand propositions. The scholastics " understand only univocal propositions and those that seem to be univocal. The former [humanist theologiansJ, by contrast, are more interested in the truth that the proposition attempts to formulate and that partly escapes it" (p. 14). In their incomprehension and fear of analogy, the scholastics are represented as hankering after a security that... (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic laid bare systemic inequities shaped by social determinants of health (SDoH). Public health agencies, legislators, health systems, and community organizations took notice, and there is currently unprecedented interest in identifying and implementing programs to address SDoH. This special issue focuses on the role of medical-legal partnerships (MLPs) in addressing SDoH and racial and social inequities, as well as the need to support these efforts with evidence-based research, data, and meaningful partnerships and funding.