The results of an empirical study intoperceptions of the treatment of farm animals inthe Netherlands are presented. A qualitativeapproach, based on in-depth interviews withmeat livestock farmers and consumers was chosenin order to assess motivations behindperceptions and to gain insight into the waypeople deal with possible discrepancies betweentheir perceptions and their daily practices.Perceptions are analyzed with the help of aframe of reference, which consists ofvalues, norms, convictions, interests, andknowledge.

Grace is defined by Thomas as a participation of the divine nature. By the gift of grace man is said to become a „god by participation”. In this study an interpretation is proposed of the meaning of participation as applied to grace. Grace, according to Thomas, is the free gift of God himself to man by which man becomes united with God in knowledge and love. It is through the gift of grace that man achieves his ultimate perfection which consists (...) in the vision of God. Why must grace be understood as a matter of participation, so it is asked? Does the notion of participation befit the Christian experience of grace as a personal encounter between man and God? It appears that the expression participation of the divine nature is intended as a solution to the following problem: how can man be understood to attain his ultimate perfection of seeing God's infinite essence, if this vision is only connatural to an infinite intellect? Because the act of seeing God is proper to the divine nature, it is not a desirable good for man precisely insofar as he is a man. This means that human nature as such cannot be understood as the subject of the act of faith by which the vision of God is anticipated within the context of human life on earth. The only way open to man to be subject of faith, thus to attain God in his divinity, is by becoming a god himself, while remaining a human being. Since the act of faith is properly a divine act, this act cannot perfect man in relation to his human nature, but only in relation to the divine nature as participated in him by grace. Only in this way, by receiving a participated likeness of God, is the human intellect capable of an act with respect to God himself, which is nevertheless a free and spontaneous act of man himself as it proceeds from an intrinsic principle. The conclusion is that participation provides an answer to the question of how man must be understood if a personal encounter between man and God, between creature and creator, should be possible. (shrink)

Amsterdam University Press is a leading publisher of academic books, journals and textbooks in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Our aim is to make current research available to scholars, students, innovators, and the general public. AUP stands for scholarly excellence, global presence, and engagement with the international academic community.

De uitvoerige reactie van Sarot en Van den Brink waarin ze hun ‘Utrechtse’ positie in de wijsgerige theologie verduidelijken en verdedigen tegenover mijn vragen en scepsis, zou een uitvoerige beantwoording verdienen, uitvoeriger en grondiger dan het mij op deze plaats mogelijk is. Ik zal, ten eerste, ingaan op de kwestie van het realisme en, ten tweede, op het verwijt van ‘agnosticisme’ aan mijn adres.

Amsterdam University Press is a leading publisher of academic books, journals and textbooks in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Our aim is to make current research available to scholars, students, innovators, and the general public. AUP stands for scholarly excellence, global presence, and engagement with the international academic community.

According to Thomas Aquinas, both logic and metaphysics are characterized by the same universal scope. The consideration of metaphysics extends to everthing which is, as its subject is being insofar as it is being. And the science of logic too considers everything which is, not as it exists in reality but insofar as the whole of being falls under the consideration of reason. Because of the equivalence between the logical sphere of reason and the real sphere of being metaphysics has (...) an affinity with logic. This similarity is mentioned by Aquinas in order to explain the legitimate use of a logical mode of reasoning within metaphysics. Metaphysics is not identical with logic, but the modus logicus, the logical mode of reasoning, is to a certain extent useful for the philosopher in his inquiry into metaphysical matters. In his Commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics Thomas refers frequently to this ‘modus logicus' by which Aristotle is said to proceed in his investigation into substance. However, it is not altogether clear what this method consists in and how the similarity between logic and metaphysics, on which the modus logicus is based, should be understood. In this article I want to clarify the meaning of the modus logicusin Aquinas and its revelance for metaphysics. This might help us to understand better how according to Thomas logic and metaphysics are related to one another and in what sense they are different. (shrink)

Contemporary theology commonly rejects the traditional 'Greek' reading of Exodus 3:14, according to which God reveals himself to Moses by the name of 'being' in favour of a more religious interpretation which sees in the name a confirmation of Gods enduring and liberating presence to his people. By means of an interpretation of Thomas Aquinas' reading of the Exodus-name in the Summa the author intends to show that Aquinas' account of the name is not guided by an exegetical and hermeneutical (...) interest but by a propoer speculative way of questioning, which can be formulated as follows: given the fact that God reveals himself to Moses under the name of being, how can this name - in what it signifies and how it signifies - be understood as a suitable medium by which God reveals himself to man. In the Summa-text Thomas gives three arguments why the name 'being' is the most appropriate name of God. It is argued that each of these arguments relates to a different aspect of the complex structure of God-in-his-revelation-to-man. Aquinas' account of the name of being is in accord with his analysis of the divine names, in which the tension between the res significata, the reality which is signified by a name, and the modus significandi, the human way of signifying, stands central. This tension returns in his analysis of the name 'being', where it clarifies the structure of revelation as a concealing presence of God to man. The implications of Thomas' reading for the notion of revelation exhibit some interesting similarities with the modern reading of Exodus inspite of the fundamental difference in theological method. (shrink)

This article examines how Reformed scholasticism can be relevant for systematic theology today. ‘Reformed Scholasticism’ denotes the academic practice in which the doctrines of the Reformation are expounded, explained, and defended. It is primarily a method and attitude in search of the truth, based on a careful reading of Scripture, drawing on patristic and medieval traditions, and interacting with philosophy and other academic disciplines. In addition to these methodological features, important contributions on various doctrinal topics can be discovered. The doctrine (...) of God has a foundational role in the sense that God is the primary subject of the other topics. Reformed scholastic theology not only examines God’s inner essence, but also the concrete relation and operation of God toward his world. In a Trinitarian understanding of God’s essence, a distinction is maintained between God’s immanent relatedness as three divine Persons, and his outward relation to created reality. The doctrines of creation and providence gave occasion for Reformed scholastics to engage in debates with the emerging natural sciences, and also articulated important theological insights concerning the involvement of God in creaturely affairs. In Christology, the Reformed orthodox maintained the classic doctrine of the two natures of Jesus Christ, against Socinians and other opponents. These ontological statements are the necessary conditions for a proper understanding of the salvation by Christ. While the doctrinal positions of Reformed scholastic theology cannot be automatically transmitted to contemporary discussions, we can profit from this tradition on several levels of method and content. (shrink)

This paper examines critically Kretzmann's reconstruction of the project of natural theology as exemplified by Aquinas's Summa Contra Gentiles. It is argued that the notion of natural theology, as understood and advocated by Kretzmann, is particularly indebted to the epistemologically biased natural theology of modernity with its focus on rational justification of theistic belief. As a consequence, Kretzmann's view of the arguments for the existence of God and their place within Aquinas's theological project is insufficiently sensitive to the ontological conception (...) of truth and intelligibility which underlies the argumentation. From his epistemological point of view Kretzmann differs from Aquinas in two aspects. First, he contends that it is not necessary to establish the existence of God with absolute certainty at the outset; one may begin with the hypothesis that there is a God. Second, the arguments do not yet conclude to the existence of God in the specific theistic sense; they show at most the existence of a primary explanatory entity, which may be identified with God later on. Both claims are criticized in the light of a discussion of Aquinas's theological method. (shrink)

SummaryIntense, sustained nursing lengthens inter-birth intervals and is causally linked with low natural fertility. However, in traditional settings, the effects of such nursing on fertility are difficult to disentangle from those of nutrition. Results from an prospective, direct observational study of reproductive function in well-nourished Amele women who nurse intensively and persistently but who also have high fertility are here presented. Endocrine measures show that ovarian activity resumes by median 11·0 months postpartum. Median duration of postpartum amenorrhoea is 11·3 months, (...) time to next conception is 19·0 months, and the inter-birth interval is 28·0 months. Average life time fertility is 6·8. High fertility in Amele women is due both to refractoriness of reproductive function to suckling stimuli, and to maintenance of equivalent age-specific fertility rates across the reproductive life span. (shrink)

This book offers a philosophical analysis of the main themes and problems of Aquinas' metaphysics of creation, centred on the concept of participation, the systematical meaning of which is examined in a critical discussion of the prevailing views of contemporary Thomas scholars.

The historiography of European liberalism has been dominated by large countries; this contribution focuses on the successful tradition of liberalism in the Netherlands. Just like German liberalism, the spirit of Dutch 19th-century liberalism was constitutional. It assumed that constitutional rules in a certain sense produced liberty, because liberty was not possible without a legally guaranteed context. Today the Dutch liberal party tries to combine classical liberalism with a mild populism, but recently the Pim Fortuyn upsurge of populism has hurt the (...) liberal party. A direct democratic style of politics has become popular among more right-wing liberals. Perhaps it is time to re-evaluate the 19th-century doctrinaire liberal traditions. Their anti-democratic ideas have been superseded, but the constitutional organization of liberty is as important as ever. (shrink)

In The Doctrine of God Dolf te Velde examines the interaction of method and content in three historically important accounts of the doctrine of God.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Dei Filius I:On God, Creation, and ProvidenceRudi A. Te VeldeIn this essay, I want to share my impressions of the first chapter of the dogmatic constitution Dei Filius of Vatican I. It begins its declaration of the basic truths of Christian faith in a language which is similar, and probably intended to be similar, to that of a solemn confession of faith: "The holy, catholic, apostolic, and Roman church (...) believes and acknowledges that there is one true living God, creator and lord of heaven and earth."1 It reminds one, in some of its formulations, of the Nicene Creed, but with a remarkable difference: here, in the text of the constitution, the object of the confession is formulated as a proposition about God's existence.2 What is said is not, for example, "I believe in one God, the Father almighty"; but the Church believes and holds it to be true that there exists a God. One can notice a subtle shift from a confession of faith to the proclamation of a (rational) truth. The Pope, gathered with all the bishops of the Church, declares that there exists a God, the one and true living God, a doctrinal statement directed, by implication, against those who dare to deny the existence of God. The opening sentence of chapter 1 corresponds with its canon, which says that, "if anyone denies the one true God, creator and [End Page 823] lord of things visible and invisible: let him be anathema."3 Thus the constitution says that the "one, true living God" of the biblical faith exists, that this is a truth, and that, as consequence, the opposed thesis of atheism is false and must be rejected.Who is asserting this truth? Who is speaking and with which authority? The text leaves no doubt about the speaking subject. It is the Church, entitled to speak with authority about matters of faith, because it is the Roman Church, holy, catholic, and apostolic. The Church speaks, in the person of the pope, the legitimate successor of St. Peter, with authority granted to her by God himself through his Son Jesus Christ. In the preface preceding chapter 1 of the constitution, it is said that the Church is appointed by God to be "mother and mistress of nations." Hence:She can never cease from witnessing to the truth of God... and from declaring it, for she knows that these words were directed to her: "My spirit which is upon you, and my words I have put in your mouth, shall not depart out of your mouth from this time forth and for evermore"(Is 59:21).4This gives the pope, sitting in the chair of Peter, the authority of "teaching and defending Catholic truth and condemning erroneous doctrines."5 And the first thing to be declared, as part of the Church's task to proclaim the Catholic truth to all the nations, is to assert the existence of God against the error of atheism.It is important to understand the genre of a dogmatic constitution. It is a document in which the Church, by mouth of the pope together with the bishops, expounds the basic tenets of Christian teaching. The purpose of a dogmatic constitution is to reaffirm the basic truths of Christian doctrine, to clarify the fundamentals of faith in a message to the world. A constitution may be occasioned by actual developments in the world and society, but it speaks as it were from the standpoint of eternity. In case of the constitution Dei Filius, the addressee is the world of the mid-nineteenth century, a time of dominance of scientific reason, of materialism, naturalism, atheism, and not unimportantly, of current forms of idealistic pantheism (Georg Hegel, Friedrich Schelling, the influence of German Idealism in general); what the constitution especially stands opposed to [End Page 824] is the view of supernatural religion as being irrational. For this purpose it wants to reclaim reason and to overcome the disastrous gap between faith and (modern) rationality.The double program underlying the constitution—teaching the Catholic truth and condemning erroneous doctrines—reminds one of the Summa contra gentiles [SCG] of Thomas Aquinas.6 The... (shrink)

De uitvoerige reactie van Sarot en Van den Brink waarin ze hun ‘Utrechtse’ positie in de wijsgerige theologie verduidelijken en verdedigen tegenover mijn vragen en scepsis, zou een uitvoerige beantwoording verdienen, uitvoeriger en grondiger dan het mij op deze plaats mogelijk is. Ik zal, ten eerste, ingaan op de kwestie van het realisme en, ten tweede, op het verwijt van ‘agnosticisme’ aan mijn adres.

Contemporary theology commonly rejects the traditional 'Greek' reading of Exodus 3:14, according to which God reveals himself to Moses by the name of 'being' in favour of a more religious interpretation which sees in the name a confirmation of Gods enduring and liberating presence to his people. By means of an interpretation of Thomas Aquinas' reading of the Exodus-name in the Summa the author intends to show that Aquinas' account of the name is not guided by an exegetical and hermeneutical (...) interest but by a propoer speculative way of questioning, which can be formulated as follows: given the fact that God reveals himself to Moses under the name of being, how can this name - in what it signifies and how it signifies - be understood as a suitable medium by which God reveals himself to man. In the Summa-text Thomas gives three arguments why the name 'being' is the most appropriate name of God. It is argued that each of these arguments relates to a different aspect of the complex structure of God-in-his-revelation-to-man. Aquinas' account of the name of being is in accord with his analysis of the divine names, in which the tension between the res significata, the reality which is signified by a name, and the modus significandi, the human way of signifying, stands central. This tension returns in his analysis of the name 'being', where it clarifies the structure of revelation as a concealing presence of God to man. The implications of Thomas' reading for the notion of revelation exhibit some interesting similarities with the modern reading of Exodus inspite of the fundamental difference in theological method. (shrink)

The results of an empirical study intoperceptions of the treatment of farm animals inthe Netherlands are presented. A qualitativeapproach, based on in-depth interviews withmeat livestock farmers and consumers was chosenin order to assess motivations behindperceptions and to gain insight into the waypeople deal with possible discrepancies betweentheir perceptions and their daily practices.Perceptions are analyzed with the help of aframe of reference, which consists ofvalues, norms, convictions, interests, andknowledge.The perceptions of the interviewed farmersare quite consistent and without exceptionpositive: according to them, (...) nothing is wrongwith animal welfare in livestock breeding. Theperceptions of the consumers we interviewed aremore divergent, but generally negative. Bothgroups show ambivalence as a result ofdiscrepancies between perceptions and behavior.Although the consumers share the impressionthat the living conditions of livestock animalsare far from optimal, most of them still buyand eat meat from the meat industry. Thefarmers believe the welfare of their animals isgood, but, as frequent defensive utterancesshow, they feel uncomfortable with expressed orunexpressed accusations of mistreating animals.The ways the respondents deal with thisambivalence were analysed by drawing ontheories of dissonance reduction and distancing devices. (shrink)

De theoloog Herman Bavinck (1854-1921) was van 1883-1902 aan de Theologische School te Kampen niet alleen verantwoordelijk voor het onderwijs in de dogmatiek, maar ook in dat van de ethiek. In deze uitgave worden drie niet eerder gepubliceerde manuscripten van Bavinck uitgegeven, die geheel of gedeeltelijk aan de filosofische ethiek zijn gewijd. In combinatie met Bavincks in 2019 verschenen Gereformeerde Ethiek biedt dit boek een representatief (en wellicht zelfs compleet) overzicht van de wijze waarop theologiestudenten in de laatste twee (...) decennia van de negentiende eeuw in Kampen wegwijs werden gemaakt in de ethiek. (shrink)

Bundel met aanvullingen op colleges, gegeven aan de landbouwhogeschool te Wageningen, waarin de opvattingen worden besproken van ondermeer de Wiener Kreis (Carnap), Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos en Habermas.

De sjoemelsoftware in auto’s bracht de vraag naar de rol van ingenieurs bij het ontwikkelen van auto’s die aan toenemende milieueisen voldoen plots veel dichterbij de consument. Maar elke techniek en technologie kan vragen oproepen omdat telkens de vraag gestel kan worden: is het goed? Is het beter? Maar het antwoord blijkt meestal veel complexer te zijn wanneer men ingaat op het waardenkader dat deze technische/technologische ontwikkelingen mee bepalen. In dit artikel proberen we wat achtergrond te bieden die kan helpen (...) om de verschillende vragen naar verantwoording te ontrafelen. (shrink)

The Best Trick to Teach Critical Thinking. How philosophy of science and magic make young people resilient to nonsense. In a world of ‘alternative facts’ and fact-free opinions, all readily available through the internet, young people can easily fall prey to nonsense, thus running the risk to act on false information. Critical thinking is usually seen as a remedy against accepting and acting on such falsehoods. Under a pragmatist-naturalist interpretation of science, critical thinking is synonymous with scientific inquiry. Magic tricks (...) in the classroom seem to trigger, in an attractive and accessible way, the scientific process of inquiry in students. Two examples are discussed. Provisional results look promising enough to further explore the use of magic tricks in the classroom to train critical thinking in young people. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Lao-tzu and the Tao-te-chingJonathan R. HermanLao-tzu and the Tao-te-ching. Edited by Livia Kohn and Michael LaFargue. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998. Pp. xii + 330.Modern scholarship on the Tao Te Ching has tended to focus on questions of authorship and the intended meaning of the text, often working from both the unquestioned assumption that matters of origination are of primary historical importance and the quasi-theological (...) bias that the original textual meaning is somehow the "right" or authoritative one. But the role of the Tao Te Ching in Chinese history and culture, as well as that of its purported author, is a much more complex affair. The text has been the subject of more than seven hundred commentaries and has been appropriated by vast networks of scholars, government officials, self-conscious religious communities, and laypeople, while Lao Tzu himself has undergone a fascinating history of deification and aesthetic representation. With Lao-tzu and the Tao-te-ching, editors Livia Kohn and Michael LaFargue take steps toward filling in some of the complicated (and much overlooked) post-canonical history by assembling essays on subjects ranging from the ritual uses of the text to modern hermeneutic experiments. The volume includes nine new essays, as well as three older ones reprinted or translated from earlier sources.The book is organized in four sections—"Ancient Myths," "Chinese Interpretations," "Modern Readings," and "Critical Methods"—although there is noticeable [End Page 625] overlap among the parts. The twelve essays are of varying quality and of varying use for different readers. Some of the material is highly technical and presupposes a sinological audience, while other material rehearses data that should already be familiar to scholars of ancient Chinese philosophy but may be tremendously useful to those who are interested in the text but lacking the scholarly background. One case of the latter is Julia Hardy's "Influential Western Interpretations of the Tao-te-ching," which does not especially break new ground but is a wonderful historical synopsis of Western scholarship on the text, as it meticulously identifies the key interpretive voices and sorts out their positions. Hardy gives only brief attention to the earliest eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholarship—omitting, for example, any mention of Victor von Strauss' 1870 German rendition—which might actually have been most edifying for specialists. LaFargue and Julian Pas' "On Translating the Tao-te-ching" is essentially a primer on hermeneutic problems relevant to the text that serves as an intelligent corrective to the uncoordinated body of Taoist materials available to novice readers.What may be most clear from several of the essays taken in tandem is that the popular Western "mystical" reading of the text not only is one of many historical interpretations but is also very much heir to Wang Pi's intellectual lineage. In "A Tale of Two Commentaries: Ho-shang-kung and Wang Pi on the Lao-tzu," Alan K. L. Chan notes how such standard tenets as the spiritualized metaphysical understanding of Tao, the relationship between nonbeing and creativity, and the identification of naturalness and nonaction with spontaneity originate with Wang Pi but are nowhere to be found in the earlier Ho-shang-kung reading. The latter employs typical Han dynasty correlative cosmological interpretive methods, referring to naturalness as the preservation of energies in the physical body and to "the One" not as an abstract metaphysical oneness but as "the original substance of life itself, energy in its most pure and potent form" (p. 93). According to Isabel Robinet's "Later Commen-taries: Textual Polysemy and Syncretistic Interpretations," the panoply of text interpretations falls into roughly three categories—"technical or specialist readings," "philosophical exegeses," and "inner alchemy interpretations," which she then proceeds to divide further into "philological" and "ideological" readings. This is all further complicated when one considers the Tao Te Ching not as a strictly philosophical text but as a collection of polemical aphorisms, as LaFargue does in "Recovering the Tao-te-ching's Original Meaning: Some Remarks on Historical Hermeneutics," or as a ritual, liturgical or meditative aid, as Kohn does in "The Tao-te-ching in Ritual."Lao-tzu and the... (shrink)