En philosophie du droit, on a coutume d’opposer juspositivisme et jusnaturalisme et de placer Jeremy Bentham dans la première catégorie. Plusieurs auteurs tiennent même Bentham pour le père du juspositivisme. Je prétends pour ma part que cette façon de classer Bentham est inadéquate et nécessite une importante mise au point. S’il est vrai que Bentham était un adversaire des doctrines du droit naturel, il ne s’ensuit pas pour autant qu’il appartient au positivisme juridique; et les raisons qui pourraient justifier le (...) classement de Bentham parmi les juspositivistes militent aussi pour son association au jusnaturalisme. Que faut-il entendre exactement par « positivisme juridique », et en quel sens Bentham y adhère-t-il? C’est à cette double question que le présent article est consacré. (shrink)

« Et si la nature finissait par livrer ses mystères? » Et d’ailleurs, à qui les livrerait-elle? Si tant est que nous en soyons les dépositaires, que pourrions-nous faire de ces mystères délivrés, nous qui cherchons la lumière de la connaissance et la clarté de l’évidence? Ce que Goethe ne dit pas dans cette interrogation placée par Schopenhauer en exergue du Monde comme volonté et représentation, c’est justement qu’il n’y a de mystère que pour un sujet qui fait face à (...) la nature et qui y ti... (shrink)

Goethes Ästhetik.--Wahrheit, Freiheit und Liebe in der griechischen Tragödie.--Plato und Kant, ein Dialog.--Der Tyrann in Platos Werk.--Die Autonomie der Ästhetik.--Wissen und religiöser Glaube in Platos Werk.

COLI – company owned life insurance – is often purchased by firms on employees in whom the firm has no demonstrable insurable interest. Though no immediate harm comes to individuals insured in this way, purchasing such policies raises moral questions. From a Kantian framework, questions arise about reciprocity and fairness, the deception of employees, the generation of mistrust, and the use of the employee’s life as a means to profit. No compensating social good is served by the sale of these (...) policies. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with the question of how the social and economic structure of cities affects the degree of political competition and how in turn these factors affect the degree of a political stability. It isbased on a comparative empirical study of the outcomes of the communal elections of 1952, 1958 and 1964 in 147 Belgian cities that had a population size of 10.000 or more in 1947.In the first place the following generalizations are made with regard to the (...) election outcomes in these cities during the 1952-1964 period. 1. A general proliferation of lists or parties participating in the elections from 1952 to 1964.2. A trend from one-party-control over the college of the city council toward coalition-control.3. A net increase in the number of catholic lists and a net decrease in the number of socialist and liberal lists participating in the colleges of these townships.4. An increase in the number of cities in which newer, smaller and nontraditional parties or lists participated in the college of the city council.Three measures of politica! competitions are employed :1. The average number of parties or lists, that entered the communal election of 1952, 1958 and 1964.2. The average number of lists that received at least ten per cent of the vote in these three elections, and3. The presence or absence of a coalition on the college of the city council in 1952.The two measures of politica! stability, which are also based on the results of the same elections, are :1. The degree of stability in the lists and parties participating in the college of the city council, and2. The degree of stability in the list or party controlling the college of the city council.In general, measures of structural differentiation, linguistic diversity, industrial diversity, and social heterogeneity are found to be positively related to the degree of competition in local politics. In turn, measures of each of these structural factors and the measures of political competition are found to be negatively related to measures of political stability. Regression analysis supports the interpretation that diversity and heterogeneity in the social structure of cities - specifically, population size, density, and the presence of many persons with high occupational status - contribute to greater politica! competition in local polities, but that it is the degree of political competition that most strongly affects the degree of political stability.The conclusion is drawn that cities with a high degree of social and economic heterogeneity have a greater amount of conflict and cleavage. This results in greater competition in the political arena whichin turn predisposes such cities to have a high degree of instability in the control of their city governments. (shrink)

This paper attempts to link the concepts of resistance and tactics present in the work of Michel de Certeau, that of Rodolfo Kusch coined by phagocytosis. The big story, defined by Kusch and bound by us to daily nature, operates as a horizon of understanding.We use for that a tour of some works of the authors, to which we add our own field experience, during our eight years in the foothills town of San Pedro de Atacama.

To investigate whether people can implicitly learn regularities in a social context, we developed a new implicit sequence learning task combining elements from classic false belief and serial reaction time tasks. Participants learned that protagonists were offered flowers at four locations. The protagonists' beliefs concerning the flowers were true or false, depending on their orientation, respectively, toward the scene or away from it. Unbeknown to the participants, there was a fixed belief-related sequence involving three dimensions. Participants had to indicate as (...) fast as possible where the flowers were located, or how many flowers were given according to the protagonists. Experiment 1 combined perceptual and motor processes, whereas Experiment 2 unconfounded the sequence and motor responses, allowing to investigate pure perceptual implicit learning. For reasons of comparison, two non-social conditions were created in Experiment 2 by replacing the protagonists with two non-social objects—colored cameras or shapes. Results revealed significant implicit sequence learning of all belief-related dimensions in Experiment 1, and of true-false belief orientation in Experiment 2, even without a motor confound. Importantly, there were faster reaction times and stronger sequence learning effects in the social than in the non-social conditions. The present findings demonstrate for the first time that people are able to implicitly learn belief-related sequences. (shrink)

People not only disagree about religious belief, but they disagree about what it is to disagree about religious belief; and consequently about what it would be for one religion to be uniquely true. What I shall try to do first is to characterise the nature of religious disagreement; and next to suggest in what the uniqueness of Christianity might consist.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:498 BOOK REVIEWS generations of theologians across denominational lines. Both Placher and Hunsinger at the end of their essays choose quotations from within Frei's own writings to give a synoptic portrait of the man and his work. Placher chooses a remark about Niebuhr's sense of vocation as a theologian (20), and Hunsinger one about knowledge of that seemingly elusive reality, a person's identity (257). However one might come away (...) from this challenging collection of essays, further confused or more enlightened, more in agreement or disagreement, I think every reader will recognize the coincidence of intellectual perspicuity and generosity with passionate faith. Regis College, Toronto School of Theology Toronto, Ontario, Canada GEORGE P. SCHNER, S.J. Reasoned Faith. Edited by ELEONORE STUMP. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993. Pp. x + 364. As the editor remarks in her "Introduction," it is not so long ago that the analytical philosophy of religion consisted very largely of discussions of the meaningfulness of religious language, and of arguments about the existence of God. Nowadays it is more adventurous, ranging over such topics as creation, providence, and God's responsibility for sin. According to Robert Merrihew Adams, the statement "truth is subjectivity," though one of the most famous, is also one of the most misunderstood in Kierkegaard's writings. He argues that, taken in context within the Concluding Unscientifu: Postscript, the statement is by no means incompatible with the objective truth of religious belief. From the point of view of the Postscript, a member of an idolatrous community who prays to her God with "the entire passion of the infinite" has more of the truth than one who prays in a false spirit from within Christendom; but this implies that the latter does have some truth. Whatever the deficiencies in her faith, she is clearly admitted to be in possession of the true concept of God objectively speaking (223 ). Adams maintains, quite rightly in the reviewer's opinion, that the Postscript is excessively pessimistic about the integration of the ideals of subjectivity and objectivity, of passionate commitment on the one side and rational assessment of evidence on the other, in religious faith (21). A useful distinction is made by Scott MacDonald between "occurrent" and "dispositional" belief; this seems to resolve some of the more puzzling paradoxes about the relation of the more cognitive and propositional side of faith to other aspects which may be thought essential to it. The demons alluded to by St. James (2:19) might believe dispositionally that their highest fulfillment BOOK REVIEWS 499 was to be found in obeying the divine will, and so performing acts of charity and service to other creatures. But to avoid the inconvenience of acting in such a way, they could think of God occurrently as just a powerful being who makes burdensome demands (55). For MacDonald, the cognitive component of faith has only two elements, belief that certain propositions are true, and belief that the kind of response of the will which is also essential to faith may be grounded on these (56). "We can make sense of Christian faith if we think of it simply as belief that Christianity is true plus an appropriate volitional response to that truth" (69). Against mainline Christian accounts like those of Augustine and Aquinas, he sees no good reason to suppose that one cannot have faith in propositions for which one has conclusive proof, but only in those for which one's justification is relatively weak. He provides interesting grounds for contradiction of a view which has been expounded by both Robert Adams and John Hick, that only such uncertainty can ground the trust which is essential to the relationship which human beings ought to have to God (59). "My ability to love and trust my wife, to commit myself without reservation to her well-being and to the goals and purposes we have chosen as definitive of our common life seem in no way dependent on my being uncertain about what she is like or what she will do" (60). On the question of how faith ought to be related to the demands of reason, Robert Audi remarks that, up to the middle 1970s... (shrink)