In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Tolerantia: A Medieval ConceptIstván BejczyThe notion of tolerance is generally considered a product of modern times and in particular of the Age of Reason.1 The enlightened philosophers, who laid the foundations of liberalism and democracy, are often hailed as the men who introduced the notion of tolerance as a means of guaranteeing maximum freedom to the individual members of society. Writings such as the Epistola de tolerantia of John (...) Locke and the Traité sur la tolérance of Voltaire prove indeed that tolerance was an important topic in enlightened thought. Sometimes it is believed that an earlier notion of tolerance can be found, most notably in the writings of Christian humanists like Erasmus. As a matter of fact, “Erasmian tolerance” is a standing phrase in the Netherlands, where the people are happy to link the one virtue for which they openly praise themselves with the only Dutch author who is universally known.The Middle Ages, on the other hand, have no reputation for tolerance, the lack of which is usually attributed to the influence of a powerful Church that was able and willing to suppress all major deviations from the exclusive truth it was convinced it possessed. Only the Reformation, it is often argued, forced the Church to change its attitude and to redefine its relation towards dissidents.2 As a consequence, many historical studies of the idea of tolerance begin only in the sixteenth century.3This representation of the history of tolerance is, however, distorted. In the Middle Ages tolerantia was a highly developed political concept, and it was [End Page 365] widely applied in the ecclesiastical as well as the secular sphere. This observation is not altogether new. In a limited number of studies the medieval concept of tolerance receives due attention. The most important of these studies are those by Joseph Lecler, Mario Condorelli, and Klaus Schreiner, but unfortunately none of these authors treat the subject of medieval tolerance in a satisfactory way.In his monumental Histoire de la tolérance au siècle de la Réforme (1955) Lecler does not investigate the term or the concept of medieval tolerance systematically, but briefly surveys the attitude adopted by Christian scholarly authors towards heretics and unbelievers. In fact Lecler tacitly equates the notion of “tolerance” with “freedom of religion,” a concept which indeed found little support among medieval scholars.4 Condorelli’s study (1960) is much more systematic, but it has a rather limited scope. It concentrates on the development of religious toleration in medieval canon law between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries.5 The canon lawyers in fact coined the medieval concept of tolerantia with specific attention to religious toleration, and for this reason Condorelli’s work remains important and useful. But Condorelli does not analyze medieval tolerantia in its full range, nor does he compare the concept with later uses of the term.Schreiner’s article on tolerance in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe (1990) contains a detailed discussion of the concept of tolerance and its development in western intellectual history.6 On the patristic and medieval periods Schreiner offers a wealth of material, and his representations of historical facts and developments are generally correct. His evaluations of the facts, however, strike me as misleading as far as the Middle Ages are concerned. Schreiner refuses to take medieval tolerance seriously. The pretension of Christian religion to embody the absolute truth and its function as the main integrating factor of society would have impeded a full development of tolerance; Schreiner even considers medieval Christianity intolerant in its very essence. As he argues,Only when the early modern state proceeded to make natural religion instead of a closed system of belief the consensus-shaping vinculum societatis, it set free spaces of action in which individuals and groups could realize their rights of freedom of belief and conscience.... Only [End Page 366] the dissolution of the historically grown bonds between religion and justice, which restituted freedom to religion and prudence to justice, enabled the free expression of religion in a spirit of mutual patience.7We can reproach Schreiner with several inaccuracies. First, it is questionable whether medieval religion represented a closed system which can be... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Tolerantia: A Medieval ConceptIstván BejczyThe notion of tolerance is generally considered a product of modern times and in particular of the Age of Reason.1 The enlightened philosophers, who laid the foundations of liberalism and democracy, are often hailed as the men who introduced the notion of tolerance as a means of guaranteeing maximum freedom to the individual members of society. Writings such as the Epistola de tolerantia of John (...) Locke and the Traité sur la tolérance of Voltaire prove indeed that tolerance was an important topic in enlightened thought. Sometimes it is believed that an earlier notion of tolerance can be found, most notably in the writings of Christian humanists like Erasmus. As a matter of fact, “Erasmian tolerance” is a standing phrase in the Netherlands, where the people are happy to link the one virtue for which they openly praise themselves with the only Dutch author who is universally known.The Middle Ages, on the other hand, have no reputation for tolerance, the lack of which is usually attributed to the influence of a powerful Church that was able and willing to suppress all major deviations from the exclusive truth it was convinced it possessed. Only the Reformation, it is often argued, forced the Church to change its attitude and to redefine its relation towards dissidents.2 As a consequence, many historical studies of the idea of tolerance begin only in the sixteenth century.3This representation of the history of tolerance is, however, distorted. In the Middle Ages tolerantia was a highly developed political concept, and it was [End Page 365] widely applied in the ecclesiastical as well as the secular sphere. This observation is not altogether new. In a limited number of studies the medieval concept of tolerance receives due attention. The most important of these studies are those by Joseph Lecler, Mario Condorelli, and Klaus Schreiner, but unfortunately none of these authors treat the subject of medieval tolerance in a satisfactory way.In his monumental Histoire de la tolérance au siècle de la Réforme (1955) Lecler does not investigate the term or the concept of medieval tolerance systematically, but briefly surveys the attitude adopted by Christian scholarly authors towards heretics and unbelievers. In fact Lecler tacitly equates the notion of “tolerance” with “freedom of religion,” a concept which indeed found little support among medieval scholars.4 Condorelli’s study (1960) is much more systematic, but it has a rather limited scope. It concentrates on the development of religious toleration in medieval canon law between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries.5 The canon lawyers in fact coined the medieval concept of tolerantia with specific attention to religious toleration, and for this reason Condorelli’s work remains important and useful. But Condorelli does not analyze medieval tolerantia in its full range, nor does he compare the concept with later uses of the term.Schreiner’s article on tolerance in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe (1990) contains a detailed discussion of the concept of tolerance and its development in western intellectual history.6 On the patristic and medieval periods Schreiner offers a wealth of material, and his representations of historical facts and developments are generally correct. His evaluations of the facts, however, strike me as misleading as far as the Middle Ages are concerned. Schreiner refuses to take medieval tolerance seriously. The pretension of Christian religion to embody the absolute truth and its function as the main integrating factor of society would have impeded a full development of tolerance; Schreiner even considers medieval Christianity intolerant in its very essence. As he argues,Only when the early modern state proceeded to make natural religion instead of a closed system of belief the consensus-shaping vinculum societatis, it set free spaces of action in which individuals and groups could realize their rights of freedom of belief and conscience.... Only [End Page 366] the dissolution of the historically grown bonds between religion and justice, which restituted freedom to religion and prudence to justice, enabled the free expression of religion in a spirit of mutual patience.7We can reproach Schreiner with several inaccuracies. First, it is questionable whether medieval religion represented a closed system which can be... (shrink)

The aim of this book is to examine Erasmus' attitude toward the medieval past and to relate it to his historical consciousness.

L’article livre l’édition d’un traité intitulé, d’après le plus ancien témoin, De origine virtutum et vitiorum. Conservé dans quatre manuscrits, il est probablement l’œuvre d’un religieux anglais dans les premières décennies du xiiie siècle. Il s’attache principalement à décrire l’interaction entre les puissances naturelles de l’âme humaine et les obligations morales des chrétiens. L’auteur manifeste son originalité par l’usage de classifications éloignées des traditions académiques. En dépit d’une forme scolaire, ce traité répond avant tout à des préoccupations pastorales.

This collection surveys the tradition of medieval commentaries on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics from its thirteenth-century origins to the fifteenth century, ...

The contributors to this volume examine the diverse roles played by moral virtues in the political writings of the Later Middle Ages. Medieval political thought has a long tradition of scholarship, and its ethical dimension has always received sustained attention. This volume specifically concentrates on the meaning and function of virtues in a political context, a theme which has thus far been neglected. The authors deal with Latin texts (occasionally in combination with vernacular ones) from the 13th to 15th centuries (...) that define, legitimize, or criticize secular rule by using catalogues of virtues, originating from ancient philosophy as well as Christian moral theology. The medieval texts under discussion are of French, German, English, Italian, and Spanish origin, and vary from educational treatises and historiography to moral theology and political philosophy. (shrink)

Jeffrey Hause - Virtue and Ethics in the Twelfth Century - Journal of the History of Philosophy 45:2 Journal of the History of Philosophy 45.2 328-329 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents Reviewed by Jeffrey Hause Creighton University István P. Bejczy and Richard G. Newhauser, editors. Virtue and Ethics in the Twelfth Century. Brill's Studies in Intellectual History, 130. Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2005. Pp. vi + 393. Cloth, $189.00. The essays collected in this fascinating volume on virtue reveal both the (...) increasing debt twelfth-century thinkers owe to Augustinian moral psychology, as well as the extent to which those thinkers integrate classical moral philosophy and its canons of rationality into their medieval Christian worldview. However, the authors also explore the historical, social, economic, and theological genesis of.. (shrink)

Across the globe, education has recently been through a major semantic shift, where new notions such as ‘learning’, ‘competences’, ‘projects’ came to replace or complement an older, more established, educational vocabulary. The political approach to education has also evolved, as many authors have underlined, from established national forms of governing to global, transnational forms of governance. These evolutions, often abbreviated to shifts ‘from teaching to learning’ and ‘from governing to governance’ have resonated globally and attracted the attention of researchers. Most (...) sociological accounts of such evolutions attribute them to the development and primacy of a preponderant logic, generally politics/power, culture or the economy. Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory, on which we draw in this article, suggests to start from a different, opposite, premise: not the predominance but instead the lack of any predominant logic characterizes modernity. The functional differentiation of modern society into a multiplicity of—specific yet universal—systems should therefore be the pivotal point that helps make sense of these transformations. We argue that the very coexistence of such systems, their simultaneous and therefore uncoordinated existences, increases the complexity of the social world tremendously and leaves them with an uncertain future. The so-called turns to governance and to learning, we argue, should be understood, respectively, as political and educational attempts to deal with this loss of direction. (shrink)

Rapid advances in high throughput genomic technologies and next generation sequencing are making medical genomic research more readily accessible and affordable, including the sequencing of patient and control whole genomes and exomes in order to elucidate genetic factors underlying disease. Over the next five years, the Human Heredity and Health in Africa (H3Africa) Initiative, funded by the Wellcome Trust (United Kingdom) and the National Institutes of Health (United States of America), will contribute greatly towards sequencing of numerous African samples for (...) biomedical research. (shrink)

We argue that nano-technology in the form of invisible tags, sensors, and Radio Frequency Identity Chips (RFIDs) will give rise to privacy issues that are in two ways different from the traditional privacy issues of the last decades. One, they will not exclusively revolve around the idea of centralization of surveillance and concentration of power, as the metaphor of the Panopticon suggests, but will be about constant observation at decentralized levels. Two, privacy concerns may not exclusively be about constraining information (...) flows but also about designing of materials and nano-artifacts such as chips and tags. We begin by presenting a framework for structuring the current debates on privacy, and then present our arguments. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Understanding how extremist Salafists communicate, and not only what, is key to gaining insights into the ways they construct their social order and use psychological forces to radicalize potential sympathizers on social media. With a view to contributing to the existing body of research which mainly focuses on terrorist organizations, we analyzed accounts that advocate violent jihad without supporting any terrorist group and hence might be able to reach a large and not yet radicalized audience. We constructed a critical (...) multimodal and multidisciplinary framework of discourse patterns that may work as potential triggers to a selection of key cognitive biases and we applied it to a corpus of Facebook posts published by seven extremist Salafists. Results reveal how these posts are either based on an intense crisis construct or on simplistic solutions composed of taken-for-granted statements. Devoid of any grey zone, these posts do not seek to convince the reader; polarization is framed as a presuppositional established reality. These observations reveal that extremist Salafist communication is constructed in a way that may trigger specific cognitive biases, which are discussed in the paper. (shrink)

This paper reports on the meeting of the Sounding Board of the EU Reprogenetics Project that was held in Budapest, Hungary, 6–9 November 2005. The Reprogenetics Project runs from 2004 until 2007 and has a brief to study the ethical aspects of human reproductive cloning and germline gene therapy. Discussions during The Budapest Meeting are reported in depth in this paper as well as the initiatives to involve the participating groups and others in ongoing collaborations with the goal of forming (...) an integrated network of European resources in the fields of ethics of science. (shrink)

The 5 lamentations, when read as a single biblical book, outline several interacting bodies in a similar way that dotted lines present the silhouettes and aspects of a total picture. Each also represents action, building into a plot that can be interpreted psychoanalytically to render its depth and colour content. In addition, by focusing on the body and its sensations, this study can facilitate the visceral experience of the suffering of collective and individual bodies by the recipient.

Just as the text is layered by redactional processes and its effects by reception processes, so different meanings of the statue of a human body in Nebuchadnezzar’s dream can be psychoanalytically ‘excavated’. Following a typical psychoanalytical dream interpretation, the possibility has therefore been explored of the body referring to the king as an individual before it was reinterpreted as a societal, collective body, the latter serving as a defence against the anxiety which the former would cause. Re-experiencing these common, human, (...) unconscious anxieties and processing them could facilitate psychological healing and health, especially in the postmodern, pluralistic and eco-threatened context, which the dream seems to adumbrate. (shrink)

ABSTRACTLearning procedures such as mere exposure, evaluative conditioning, and approach/avoidance training have been used to establish evaluative responses as measured by the Implicit Association...

Some sceptics claim that in cases of peer disagreement, we ought to suspend judgment about the topic of discussion. In this paper, we argue that the sceptic’s conclusions are only correct in some scenarios. We show that the sceptic’s conclusion is built on two premises (the principle of evidential symmetry and the principle of evidentialism) and argue that both premises are incorrect. First, we show that although it is often rational to suspend judgment when an epistemic peer disagrees with you, (...) peer disagreements are not symmetrical. Next, we argue that even if one assumes that peer disagreements are symmetrical, it might still be rational to stick to one’s guns in the light of peer disagreement. (shrink)

(1996). Korte Notities Over Het Godsbegrip Bij Grieken En Romeinen En De Vergoddelijking Van Jezus in Het Nieuwe Testament. Bijdragen: Vol. 57, No. 2, pp. 149-157.

Since Hegel's analysis of weltanschauung the concept of 'worldview' has received a variety of implementations relating to a shared and encompassing cultural comprehension of and by a community in a given period and society. Worldviews can best be described as the various ways in which people imagine or represent their (social) existence, how they fit together with others, how things in the world go on. They are (meta)physical systems of dispositions that function as principles that generate and organize representations and (...) practices. Implicitly and explicitly, worldviews give meaning to our everyday relation with the world and the other. With regards to people's most important beliefs and faiths, worldviews enter the domain of lifestances: what really drives people, what grounds their being and what is the main-spring of their attack in life? From a religious and ideological point of view, such questions can be answered rather unambiguously and straightforwardly. However, due to (post)modern evolutions in science and its accompanying secularization of society, the foundation and legitimation of such grand narratives are increasingly and extensively discredited. Furthermore, the expanding globalization of the world entails a far-reaching diversification of and confrontation between various belief systems. Indeed, if anything, contemporary society can no longer claim an exclusive and univocal kosmotheoros, a single theory about the world. This alleged decline of general and common frames of reference for the guidance of our daily actions seems a non sequitur however: while from a philosophical and scholarly stance, the use of a world-picture or a worldview as the absolute foundation of everyday praxis is discredited, in global socio-cultural contexts these frames of reference easily gather power for groups with ideological inspiration (religious, political, ...). In a global setting, due to an increasing globalized interconnectedness and its unprecedented degree of people with different religious and lifestance backgrounds, the tangibility of this strange non sequitur is evermore present: the idea that the finite reach of such worldviews and lifestances is sociologically and philosophically acknowledged contrasts strongly with the way in which these frames of reference all too easily seem to gather terrific power in local contexts. Every day our world witnesses the further rise of religious, political and economic radicalism, unfortunately often with dramatic scenes and results. A 'clash of civilizations' seems to be practically on our doorstep. (shrink)

AimsThis preliminary study aimed to investigate therapy-induced electrophysiological changes in persons with primary progressive aphasia. The investigated event-related potential components associated with language processing were the mismatch negativity, P300, N400, and P600.MethodsA linguistic ERP test battery and standardized language assessment were administered in four patients with PPA of which two received speech-language therapy and two did not receive therapy. The battery was administered twice with approximately 6 months in between in each patient. The results of the follow-up assessments were compared (...) to the results of the initial assessments.ResultsAlthough the results of the behavioral language assessment remained relatively stable between the initial and follow-up assessments, changes in the mean amplitudes, onset latencies, and duration of the ERP components were found in the four patients. In the two patients that did not receive SLT, an increased delay in 50% and a decreased mean amplitude in 25% of the measured ERP components were found. The electrophysiological changes found in the patients that received SLT were variable. Interestingly, the mismatch negativity and the N400 effect elicited by the categorical priming paradigm were less delayed and had an increased mean amplitude at the follow-up assessment in the patient with the non-fluent variant who received SLT. In this patient, the P600 component was absent at the initial assessment but present at the follow-up assessment.ConclusionAlthough no clear patterns in electrophysiological changes between patients who received SLT and patients who did not receive SLT were found by our preliminary study, it seems like the SLT induced improvements or compensation mechanisms in some specific language comprehension processes in the patient with the NFV. The results of this study are still preliminary because only four heterogeneous patients were included. Future studies should include larger patient groups of the three clinical variants because the therapy-induced electrophysiological changes might differ depending on the clinical variant and the underlying pathology. (shrink)

Recenzio Kiraly V. Istvan Death and History c. konyverol.

The aim of this paper is to evaluate etiological accounts of functions for the domain of technical artefacts. Etiological theories ascribe functions to items on the basis of the causal histories of those items; they apply relatively straightforwardly to the biological domain, in which neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory provides a well-developed and generally accepted background for describing the causal histories of biological items. Yet there is no well-developed and generally accepted theory for describing the causal history of artefacts, so the application (...) of etiological theories to the technical domain is hardly straightforward. In this paper we consider the transposition of etiological theories in general from the biological to the technical domain. We argue that a number of etiological theories that appear defensible for biology become untenable for technology. We illustrate our argument by showing that the standard etiological accounts of Neander and Millikan, and some recent attempts to improve on them, provide examples of such untenable theories. 1 Introduction 2 Desiderata for theories of functions 3 Etiological theories in general 3.1 Common core and divergent aims 3.2 Reproduction versus non-reproduction etiological theories 3.3 Intentionalist versus non-intentionalist etiological theories 4 Problems for etiological theories in the technical domain 5 The failure of existing reproduction theories 6 The failure of existing non-reproduction theories 7 Improving reproduction by hybridisation 8 Conclusions. (shrink)

Met als hoofdgedachte dat begrip voor het gevoel en het lijden van de mens centraal moet staan, geeft een psychiater zijn inzichten over de wetenschappelijke basis van de psycho-analyse en over de bestaande psychoanalytische theorieën.