J.L. Chretien is a French public intellectual, philosopher and poet, widely published and revered in his home country and in academic circles worldwide. This translation makes his work available to an English-language audience for the first time and a crucial contribution to our understanding of the phenomenology of religious experience.

Si le christianisme a survécu en Grande Syrie, c'est en raison de facteurs spécifiques: l'intégrité de la communauté chrétienne arabe indigène dans la région; l'intégration sociale des chrétiens arabes syriens dans la société musulmane; l'échec des musulmans dans le prosélytisme agressif auprès des chrétiens; l'identification ethnique de la population indigène avec les nouvelles arrivées du VIIe siècle. L'arabisation ne signifiait pas systématiquement l'islamisation. Elle encourageait même le contraire dans certaines régions comme la Palestine, coeur d'une Eglise chrétienne arabophone viable.

La réinsertion progressive de l'Église dans le jeu international ne peut être niée; certains l'attribuent à des circonstances exceptionnelles d'autres pensent qu'elle occupe une place incontournable dans l'histoire. Le chapitre de Gaudium et Spes sur la paix et la guerre reflète la volonté du concile d'intervenir avec autorité dans les débats brûlants de l'heure, la guerre totale, la course aux armements d'une part, l'organisation de la société internationale et la pratique de la solidarité d'autre part. Les Papes qui ont suivi (...) le concile ont souligné l'urgence d'intégrer ces directives dans une réflexion sur le rôle du chrétien dans le développement historique des sociétés. (shrink)

The norm of assertion, to be in force, is a social norm. What is the content of our social norm of assertion? Various linguistic arguments purport to show that to assert is to represent oneself as knowing. But to represent oneself as knowing does not entail that assertion is governed by a knowledge norm. At best these linguistic arguments provide indirect support for a knowledge norm. Furthermore, there are alternative, non-normative explanations for the linguistic data (as in recent work from (...) Van Elswyk). Direct arguments would rely on normative judgments about the permissibility or impermissibility of assertions with and without the speaker knowing the content asserted. John Turri's work experimental results purport to show that our norm of assertion is factive, and probably knowledge. But as a number of recent experimentalists (Kneer, Reuter and Broessel, Marsili and Wiegmann) have shown, Turri's results rely on the problemmatic use of 'should' as in 'Maria should assert that she owns a 1990 watch.' Correcting for this, these experimentalists provide strong evidence that our norm of assertion is not factive. The standard reply to evidence like this from the assertion of unlucky falsehoods is the excuse maneuver. But Marsili and Wiegmann, following Turri's protocol for testing for excuse validation, show that participants who judge that assertions unlucky falsehoods are permissible are not guilty of excuse validation. Given our current understanding of the experimental evidence, knowledge is not our norm of assertion. (shrink)

The traditional verbal/nonverbal dichotomy is inadequate for completely describing cerebral lateralization. Musical functions are not necessarily mediated by the right hemisphere; evidence for a specialist left-hemisphere mechanism dedicated to the encoded speech signal is weakening, and the right hemisphere possesses considerable comprehensional powers. Right-hemisphere processing is often said to be characterized by holistic or gestalt apprehension, and face recognition may be mediated by this hemisphere partly because of these powers, partly because of the right hemisphere's involvement in emotional affect, and (...) possibly through the hypothesized existence of a specialist face processor or processors in the right. The latter hypothesis may, however, suffer the same fate as the one relating to a specialist encodedness processor for speech in the left. Verbal processing is largely the province of the left because of this hemisphere's possession of sequential, analytic, time-dependent mechanisms. Other distinctions are special cases of an analytic/holistic dichotomy. More fundamentally, however, the left hemisphere is characterized by its mediation of discriminations involving duration, temporal order, sequencing, and rhythm, at thesensory level, and especially at themotorlevel. Spatial aspects characterize the right, the mapping of exteroceptive body space, and the positions of fingers, limbs, and perhaps articulators, with respect to actual and target positions. Thus there is a continuum of function between the hemispheres, rather than a rigid dichotomy, the differences being quantitative rather than qualitative, of degree rather than of kind. (shrink)

Substance dualism is compatible not only with Cartesian dualism but also with a number of nonCartesian alternatives, including several varieties of Thomistic dualism, William Hasker's emergent subject dualism, and the holistic anthropology of E. J. Lowe. Due to recent developments within the philosophy of mind, a renewed interest in historical and contemporary theories of the soul, and a more careful evaluation of what does and does not follow from neuroscience, substance dualism is back on the table for a serious critical (...) reevaluation. This chapter reviews the developments in the philosophy of mind and in scholarship on the soul. It shows that substance dualists and their many critics have been brought together by a shared focus on the nature of mental subjects. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. (shrink)

Historians of seventeenth-century science have frequently asserted that Kepler's laws of planetary motion were largely ignored between the time of their first publication and the publication of Newton's Principia . In fact, however, they were more widely known and accepted than has been generally recognized.Kepler's ideas were, indeed, rather slow in establishing themselves, and until about 1630 there are few references to them in the literature of the time. But from then onwards, interest in them increased fairly rapidly. In particular, (...) the principle of elliptical orbits had been accepted by most of the leading astronomers in France before 1645 and in England by about 1655. It also received quite strong support in Holland.The second law had a more chequered history. It was enunciated in its exact form by a few writers and was used in practice by some others without being explicitly formulated, but the majority, especially after 1645, preferred one or another of several variant forms which were easier to use but only approximately correct. The third law attracted less interest than the others, chiefly perhaps because it had no satisfactory theoretical basis, but it was correctly stated by at least six writers during the period under review.Between about 1630 and 1650 Kepler's Epitome Astronomiae Copernicanae was probably the most widely read work on theoretical astronomy in northern and western Europe, while his Rudolphine Tables, which were based upon the first two laws, were regarded by the majority of astronomers as the most accurate planetary tables available.Kepler's work certainly did not receive all the recognition it deserved, but the extent to which it was neglected has been much exaggerated. (shrink)

The study of business ethics has led to the development of various principles that are the foundation of good and ethical business practices. A corresponding study of Information Technology (IT) professionals’ ethics has led to the conclusion that good ethics in the development and uses of information technology correspond to the basic business principle that good ethics is good business. Ergo, good business ethics practiced by IT professionals is good IT ethics and vice versa. IT professionals are professionals in businesses; (...) a difficulty presented to these professionals, however, is the number and diversity of codes of ethics to which they may be held. Considering the existence of several formalized codes of ethics prepared by various IT professionals’ associations, a more harmonized approach seems more reasonable. This paper attempts to present a review of the purpose of codes of ethics, the persons who should be covered by such codes and to organize codes of ethics for business in general and IT professionals in particular and to make the argument that, once again, good ethics is good business practice, regardless of the profession or occupation concerned. (shrink)

Business Ethics, the Environment &Responsibility, EarlyView.

This study empirically examines the association between certain director characteristics and the extent of voluntary audit committee disclosure in annual reports. Results suggest that Singapore's publicly traded firms are more likely to voluntarily disclose audit committee related information as: the number of board members increases; different individuals occupy the roles of CEO and board chairperson; and the proportion of independent directors serving on the board increases. Findings, however, fail to show any association between the amount of voluntary audit committee disclosure (...) and the percentage of executive directors' ownership. Documented findings are of interest and benefit to various parties including regulators, corporate governance reformists, and corporate management. For instance, findings imply that a positive by-product of implementing major corporate governance reforms currently championed by corporate governance reformists will be an increase in audit committee disclosures. As a result, there will be less pressure on regulators to develop, introduce, and enforce mandatory audit committee disclosures that may be potentially intrusive to a firm's management. (shrink)

In this paper, we investigate the link between audit committees and earnings management providing a more comprehensive simultaneous analysis of the influence of audit committee features using a sample of 485 firm-years from Singapore's publicly traded firms during the 2000 2001 calendar period. Empirical findings indicate firms with a higher proportion of independent audit committee members are more effective at constraining earnings management. Firms with audit committees that are more diligent and/or lack the presence of independent directors serving simultaneously on (...) a substantial number of boards and committees are more effective at constraining earnings management. These findings are robust to alternative income-incentives facing corporate management. Overall, our findings have implications for stakeholders, regulators, and corporate governance. For example, our findings infer policymakers may need to focus on other audit committee characteristics to strengthen the committee's ability to constrain earnings management rather than continue the present fixation with independence. (shrink)

La longue histoire de l’Acropole d’Athènes est une vitrine fascinante de la façon dont un patrimoine ancien peut être transformé, d’un sanctuaire païen à un sanctuaire chrétien, à une forteresse islamique, à l’autel symbolique de la Grèce moderne. De plus, ce site a suscité l’admiration presque religieuse des chercheurs et, comme dans le cas des marbres d’Elgin, a été contesté à de nombreux égards. L’auteur du volume analysé, William St Clair, un spécialiste des marbres d’Elgin et de divers a...

In 1976 Raymond Williams commented, ‘Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language.’ Such implied difficulty has not prevented Bloomsbury Academic, since the 2000s, from publishing around forty series of their well-produced and generously illustrated Cultural Histories, with, according to their website, a further fifty in progress. Each series contains six volumes, each book covering, in theory, the same chronological period (antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the age of empire and (...) the modern age), though there is some variation depending on precise topic. The idea is that one can use these books not only to read ‘horizontally’ about a subject across time, but also ‘vertically’ through different subjects in the same period – a idea made easier by the e-texts of the series on Bloomsbury's website. (shrink)

. New insights about a variety of epistemological topics including skepticism, peer disagreement, and the nature of knowledge emerge when we give the right sort of attention to our epistemic immaturity at the species level. This large-scale developmentalist concern illustrates a new way of doing epistemology, here called big epistemology.

Sedlakova and Trachsel (2023) argue that on the one hand, conversational artificial intelligence (CAI) does not fulfill the necessary conditions for full attribution of agency, such as having consc...

Until recently, retention of introns in mature mRNAs has been regarded as a consequence of mis‐splicing. Intron‐retaining transcripts are thought to be non‐functional because they are readily degraded by nonsense‐mediated decay. However, recent advances in next‐generation sequencing technologies have enabled the detection of numerous transcripts that retain introns. As we review herein, intron‐retaining mRNAs play an essential conserved role in normal physiology and an emergent role in diverse diseases. Intron retention should no longer be overlooked as a key mechanism that (...) independently reduces gene expression in normal biology. Exploring its contribution to the development and/or maintenance of diseases is of increasing importance. (shrink)

Infléchissant le propos de J.-L. Chrétien en passant du " dire " au " lire ", et en congédiant l' " autorité " ainsi que le qualificatif " Saintes " impliqués dans l'article du philosophe, P. Gisel pose la question de savoir en quoi ce livre - l'Ecriture ou les Ecritures - est " Parole de Dieu ", peut-être " en quoi " il est d'abord Parole, et ensuite, plus radicalement, " Parole de Dieu ". Or, les Ecritures sont et (...) restent de bout en bout humaines, historiquement situées, culturellement et religieusement déterminées. Second, par rapport au Christ qui n'a pas laissé d'écrits, le corps des Ecritures est donc lieu de médiation donné et irréductible, comme la canonisation d'Ecritures est un fait institutionnel, donc instaurateur. Justement, le " regard " porté au nom de la sainteté et de l'inspiration et donc de la logique croyante ne peut porter que sur l'ordre " tiers " d'une symbolisation religieuse, inscrite dans l'histoire déterminée d'une canonisation institutionnelle.Modifying the position of J.-L. Chrétien by moving from "saying" to "reading," and dismissing the "authority" as well as the descriptive term "Holy" implied in the philosopher's article, P. Gisel raises the question as to how this book-the Scripture or the Scriptures-is the "Word of God," perhaps "how" it is first the Word, and later, more radically, the "Word of God." But the Scriptures are and remain human from beginning to end, historically situated, culturally and religiously determined. Secondly, in relation to Christ who did not leave writings, the body of the Scriptures is, then, the place of given and irreducible mediation, just as the canonization of the Scriptures is an institutional, and hence founding, fact. When a "look" is taken in the name of holiness and inspiration and therefore of the logic of the believer, it can only be concerned with the "outside" order of a religious symbolism that appears in the determinate history of an institutional canonization. (shrink)