Diese Veröffentlichung des verdienten Forschers entstand auf der Grundlage seines Vortrags auf dem 8. Internationalen Kolloquium über Gregor von Nyssa 1998 in Paderborn. Der Beitrag auf dem Gregorkolloquium wurde auf Anregung und mit Unterstützung von Hubertus R. DROBNER zur Monographie ausgebaut und herausgegeben. Die detaillierte und umfassende Darbietung des Quellenmaterials zu den entscheidenden Fragen der Gregorforschung, die das Buch von Lilla leistet, macht das Anliegen des Herausgebers verständlich. Es gelingt dem Autor, die Quellenforschung mit der geistesgeschichtlichen Betrachtung der Problematik (...) zu einer spannenden Darstellung zu verbinden, womit er das gegebene Versprechen (S. XVII) uneingeschränkt einlöst. Darüber hinaus stellt die Studie von LILLA eine wertvolle Vervollständigung des Quellenapparats zu der Textausgabe von De Beatitudinibus von John F. CALLAHAN in Gregorii Nysseni Opera aus dem Jahr 1992 dar. (shrink)

Despite a large and multifaceted effort to understand the vast landscape of phenotypic data, their current form inhibits productive data analysis. The lack of a community-wide, consensus-based, human- and machine-interpretable language for describing phenotypes and their genomic and environmental contexts is perhaps the most pressing scientific bottleneck to integration across many key fields in biology, including genomics, systems biology, development, medicine, evolution, ecology, and systematics. Here we survey the current phenomics landscape, including data resources and handling, and the progress that (...) has been made to accurately capture relevant data descriptions for phenotypes. We present an example of the kind of integration across domains that computable phenotypes would enable, and we call upon the broader biology community, publishers, and relevant funding agencies to support efforts to surmount today's data barriers and facilitate analytical reproducibility. (shrink)

‘Mysticism means to isolate the eternal from the originated.’ This is not my definition of the word ‘mysticism’ but that of the founder of the ‘orthodox’ school of Muslim mysticism, Al-Junayd of Baghdad who flourished in the ninth century a.d . In actual fact it is not a definition of mysticism at all but of the Arabic word tawḥīd which means primarily ‘the affirmation of unity’; and that surely is an essential ingredient of any form of mysticism: it is the (...) affirmation through personal experience of unity either absolutely or in some qualified sense. (shrink)

As everyone knows, since the end of the Second World War there has been a sensational revival of interest in the non-Christian religions particularly in the United States and in this country. The revival has taken two forms, the one popular, the other academic. The first of these has turned almost exclusively to Hindu and Buddhist mysticism and can be seen as an energetic reaction against the dogmatic and until very recently rigid structure of institutionalised Christianity and a search for (...) a lived experience of the freedom of the spirit which is held to be the true content of mysticism, obscured in Christianity by the basic dogma of a transcendent God, the ‘wholly Other’ of Rudolf Otto and his numerous followers, but wholly untrammelled by any such concept in the higher reaches of Vedanta and Buddhism, particularly in its Zen manifestation. On the academic side the picture is less clear. There is, of course, the claim that the study of religion, like any other academic study, must be subjected to and controlled by the same principles of ‘scientific’ objectivity to which the other ‘arts’ subjects have been subjected, to their own undoing. But even here there would seem to be a bias in favour of the religions of India and the Far East as against Islam, largely, one supposes, in response to popular demand. (shrink)

Neuroscientists are searching for the engram within the conceptual framework established by John Locke's theory of mind. This framework was elaborated before the development of information theory, before the development of information processing machines and the science of computation, before the discovery that molecules carry hereditary information, before the discovery of the codon code and the molecular machinery for editing the messages written in this code and translating it into transcription factors that mark abstract features of organic structure such as (...) anterior and distal. The search for the engram needs to abandon Locke's conceptual framework and work within a framework informed by these developments. The engram is the medium by which information extracted from past experience is transmitted to the computations that inform future behavior. The information-conveying symbols in the engram are rapidly generated in the course of computations, which implies that they are molecules. (shrink)

Personality research has functioned under the prevailing influence of middle-level theorizing sufficiently long to justify consideration of the effects of this approach. Despite improvements in precision and testability of hypotheses, with resulting increases in volume of research, the pervasive effect of several practical dangers of middle-level theorizing are identified. These involve the unappreciated failure to test comprehensive theories when concepts from them have been extirpated, overly-weak justification of research methods, a vanity of small differences, and insufficient theoretical precision in framing (...) empirical efforts. Ways of avoiding these dangers are explored, and it is concluded that the most promising is a comparative analytic stance toward inquiry that reconsiders comprehensive theorizing without courting ambiguity and imprecision. (shrink)

The argument of the Transcendental Deduction of the Categories in the Critique of Pure Reason is the deepest and most far-reaching in philosophy. In his new book, Robert Howell interprets main themes of the Deduction using ideas from contemporary philosophy and intensional logic, thereby providing a keener grasp of Kant's many subtleties than has hitherto been available. No other work pursues Kant's argument through every twist and turn with the careful, logically detailed attention maintained here. Surprising new accounts of apperception, (...) the concept of an object, the logical functions of thought, the role of the Metaphysical Deduction, and Kant's relations to his Aristotelian-Cartesian background are developed. Howell makes a precise contribution to the discussion of most of the disputed issues in the history of Deduction interpretation. Controversial in its conclusions, this book demands the attention of all who take seriously the task of understanding Kant's work and evaluating it dispassionately. (shrink)

This study investigates the ability of individuals with psychopathy to perform passive avoidance learning and whether this ability is modulated by level of reinforcement/punishment. Nineteen psychopathic and 21 comparison individuals, as defined by the Hare Psychopathy Checklist Revised (Hare, 1991), were given a passive avoidance task with a graded reinforcement schedule. Response to each rewarding number gained a point reward specific to that number (i.e., 1, 700, 1400 or 2000 points). Response to each punishing number lost a point punishment specific (...) to that number (i.e., the loss of 1, 700, 1400 or 2000 points). In line with predictions, individuals with psychopathy made more passive avoidance errors than the comparison individuals. In addition, while the performance of both groups was modulated by level of reward, only the performance of the comparison population was modulated by level of punishment. The results are interpreted with reference to a computational account of the emotional learning impairment in individuals with psychopathy. (shrink)

This is a companion paper to my preceding one on Harriot's experimentations in the field of the sign-rule of multiplication in algebra. Cardano had earlier attacked the conventional rule in a chapter of his De Aliza regula liber, published in 1570 as an appendix to the second edition of his Ars magna. He returned to the subject in a brief tract, published nearly a century later in his collected works as Sermo de plus et minus. Only Cardano's valid contention that (...) the standard ‘proof’ of the accustomed sign-rule was faulty made impact, in the Euclidean background to which the ‘proof’ belonged. His cause was to preserve the purity of the Euclidean tradition. It overshadows the true aim in the De Aliza chapter, but the Sermo reveals it plainly as far from retrograde: he wished to retain all the new techniques of algebra that brought in not only ‘minus’ quantities but also their square roots, and to escape the ‘impossible’ status of these last. This the rebel sign-rule did for him by making every root of a ‘minus’ just another ‘minus’. (shrink)

The article sets out aspects of locke's theory of personal identity which were seen by contemporaries to be not only fallacious but also to conflict with christian doctrine regarding the soul. A modified theory is then educed, From berkeley, Butler, William law and other divines, Which avoids these fallacies, Is epistemologically more rigorous and arguably expressed christian doctrine more accurately. This is seen as a forerunner of some central concerns of romantic theology.

R. C. Cross; XIII—Category Differences, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 59, Issue 1, 1 June 1959, Pages 255–270, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristot.