This paper reconstructs some important medieval interpretations of the first two words of the Aristotelian Metaphysics: “Omnes homines natura scire desiderant”. After presenting lay readings of the 14th-15th centuries, it returns to earlier scholastic and clerical interpretations of the Aristotelian “natural” desire for knowledge. Medieval readers of Aristotle coming from various backgrounds noted the strong discrepancy between the Aristotelian definition of man and the discriminatory social reality of their time. They elaborated different strategies of reading that allowed them to downplay (...) or emphasize, to legitimize or challenge, the monopolization of knowledge by a clerical elite. (shrink)

I use the collection of “carnal ethnographies” of martial arts and combat sports assembled by Raul Sanchez and Dale Spencer under the title Fighting Scholars to spotlight the fruitfulness of deploying habitus as both empirical object (explanandum) and method of inquiry (modus cognitionis). The incarnate study of incarnation supports five propositions that clear up tenacious misconceptions about habitus and bolster Bourdieu’s dispositional theory of action: (1) far from being a “black box,” habitus is fully amenable to empirical inquiry; (2) the (...) distinction between primary (generic) and secondary (specific) habitus enables us to capture the malleability of dispositions; (3) habitus is composed of cognitive, conative and affective elements: categories, skills, and desires; (4) habitus allows us to turn carnality from problem to resource for the production of sociological knowledge; and (5) thus to realize that all social agents are, like martial artists, suffering beings collectively engaged in embodied activities staged inside circles of shared commitments. (shrink)

The study of human origins is a kaleidoscopic field, a multitude of objects, reflections, and disciplines a swirl in an ever-changing tumult. The extreme diversity of the elements of information that are indispensable to this field of study (teeth, bones, apes, genes, ancient objects, present-day objects, biomechanical factors, cultural constructions …) appears all by itself to be enough to consign any attempt at synthesis to the realm of the Utopian. It hardly seems reasonable to expect the disparate sciences that fuel (...) the field (paleoanthropology, archaeology, molecular biology, physics, psychology, and others) and the contradictory conceptions of scientific activity that they defend (human sciences, natural sciences, experimental sciences, exact sciences) to be joined with any regularity. As for formulating an overall problematics of the interdependent phenomena encountered in the field, one would have to be more than optimistic to entertain such dreams. And yet this is exactly the program that prehistory and paleoanthropology are laboring to construct tinder the label “the study of the origins of man,” an expression that includes both diachronic processes (human evolution) and activities or behaviors from particular moments, elements that are exceedingly difficult to compare given the separation of their geographic and temporal contexts. (shrink)

The study of human origins is a kaleidoscopic field, a multitude of objects, reflections, and disciplines a swirl in an ever-changing tumult. The extreme diversity of the elements of information that are indispensable to this field of study (teeth, bones, apes, genes, ancient objects, present-day objects, biomechanical factors, cultural constructions …) appears all by itself to be enough to consign any attempt at synthesis to the realm of the Utopian. It hardly seems reasonable to expect the disparate sciences that fuel (...) the field (paleoanthropology, archaeology, molecular biology, physics, psychology, and others) and the contradictory conceptions of scientific activity that they defend (human sciences, natural sciences, experimental sciences, exact sciences) to be joined with any regularity. As for formulating an overall problematics of the interdependent phenomena encountered in the field, one would have to be more than optimistic to entertain such dreams. And yet this is exactly the program that prehistory and paleoanthropology are laboring to construct tinder the label “the study of the origins of man,” an expression that includes both diachronic processes (human evolution) and activities or behaviors from particular moments, elements that are exceedingly difficult to compare given the separation of their geographic and temporal contexts. (shrink)

Die Pythagoreer.--Empodokles.--Platon.--Aristoteles.--Katharsis: ein Exkurs.

A reprint of the 1972 Doubleday edition. Contains the most helpful version of Hobbes's political and moral philosophy available in English. Includes the only English translation of De Homine, chapters X-XV. Features the English translation of De Cive attributed to Hobbes.

A reprint of the 1972 Doubleday edition. Contains the most helpful version of Hobbes's political and moral philosophy available in English. Includes the only English translation of De Homine, chapters X-XV. Features the English translation of De Cive attributed to Hobbes.

Summary With the current discussion about posthumanism, the traditional concept of man has become questionable. This also poses severe challenges for theology. In addition to theological anthropology, Christology is particularly affected by this. When it is no longer possible to answer unequivocally what it means to be human, it becomes even more controversial than before how the figure of the Deus-homo should be interpreted. The paper at hand presents a thought experiment in order to check whether it is possible to (...) develop a Christology if one adopts central ideas of recent posthumanist scholarship. Taking Anselm’s famous remoto Christo argument as a model, the thought experiment avoids referring to the concept of man. After three major types of Christology haven been tested, the experiment yields the result that only a very abstract Christology is possible without resorting to explicitly anthropological assumptions. Rather, Christology can be seen as a reason why Christian theologians should reject posthumanism altogether. God has a human face, not a posthuman one. (shrink)

Le bien-fondé de l’herméneutique d’Augustin dans son De doctrina christiana est d’ordre communautaire, plus qu’épistémologique. Occasion d’enseigner et d’apprendre, de se parler et de s’entendre, l’activité herméneutique se révèle toute désignée à la pratique de la charité; les médiations humaines qu’elle met en jeu, et qu’elle structure à l’intérieur d’un certain cadre éthique, sont propres à affermir les liens communautaires. Le De doctrina christiana veut promouvoir la double économie du sens et de l’amour. Il s’y essaie d’une manière originale, qui (...) trouve à se refléter et à se synthétiser dans son prologue, comme je me propose de le démontrer. (shrink)

It is a matter of dispute whether St. Thomas Aquinas accepted the doctrine of “departing hominization.” Departing hominization is the view that in the process of human death, the rational soul departs first, leaving a mere animal ensouled by a sensitive soul, and then the sensitive soul departs, leaving a corpse. This would be a surprising thing for St. Thomas to believe, but he does appear to endorse the view in at least one place. I argue that he (...) does not, in fact, accept departing hominization, and explain how the recalcitrant text should be understood. (shrink)

In Book 9 of his Confessions, Augustine recounts that his mother Monica told him how ‘a weakness for wine gradually got grip upon her’ as a little girl. After some time, so the story goes, God healed her from her bad habit. In this context, Augustine observes: ‘When father and mother and nurses are not there, you are present. You have created us, you call us, you use human authorities set over us to do something for the health of our (...) souls.’ Even though at first sight this passage does not seem to pose any problems, one wonders about the exact meaning of the last part: etiam per praepositos homines boni aliquid agis ad animarum salutem. First, it is to be noted that Henry Chadwick's translation cited here leaves etiam untranslated. Moreover, it is not certain at all that Augustine really wants to say that God heals human souls ‘even by those human beings who are set over us’. As the subsequent lines of this paragraph make clear, God freed Monica from her sin through her servant, who scoffingly called her young mistress ‘a little boozer’. This renders the phrase etiam per praepositos homines problematic, on the one hand, because the meaning of etiam is unclear and, on the other, because it is difficult to regard Monica's servant as one of the ‘human authorities’. Nothing in the text compels us to identify this servant with the old famula of Monica's parents who, according to the preceding paragraph, was ‘vehement with a holy severity in administering correction and soberly prudent in her teaching’. At any rate, the ancilla mentioned here is depicted not as an authoritative person but rather as someone who quarrels with her young domina, not in order to heal or educate her but merely to irritate her. (shrink)

Argumentation that uses the beliefs of one’s opponents to refute them is well known. This paper proposes that there is a hitherto unnoticed counterpart to it, to be called ab homine, in which speakers/writers argue through the manner in which they deliver a message. Since the manner of delivery can never be turned into a premise or premises, this form of argumentation—although somewhat resembling Aristotle’s ethos—is much closer to the peculiar force of Socratic elenchos.

Nach der Meinung das Verfassers bezieht sich heute der Streit zwischen der Philosophie und der Theologie auf den Menschen und nicht - wie in der Yergaxgenheit - auf Gott. Aufgrund dieser These wird die späte Abhandlung von Luther “Disputatio de homine" erörtert. An Hand de Vernunft ist die philosophische Anthropologie nur imstande eine Bestimmung des Menschen als einer weltlichen Ezietans zu geben. In der theologischen Anthropologie wird der Mensch als "pura materis Dei" verstanden. Es ist auch keine Begriffsbestimmung des menschlichen (...) Seins; es wird darin nur die Abhängigkeit des Menschen von Gott ausgedrückt. Die leitende Stelle wird der theologischen Anthropologie zugeteilt und nicht der Wissenschaft, die unfähig ist, Grundprobleme das menschlichen Seins zu lósen. (shrink)

Late ancient and early medieval narratives often depict dreaming as a vertical and hierarchical process of influence that has its starting point in a higher entity and ends with the human being. This model of explanation seems to take a more horizontal approach with the advent of a new natural philosophy and medical works from Arabic milieu that put the psychosomatic processes of the human being into perspective. The general purpose of this paper is to assess to which extent Albert (...) the Great’s consideration of dreams can be taken as an example of this turning point. Specifically, it tries to show how his dream theory is articulated in De homine. The main hypothesis is that the Dominican friar advocated a materialistic account of dreams, in which the process of dream formation is explain as a flux of bodiness caused by a change in the thermal behavior of the body. (shrink)

Hominization theory speculates on the process and chronology of a human embryo’s ensoulment. Aristotle, a key ancient Greek thinker, presented his own hominization theory based on his hylemorphic metaphysics and pioneering researches in embryology. Thomas Aquinas, a medieval philosopher and theologian, built his Christian and Catholic hominization theory on the foundations laid down by Aristotle. The contemporary Roman Catholic Church, with its own prolife, anti-abortion and anticontraception agenda, modified the Aristotelian and Thomistic hominization theories by allegedly (...) benchmarking on recent developments in human embryology. This paper uses the archeological and genealogical methods, as developed by the French poststructuralist and postmodernist philosopher Michel Foucault, in reexamining these three hominization theories as discourses, in comparing and contrasting their epistemic contexts, and in peering into their respective genealogies. Contrary to common assumptions, these three hominization theories have very few elements in common and are actually divergent. The underpinning intention of this paper is to demonstrate the strengths and weaknesses of the contemporary Roman Catholic Church’s hominization theory. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Klio Jahrgang: 99 Heft: 1 Seiten: 368-372.

The essay proposes to read the political science of Thomas Hobbes in the light of his studies on optics, with particular reference to De homine. I intend to verify the relationship existing in Hobbes's thought between the development of the theory of political representation and the subjective optical science, with particular reference to the theory of fiction.

Hobbes redefines his conception of liberty in the Leviathan as the absence of external impediments to motion. Power, on the other hand, refers to the body’s intrinsic dimension, that is, to the faculties possessed by each individual. There thus appears to be a clear distinction between liberty and power in Hobbes’ political philosophy. Taking into consideration Hobbes’ Latin works, however, in which he uses two different terms to refer to power: at times potestas and others potentia, such a distinction may (...) need to be revisited. As we will argue, there is a marked relation between liberty and power when considering human sociability. In this way, the aim of the article is to discuss Hobbes’ conception of power, through the pages of the Leviathan and De Homine, trying to clarify its complex, even ambiguous relation with his conception of liberty. (shrink)