The aim of this work is to respond to the following question: how did Charles S. Peirce find unity for his pragmatist philosophy through the formulation of Scholastic Realism? The author proposes the said doctrine to be a reading guide, leading us through the different stages of Peirce's work as a philosopher. By understanding his realist doctrine, we can see why he believed it was a viable theory for understanding the problem of Universals. This book demonstrates why, in Peirce's (...) mind, such a problem has pervaded the history of philosophy. The author's line of argument reveals that Scholastic Realism is crucial to the understanding of his philosophy, which is a new approach in Peirce scholarship. It provides a useful framework for asking questions about reality in the same way that Peirce himself did. As a result, the author shows that Peirce's realism addresses different yet related philosophical problems, leading Peirce to brand the final version of his philosophy as "Scientific Metaphysics". The conclusion offers an interpretation of the Scholastic Realism principle as a solution to Peirce's concerns -- a useful idea to achieve a better theory of reality in his struggle to realize metaphysics a posteriori. Peirce's doctrine is presented alongside some of its uses, especially in the fields of abstraction theory, and also in the fundamental principles of mathematics. This work should advance our comprehension of the problems related to Peirce's philosophy as well as shedding light on pragmatism and its origins as well as the battle between realism and nominalism. (shrink)

Introduction Conatus is a specific concept within Descartes’s physics. In particular, it assumes a crucial importance in the purely mechanistic description of the nature of light – an issue that Des- cartes considered one of the most crucial challenges, and major achievements, of his natural phil- osophy. According to Descartes’s cosmology, the universe – understood as a material continuum in which there is no vacuum – is composed of a number of separate yet interconnected vortices. Each of these vortices consists (...) in a set of bands rotating around their centres. The bands are com- posed of corpuscles of the three elements, each distinguished on the basis of their different shapes and sizes. The small globules of the second element, although impeded by the other parts of heaven, strive to move away from the centre of the vortex around which they revolve, thus exerting a certain force against the surrounding bodies. This striving or conatus, though a mere force rather than a genuine motion, is transmitted instan- taneously and along straight lines from body to body. According to Descartes, then, the nature of light consists in this striving alone. This account must be understood as strictly connected to the fundamental laws that regulate the Cartesian world. It is particularly important to recall that for Descartes the centrifugal force exerted by a rotating body is understood to be a consequence of the intrinsic rectilinearity of every motion. As the second of the three Laws of Nature set forth in Book II of the Principles of Philosophy establishes, “all motion is in itself rectilinear; and hence any body moving in a circle tends to move away from the centre of the circle which it describes as proved by the fact that a stone rotating in a sling tends to move centrifugally along the tangent of each point described by a circle.1 Similarly, each of the globules of the second element “strives to recede with a great force from the centre of the vortex in which it rotates; it is in fact prevented by the other globules placed all around, not differently than a stone in a sling”. Within this framework, as I show later, conatus occurs when a body’s intrinsic tendency to rectilinear motion is impeded by an external constraint. As Stephen Gaukroger notes, the use of the term conatus in the Principles – like “vis” and “ action ” – shows that Descartes “cannot avoid dynamic terminology”, despite his declared intent “to construe motion in a purely kinematic way”. Indeed, Gaukroger observes that the notions of force action and striving are systematically employed in the Principles – appearing 290, 59 and 8 times, respectively. Also noteworthy, conatus was – together with the more familiar concepts of actio and vis – a significant element of the conceptual apparatus of Scholastic natural philosophy. As will be seen later – and this is the first goal of this paper – here the concept of conatus had a very specific function. Indeed, it was a central part of the Aristotelian- Scholastic account of gravitation. Conatus was used to refer to the striving of a body to move towards its natural place – especially in cases where its natural motion was hindered or impeded by an external mover. This specific use of the concept of conatus can be found in texts on natural philosophy from the end of the sixteenth through the late seventeenth century. Notably, it occurs in some of the late -Scho- lastic texts which held special significance for Descartes’s thought. Therefore, Descartes introduces conatus in a context in which this concept already had a very specific meaning, and one of which he was very probably aware. The possible relations between these two apparently very different con- cepts have therefore to be scrutinized. I thereby propose to undertake a comparison between the Scho- lastic and the Cartesian conceptions of conatus. I hope to show that certain traits of the former are indeed echoed by the latter, although adapted to the much changed physical paradigm of Cartesian physics. In fact, Descartes’s conatus, though sharing some important similarities with the old one, underwent significant transformations in terms of both its meaning and its application. However, I hope to show that these concepts are both used to describe the behaviour of bodies in relation to their intrinsic motive tendency, and in particular when this tendency is impeded or prevented. Such a reconstruction offers two main areas of interest. On an immediate level, it furthers the general efforts of scholars over the past decades to reconstruct the full extent of the relations between Descartes’s thought and Scholastic philosophy. However, there is another significant reason for taking an interest in the ties between the Scholastic and the Cartesian conceptions of conatus. Indeed, the Cartesian conatus must be seen as crucial to a proper understanding of the broader, diverse conceptualization that this idea enjoyed in the thought of many of the most important philosophers of the early modern period, namely Spinoza, Hobbes and Leibniz. In particular, Spinoza, were directly influenced by Descartes in their unique formulations of conatus. Thus a reconstruction of the context in which Descartes formulated his conatus and of its relations to a pre-existing Scholastic conception will enable us to better reconstruct the history of this idea in the early modern period. The paper is structured as follows: in the first part, I provide a thorough review of the Scho- lastic employment of the concept conatus – both its meaning and the extent of its usage. I then show that it occurs in some of the most prominent Cartesian sources. Finally, I shall provide an account of Descartes’s theory of circular motion and conatus with the specific aim of empha- sizing the elements of both continuity and discontinuity that justify the claim that Descartes’s con- ception of conatus is reminiscent of the Scholastic one. (shrink)

Joseph Alois Schumpeter (1883-1950) stands among the intellectual giants of the twentieth century, especially in the field of economics; in his long and varied impact on the profession, he is second only to Maynard Keynes. He was a pragmatist in his economic philosophy, an “objective scientific investigator with no particular axe to grind” (Newman, et al., 746). His encyclopedic History of Economic Analysis, edited after his death by his wife and published in 1954, is a monument to his gigantic and (...) versatile achievements; and it remains the locus classicus of almost all works in this area. (shrink)

In Understanding Scholastic Thought with Foucault, Philipp Rosemann provides a new introduction to Scholastic thought written from a contemporary and, notably, Foucauldian perspective. In taking inspiration from the methodology of historical research developed by Foucault, the book places the intellectual achievements of the thirteenth century, especially Thomas Aquinas, in a larger cultural and institutional framework. Rosemann’s analysis sees the Scholastic tradition as the process of the gradual reinscription of the Greek intellectual heritage into the center of Christian (...) culture. This process culminated in the thirteenth century, when new intellectual techniques facilitated the creation of a culture of dialogue. Rosemann argues that the witch-hunt can be seen as the result of a subtle but crucial transformation of the Scholastic episteme. (shrink)

The aim of this work is to respond to the following question: how did Charles S. Peirce find unity for his pragmatist philosophy through the formulation of Scholastic Realism? The author proposes the said doctrine to be a reading guide, leading us through the different stages of Peirce's work as a philosopher. By understanding his realist doctrine, we can see why he believed it was a viable theory for understanding the problem of Universals. This book demonstrates why, in Peirce's (...) mind, such a problem has pervaded the history of philosophy. The author's line of argument reveals that Scholastic Realism is crucial to the understanding of his philosophy, which is a new approach in Peirce scholarship. It provides a useful framework for asking questions about reality in the same way that Peirce himself did. As a result, the author shows that Peirce's realism addresses different yet related philosophical problems, leading Peirce to brand the final version of his philosophy as «Scientific Metaphysics». The conclusion offers an interpretation of the Scholastic Realism principle as a solution to Peirce's concerns - a useful idea to achieve a better theory of reality in his struggle to realize metaphysics a posteriori. Peirce's doctrine is presented alongside some of its uses, especially in the fields of abstraction theory, and also in the fundamental principles of mathematics. This work should advance our comprehension of the problems related to Peirce's philosophy as well as shedding light on pragmatism and its origins as well as the battle between realism and nominalism. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to explain the differences in perspectives on the human soul between scholastic philosophy and Neo-Confucianism through an analysis of Shin Hudam’s criticism on Lingyan Lishao, a work authored by Sambiasi in 1624. Shin Hu-dam, a prominent figure in the Gongseo school in late Choson, rejected the notion of the soul as a substantial form of human beings, drawing instead on the Neo-Confucian concept of the soul as a gathering of Qi. He further negates (...) epistemology of faculty psychology based on the concept of the mind as an interior whole. Moreover, he denounced the scholastic idea that the goal of the soul consists in achieving the supreme good, labeling it as heretical. Shin Hudam should be recognized for his historical significance in providing a theoretical basis for the critique of Western learning by the Neo-Confucian scholars in Choson, ensuring their response was not merely political or religious backlash but grounded in moral-psychological criticism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Achievement of David Novak: A Catholic–Jewish Dialogue ed. by Matthew Levering and Tom AngierChristopher KaczorThe Achievement of David Novak: A Catholic–Jewish Dialogue, edited by Matthew Levering and Tom Angier (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2021), 360 pp.The Achievement of David Novak: A Catholic–Jewish Dialogue, edited by Matthew Levering and Tom Angier, brings together twelve essays on various aspects of Novak's thought along with a response to (...) each essay by Novak himself. The topics themselves concern whether Jews and Christians worship the same God, suicide, natural law, Pope Pius IX, justice, the sanctity of human life, and supersessionism. Its contributors include senior scholars as well as those at the beginning of their careers. Each essay, arising from some aspect of Novak's vast corpus, is replied to by Novak himself. These replies are instructive, for they show a great teacher at work, responding with nuance and charity to criticisms and always moving the conversation forward in illuminative ways.Levering opens the volume with a contribution about Novak as a master of Jewish–Christian dialogue, indeed, "the greatest master of Jewish–Christian dialogue who has ever lived" (1). Levering highlights the intellectual pedigree of Novak, whose teachers included Abraham Joshua Heschel, Leo Strauss, Yves Simon, Louis Dupré, and Germain Grisez. Jews are called to live according to the revelation to which they are accountable. Christians are called to live according to the revelation to which they are accountable. Neither Jews nor Christians should hold the other group accountable for their distinctive revelation, but neither Jews nor Christians should hide or minimize what they have to offer to the other.Princeton's Robert P. George interviews Novak, revealing something of the origin story shaping decades of dialogue between the rabbi and [End Page 299] Catholic interlocutors, perhaps the most influential of which was Germain Grisez, Novak's dissertation director in the early 1970s at Georgetown University and a colleague in founding the "new natural law" school, along with George's own dissertation director, John Finnis.Melanie Barrett's essay highlights the importance of natural law, a key theme in Novak's work, for a pluralistic and secular milieu. She cites him saying, "Jews ought to encourage non-Jews to pray in public in order to show how much they believe the world, including the political order, is dependent on God" (48). Such public prayer creates more opportunity also for Jews to express their faith in public.Invoking Gottlob Frege's distinction between sense and reference, Francis Beckwith tackles the question of whether the Trinitarian God is the same God as the God of Abraham. Cassius Clay and Mohammed Ali have the same reference, though different senses. Like Novak, Beckwith believes Catholics and Jews worship the same God.John Berkman returns to the subject of much of Novak's early writing, suicide. Berkman's chapter seeks to explore the similarities and differences between Jewish and Catholic views on the topic. Novak's dissertation exploration of Plato's, Aquinas's, and Kant's views was supplemented by his experience working as a rabbi and hospital chaplain at St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, DC, a facility that specializes in treating mental illness. One of Aquinas's arguments against suicide is that it is contrary to proper love of self. In his response to Berkman's essay, Novak highlights that the command "to love your neighbor as yourself" could mean "as you love yourself" or "as you yourself are loved by God" (118).David Elliot, a former student of Novak's, responds to quasi-Marcionite attacks on the manualist tradition by what might be called the "beige moral theologians" of the 1970s. He highlights Novak's insight that "our terror of God's power is mostly sublimated into our reverence for God's wisdom.... It should reappear only when we are tempted to stand up against God in contempt rather than standing before him in awe" (134).Tom Angier, one editor of The Achievement of David Novak, treats the difference between a more typically Scholastic approach to natural law grounded in metaphysics and Novak's theologically formulated approach. But Novak replies, "I tried to... (shrink)

To show the importance of preparing historical editions as textual data first, while leaving presentation (whether in print or on the web) as a secondary down-stream task, this article identifies beneficial outcomes for research that can be achieved through computational analysis when such a corpus of textual data is at hand. With a focus on the deep intertextuality characteristic of the medieval scholastic corpus, it reviews three distinct methods for detecting different forms of textual relatedness within the corpus: n-gram (...) intersections, document embeddings, and convolution. In each case, special attention is given to how the availability of a domain specific knowledge graph helps us both properly prepare the corpus for analysis and visualize the results in ways that enhance research. Such results include observing trends in citation practices across different genres and sub-genres of the corpus, automatically grouping questions by similarity, and detecting sustained and uncited textual re-use. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Omne Agens Agit Sibi Simile: A “Repetition” of Scholastic Metaphysics by Philipp W. RosemannJohn InglisPhilipp W. Rosemann. Omne Agens Agit Sibi Simile: A “Repetition” of Scholastic Metaphysics. Louvain Philosophical Studies, Vol. 12. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1996. Pp. 368. Paper, BF 1,450.The technical sounding title of this volume could mislead the reader into thinking that it concerns some obscure point of Latin medieval thought, rather than (...) an issue central [End Page 131] to medieval metaphysical speculation. In fact, Philipp Rosemann charts the metaphysical theology of a significant number of intellectuals, ranging from Plato to Aquinas, in a dense and perceptive historical narrative that reaches its telos in Aquinas’s view of the emanation from, and return to, God. Too often historians and philosophers atomize specific medieval issues by treating them apart from the textual, historical, and metaphysical context. The classic case of this occurs when the wider web of metaphysical and monastic concerns is neglected in presentations of Anselm’s argument for the existence of God. Rosemann supplies much of this context in a concise yet detailed discussion of Hellenistic and medieval views on causal similitude, i.e., the degree of similarity that must exist between every cause and effect.The book is divided, as it were, into three equal parts: the first is devoted to the ancient philosophers Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, and Proclus; the second to Pseudo-Dionysius, Augustine, Eriugena, Peter the Lombard, Avicenna, Averroes, and Albert the Great; and the third to Aquinas. These figures were included for two reasons: first, for contributing views of causal similitude that take into account either a Neo-Platonic emanational causality between different types of beings or/and a peripatetic efficient causality between individual substances; and second, to provide the background for Aquinas’s reconciliation of both types of causality.In the second part of the book, Rosemann presses his thesis that there is a Trinitarian context to Western metaphysical reflection which must be understood if we are to be clear about the history of Latin medieval thought. His point is that within this context intellectuals produced detailed accounts of a hierarchy of beings each of which stands on a scale closer to or farther away from a single divine “being” (111). Individual beings, including physical objects, both replicate and exteriorize various qualities of the divine (115). From this perspective, Latin medieval inquiry into issues concerning causality and the human mind form at the same time an inquiry into the interior character of a triune God (145, 349). For example, it becomes clear why Eriugena claims that a human being has no direct knowledge of his or her individual essence (125). In imitation of the divine, one reasons about one’s concerns, and only then is one able to reflect on this reasoning. Such reflection yields self-knowledge (124–27). Since human self-knowledge reflects divine self-knowledge, human self-knowledge is required in order to inquire into the mind of God. According to Rosemann, the medievals extend to the divine Socrates’ dictum regarding the unexamined life.Recent writers have devoted attention to the Neo-Platonic framework of Aquinas’s project. For example, in his important God in Himself (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), Wayne Hankey has clarified the two emanations that structure the first part of Aquinas’s Summa theologiae: the first a procession of three persons internal to God, and the second the procession of creation. The first plays a causal role in regard to the universe while the second mirrors the metaphysical structure of the first. Rosemann places this intellectual achievement in a more precise historical context, carefully isolates Aquinas’s types of causal relations (280–88), and offers a splendid account of the role played by causal similitude in the emanation and return of individual substances to God (262–77). Individual beings bring about effects that are species-specific to the point that they both lead to the flourishing of the species and represent [End Page 132] the divine. The higher the type of being, the more elevated and individual the degree of representation. For example, while a stone might express external physical characteristics of strength, a human being can obtain a... (shrink)

It is no surprise that the phenomenal qualities of our sensory experience pose recalcitrant philosophical problems for a physical materialist metaphysics. The colors of flowers as we experience them by sight, the taste of a ripe peach, and the smell of fresh-cut grass are undeniably part of the experienced world; yet in their phenomenal mode, they do not seem well-placed in the physicist's world of particles and energy fields. It seems, prima facie, that the metaphysical programs found in earlier science (...) and philosophy were better suited to accommodate these qualities: in the hylomorphic world of the Aristotelians, colors were "real qualities" existing as such in flowers; in the dualistic world of Descartes, colors were displaced from things like flowers to the immaterial mind of the perceiver. The dissertation argues that this intuition about our philosophical heritage is both philosophically confused and historically inaccurate. It betrays a misconception about phenomenal qualities and the problems they pose which results from a failure to distinguish phenomenal qualities from a special subset of sensible qualities that we have come to call "secondary" qualities. Disentangled from the primary-secondary quality distinction, phenomenal qualities include all sensible qualities insofar as they form the experiential contents of our sensory perceptions. So considered, phenomenal qualities invite difficult questions about the representational nature and ontological status of our sensory experience even within the Aristotelian and Cartesian metaphysics. By examining Descartes' and the Aristotelians' theories of sense perception with a focus on these questions we achieve a better understanding of "the problem" of phenomenal qualities, better interpretations of these historical theories of sense perception, and suggestions for reshaping the problem space within which we think philosophically about phenomenal qualities today. (shrink)

Hangang Jeong Gu can be considered a representative Yeongnam regions’s scholar of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. He was a scholar who followed in the footsteps of both Emperor Lee Hwang and Jo Sik, and developed his studies especially in the fields of psychology and art. He was a scholar who inherited from the scholastic mantle of Lee Hwang and Jo Sik, and developed his own scholarship, especially focusing on study of mind and study of ritual. He (...) was active mainly in the Yeongnam region centered on Seongju and Daegu. The Yeongnam region was located on the road to the Japanese invasion during the Japanese invasion of Korea in 1592 and directly suffered the damage. For this reason, after the Japanese invasion of Korea in 1592, those who led the righteous army activities in the Yeongnam region led the academic world, and among them, there were many figures of the Hangang School, including Jeong Gu. Studies on Jeong Gu have been accumulated for about 40 years, starting in 1985, and are being studied in various fields such as literature, history, and philosophy. And as the research on Jeong Gu progressed, the Hangang School, which inherited the academic flow of Jeong Gu, was gradually studied. In this paper, research on the Hangang School is largely divided into four categories: the external appearance and status of the Hangang School, the aspect of academic transmission of Jeong Gu, the growth and expansion of the Hangang School, and the social practice of the Hangang School. First of all, the denotation and status of the Hangang School were examined through Hoiyeongeupmunjehyeonrok and Bongsanyokhangrok. Hoiyeongeupmunjehyeonrok is Jeong Gu’s literary record, which examines the overall scale and extension of the Hangang School, and through Bongsanyokhangrok, Jeong Gu’s academic influence at the time, as well as the bonds and solidarity within the school can be confirmed. And the aspect of Jeong Gu’s academic transmission was examined through Hangangeonhaeongrok, a collection of Jeong Gu’s words and actions. Through this, it is possible to confirm Jeong Gu’s academic thoughts passed down to the Hangang School. In addition, the growth and expansion of the Hangang School can be confirmed through the process in which a large number of second-generation and third-generation Confucian scholars in the Daegu region who were active at the time were absorbed into the Hangang School as Jeong Gu moved his lecture center from Seongju to Daegu and Chilgok. In addition, as one of the aspects of social practice of the Hangang School, it can be confirmed through the development of righteous armies activities during the Japanese invasion of Korea in 1592. Lastly, it contains contents about some tasks in the study of the Hangang School in the future. (shrink)

In the winter of 1969 the Harvard Educational Review published a long article by Professor Arthur Jensen of the University of California at Berkeley. In this article Jensen reviewed the psychological evidence bearing upon the question ‘How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?’ The original publication occasioned an enormous coast to coast brouhaha of protest and denunciation; including tyre-slashing, slogan-painting, telephoned abuse and threats, and strident demands to ‘Fire’ or even to ‘Kill Jensen’. The author has (...) now republished this offending article, along with several shorter contributions in the same area, under the title Genetics and Education. He has also supplied, in addition to a full collection of References for the papers included, a Bibliography of the controversy, two Indices, and a 67 page Preface. (shrink)

The implementation of inclusive policies is largely dependent on teachers´ willingness to accommodate students with special educational needs (SEN) in mainstream classrooms, which is affected by their perceived competence and attitudes. This study investigated attitudes of pre- and in-service teachers toward students with two types of SEN: challenging behavior and learning difficulties. The three components of attitude (affective, cognitive, and behavioral) were assessed using indirect and direct measures. Results revealed that teachers held negative implicit attitudes toward challenging behavior and learning (...) difficulties, however implicit attitudes did not vary as a function of the type of SEN. Ratings of the stereotypical dimensions warmth and competence and overall ratings of scholastic achievement were affected by professional status and type of SEN. Professional status, implicit attitudes and stereotypical knowledge together explained 52 and 43% of the variance in teachers´ ratings of academic proficiency for students with challenging behavior and learning difficulties, respectively. Results are interpreted within the theoretical framework and implications for teacher training are discussed. (shrink)

Parental investment decisions guide parental actions regarding children’s productive work and are shaped by ecological context. Urban ecology enhances long-term payoffs to investment in human capital, increasing opportunity costs for work performed by children, and decreased workload should result. Using an embodied capital framework, self-reported data on urban and rural Indo-Fijian children’s work activities are compared. Results show higher workloads for older children, rural children, and girls. High scholastic achievement is associated with lower workloads for girls, but not (...) boys. This pattern is interpreted as daughter-biased investment in the context of urbanization. (shrink)

L. Stasyuk «Projection of Humanistic and Reformational reception in Protestant Ortodoxy». There is performed a philosophical and theological reflection of the process in which main subjects of Renaissance and Reformation changes adhere to the principle of getting back to sources such as appeal, thorough rethinking, borrowing of the antique heritage within which a foundation of the Humanism philosophy is laid, as well as to the Holy Scriptures and to the teachings of spiritual and religious leaders of Christianity. There is made (...) a comparative analysis of the attitude to the antique philosophical and medieval scholastic achievements and to the philosophy as a way of thinking generally by representatives of Humanism and Protestant Orthodoxy which typify the spiritual paradigm of European history. (shrink)

For over 700 years scholastic theologians of varying degrees of allegiance to the text(s) of Thomas Aquinas have discoursed on the mystery of Christ's being (esse): Did Christ have one or two acts of existence? Yet despite this frequent and recurring quaestio, nevertheless only a handful of scholastic commentators pause to note that this is not simply a debate between rival scholastic ‘schools’ in regard to a theological mystery, but that in fact there is an inconsistency within (...) the Angelic doctor's own texts. And while in more recent scholarship this discrepancy has not only been noticed but explicated in various ways, nevertheless it is the contention of this paper that a satisfactory exposition of the meaning of esse secundarium has not yet been achieved. Consequently, I propose in this paper that esse secundarium is the created, substantial, but absolutely supernatural participation of the human nature of Jesus in the uncreated communication of the divine esse of the Word and provide a robust textual defense of this interpretation. (shrink)

Scholastic debates about the activity of our final end—happiness—become famously heated in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, with intellectualists claiming that the primary activity through which we are joined to God is intellective ‘vision’ and voluntarists claiming that it is love (an act of will). These conversations represent only one set of medieval views on the subject, however. If we look to contemplative sources in the same period—even just those of the Rome-based Christian tradition—we find a range of views (...) on our final end that runs the gamut from ‘self-less union with an unknowable God’ to ‘embodied fulfilment of human nature.’ In this article, I argue that these differing conceptions push their holders to develop a correspondingly wide range of attitudes toward the human faculty of reason, particularly with respect to its value (or lack thereof) in helping us achieve our ultimate end. Medieval thinking on this topic is thus much more complex—and offers more points of connection with contemporary philosophical theology—than is typically recognized. (shrink)

Peirce did not achieve a final systematization of his work. Beyond the difficulties in explaining so many philosophical tools that he introduced—suffice it to mention semiotic, abductive logic, a heuristic based on continuity, scholastic realism—, there is a theoretical reason for this incompletion. All those new philosophical tools indicated a conception of synthesis very different from the one he received from Kant. Peirce did not realize the profound direction of his enquiry so that he did not directly question neither (...) Kant’s legacy on this issue nor the idea of necessity that presides over it. Starting from Peirce’s conception of continuity and change, this paper will give a new definition of synthetic and analytic judgments and reasoning, completing the picture with a third “vague” judgment and reasoning. In this new definition a synthetic judgment is a judgment that recognizes identity through changes. An analytical judgment is a judgment that loses identity through changes. A vague judgment is a judgment that it is blind to identity through changes. How do we perform synthetic reasoning? Following Peirce’s semiotic study of elements of Gamma Graphs as the sheet of assertion and the line of identity, the paper will first individuate the semiotic characteristics necessary for the recognition of identity. These characteristics lead us to discover “complete gesture” as the tool that we use in our every-day reasoning in order to acquire new knowledge synthetically. “Complete gestures” are actions through which we carry and recognize significant meanings. This new paradigm should provide an improved account of common-sense knowledge as well as of particular creative and hypothetic stages of conception in both scientific and humanistic thought. (shrink)

Several hundred thousand intellectually talented 12-to 13-year-olds have been tested nationwide over the past 16 years with the mathematics and verbal sections of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT). Although no sex differences in verbal ability have been found, there have been consistent sex differences favoring males in mathematical reasoning ability, as measured by the mathematics section of the SAT (SAT-M). These differences are most pronounced at the highest levels of mathematical reasoning, they are stable over time, and they are (...) observed in other countries as well. The sex difference in mathematical reasoning ability can predict subsequent sex differences in achievement in mathematics and science and is therefore of practical importance. To date a primarily environmental explanation for the difference in ability has not received support from the numerous studies conducted over many years by the staff of Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY) and others. We have studied some of the classical environmental hypotheses: attitudes toward mathematics, perceived usefulness of mathematics, confidence, expectations/ encouragement from parents and others, sex-typing, and differential course-taking. In addition, several physiological correlates of extremely high mathematical reasoning ability have been identified (left-handedness, allergies, myopia, and perhaps bilateral representation of cognitive functions and prenatal hormonal exposure). It is therefore proposed that the sex difference in SAT-M scores among intellectually talented students, which may be related to greater male variability, results from both environmental and biological factors. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The 2007 Meeting of the Society for Buddhist-Christian StudiesSan Diego, California, November 16–17, 2007Peter A. HuffThe Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies sponsored two sessions in conjunction with the 2007 annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion (AAR). Each session highlighted themes related to the work of a major figure in Buddhist-Christian dialogue. The first session, addressing the topic “Homosexuality, the Church, and the Sangha,” was organized in honor of (...) Roger Corless (1938–2007), longtime member of the society, dual practitioner of Roman Catholicism and Vajrayana Buddhism, and a well-known voice for “queer sangha.” The second session, a panel discussion titled “The Thought and Legacy of Masao Abe,” focused on the career achievements of Abe (1915–2006), widely acknowledged as one of the most innovative and influential scholars in modern Zen studies, interreligious dialogue, and comparative philosophy.The first session, moderated by Harry Wells (Humboldt State University), featured three papers on issues of gender, sexual ethics, and religious identity. Robert Fastiggi, professor of systematic theology at Sacred Heart Major Seminary (Detroit), presented the paper “The Catholic Church and Homosexuality.” Arguing that the Catholic tradition avoids an “either/or” approach to homosexuality, he outlined the church’s official distinction between morally neutral homoerotic identity and what Vatican documents call “intrinsically disordered” homosexual acts. He also noted that Catholic researchers differ significantly on the question of the genetic origins of same-sex attraction. The key to Catholic moral teaching on homosexuality, he explained, is a “theology of the body” that envisions male-female complementarity as the divinely ordained pattern of creation. Fastiggi suggested that further discussion of related ideas such as celibacy, chastity, desire, and concupiscence would enhance future Buddhist-Christian dialogue on homosexuality.Ilene Stanford, a ThD candidate in religion, gender, and culture at Harvard University, presented the next paper, “In or Out? Marriage as a Social Practice.” Describing marriage in the United States as a “site of contestation,” she explored the conflicting [End Page 137] models of sexual union that currently inform public debates in political and ecclesiastical contexts. Using William Johnson’s A Time to Embrace: Same-Gender Relationships in Religion, Law, and Politics (2006) as a point of departure, she argued that many contemporary examinations of sexual relationships, even some of the most inclusive, fail to reckon with the way in which the West’s Augustinian legacy continues to make heterosexual marriage the norm for all moral reflection on sexual identity and expression. The escalating controversy in the international Anglican community, she said, exposes the weaknesses of Johnson’s “deliberative democracy” model and other theoretical models that minimize the role of political and social power in the construction of sexual ideals.José Ignacio Cabezón, who holds the XIV Dalai Lama Chair in Tibetan Buddhism at the University of California, Santa Barbara, presented the final paper: “Is Homosexual Sex ‘Sexual Misconduct’? Critical Reflections on Some Classical Indo-Tibetan Sources.” Analyzing the changing portraits of sexual immorality in the Pali canon, Indian Sanskrit texts, and Tibetan scholastic treatises, Cabezón traced the evolution of monastic commentary on lay sexuality over the course of several centuries. What originated primarily as a simple prohibition against some forms of male adulterous activity, he explained, eventually became an unprecedented attempt to regulate intricate details of sexual behavior. Identifying Ansanga (fourth century ce) as the first Buddhist writer to proscribe same-sex activity between men, Cabezón suggested that changing social mores, intra-Buddhist debates, and the fertile monastic imagination contributed to the gradual elaboration of moral teaching in ancient and classical Buddhist literature.After the paper presentations, Richard Reilly, professor of philosophy at St. Bonaventure University, responded with provocative comments. He raised critical points about the significance of the distinction between sexual acts and erotic relationships, the strategic though limited value of “deliberative democracy” in multicultural faith communities, and the need for more rigorous comparative study of homophobic legislation in Buddhist and Abrahamic religious traditions. Sparking an engaging discussion among presenters and members of the audience, Reilly’s remarks underscored the importance of ongoing interdisciplinary investigations into homosexuality, the church, and the sangha.The society’s second session at the AAR provided a venue for former... (shrink)

In this first book-length treatment of Descartes' important and influential natural philosophy, Daniel Garber is principally concerned with Descartes' accounts of matter and motion—the joint between Descartes' philosophical and scientific interests. These accounts constitute the point at which the metaphysical doctrines on God, the soul, and body, developed in writings like the Meditations, give rise to physical conclusions regarding atoms, vacua, and the laws that matter in motion must obey. Garber achieves a philosophically rigorous reading of Descartes that is sensitive (...) to the historical and intellectual context in which he wrote. What emerges is a novel view of this familiar figure, at once unexpected and truer to the historical Descartes. The book begins with a discussion of Descartes' intellectual development and the larger project that frames his natural philosophy, the complete reform of all the sciences. After this introduction Garber thoroughly examines various aspects of Descartes' physics: the notion of body and its identification with extension; Descartes' rejection of the substantial forms of the scholastics; his relation to the atomistic tradition of atoms and the void; the concept of motion and the laws of motion, including Descartes' conservation principle, his laws of the persistence of motion, and his collision law; and the grounding of his laws in God. (shrink)

For most early Medieval and Scholastic philosophers working in the Aristotelian tradition, knowledge of any specific subject is knowledge of its causes and principles. Knowledge of individuals was no exception. As Jorge Gracia has written "To know individuality [for early Medieval and Scholastic philosophers] is to be able to determine the causes and principles that are responsible for it."1 The achievement of such ability is also known as the problem of individuation. This paper will be concerned with (...) the solution to the problem suggested by Leibniz’s writings and how it relates to the contemporary metaphysical debate. In the first section I introduce the problem of individuation along with the solution Leibniz proposed during the latter part of his life. The second section analyzes Leibniz’s solution in a contemporary perspective. I argue that, unlike during the Medieval and early Modern periods, today the epistemic side of the problem of individuation plays a major role in the debate. In this light, Leibniz’s proposal that humans cannot grasp what the individuality of an individual consists in seems problematic. I show, however, that Leibniz’s proposal can stand on its feet also nowadays, provided we are willing to give up the pretenses that there is a definitive count of individuals and that re-identifying individuals across time and space is part of the problem of individuation. (shrink)

The High Middle Ages were remarkable for their coherent sense of 'Christendom': of people who belonged to a homogeneous Christian society marked by uniform rituals of birth and death and worship. That uniformity, which came under increasing strain as national European characteristics became more pronounced, achieved perhaps its most perfect intellectual expression in the thought of the western Christian thinkers who are sometimes called 'scholastic theologians'. This book offers the first focused introduction to these thinkers based on the individuals (...) themselves and their central preoccupations. (shrink)

Philosophy, as Aquinas, and many others, described it-- as a demonstrative progression from self-evident premises to evident (or even necessary [Scotus]) conclusions,-- is rarely attempted nowadays, even by "scholastic" philosophers. Demonstrative success,-- that is, entirely to eliminate competitors to one's conclusions, -- is not the expectation now, nor has it been the achievement of philosophers historically. Thus, some restrictions upon starting points may be relaxed as unnecessary, e.g. that they be self-evident.

Theory of names is a prominent part of analytic philosophy of language. Contemporary analysis of names is typically taken to be emerging from the works of F. Brentano, A. Meinong and especially G. Frege. However, the contemporary theory of names originates from J. S. Mill. System of Logic, his opus magnum, had an enormous influence on later development of logic, the philosophy of language and the emergence of logical positivism. The philosophy of language and the theory of names in the (...) scholastic tradition were treated highly, partially to their significance to theology. However, achievements of the scholastic philosophy of language are hardly noticeable in the contemporary analytic philosophy of language. This article seeks to investigate the causes of such situation. These may involve disregard towards scholastic philosophy in general characteristic of the philosophy of Enlightment. It is claimed that some other significant influence may had been the analysis of logic and epistemology provided in the System of Logic. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 68J The Theology of Henri de Lubac: An Overview. By HANS URS VON BALTHASAR. Translated by Joseph Fessio, S. J., Michael M. Waldstein (Preface), and Susan Clements (Conclusion). San Fran· cisco: Ignatius Press/Communio, 1991. Pp. 127. $9.95 (paper). Except for the preface and conclusion, Hans Urs von Balthasar's The Theology of Henri de Lubac first appeared as the long essay, "Henri de Lubac-L'oeuvre organique d'une vie," in (...) Nouvelle Revue Theologique 97 (1975), 897-913 and 98 (1976), 33-59, and translated by Joseph Fessio, S.J., as "The Achievement of Henri de Luhac" in Thought 51 (1976), 7-49. The preface was added soon after for the German edition, Henri de Lubac: Sein organisches Lebenswerk (Frei· burg im Breisgau: Johannes Verlag, 1976). The conclusion was added for Balthasar's and Jesuit Georges Chantraine's Le Cardinal de Lubac: L'Homme et son oeuvre (Paris: Ed. Lethielleux, 1983). While de Lubac denied " a true, personal philosophical or theo· logical synthesis " in the multiplicity of his oeuvre, he did believe that there could he found " a pattern that constitutes its unity " (de Luhac on p. 10). A more systematic work had been planned with Bruno de Solages, Peres Congar, Chenu, and others. In de Luhac's words, " the lightning bolt of Humani Generis killed the project" (p. 11). We can only wonder at what might have been. At the center of de Lubac's thought is a spiritual perception of "the essence of Christian mysticism" (p. 11). A hook on this subject was planned hut never completed; its fundamental importance was indicated by de Luhac in 1956: "I believe my hook on mysticism has inspired me for a long time in everything I work on; in its light I make my judgments and gain the criteria for ordering my thoughts and ideas" (p. 11). The purpose of Balthasar's little book is to trace these "great spiritual options of the master" (p. 26). Balthasar wrote his preface after he had received from de Luhac the manuscript that would he published as his Memoire sur l'occasion de mes ecrits (1989; ET: At the Service of the Church (1993]). Accord· ing to Balthasar, this "meandering" text has great value in display· ing the organic unity of de Luhac's writings in the contexts which occasioned them-" as well as the legendary condemnations and banish· ments prepared for him by his order and by the Church" (p. 9). De Luhac adopted the " fundamental elan " (p. 13) of Blondel, Marechal, and Rousselot. They enabled de Lubac to see in Thomas Aquinas " the paradox of the spiritual creature that is ordained beyond itself by the innermost reality of its nature to a goal that is unreachable for it and that can only he given as a gift of grace " (p. 13). Balthasar is unambiguous in his belief in the correctness of their interpretation. 684 BOOK REVIEWS Blondel, Marechal, and de Lubac were " martyrs for truth " (p. 13). De Lubac " exposed himself to the attacks of a tutiorist scholastic theology, armed with nothing but the historical and theological truth" (p. 13). Of the three, de Lubac was the most persecuted. The conflict with scholasticism is presented in all its sharpness. One must go back to Thomas himself, over the commentatorial tradition of John of St. Thomas and Cajetan, whose work represents, in the words of Gilson, " a successful ' corruptorium Sanctae Thomae.'... Thomas has been castrated by it" (p. 14). Gilson's "unqualified assent" to de Lubac's Thomistic conclusions means much to Balthasar, because it is "the assent of the greatest authority in the field of the history of phi· losophy" (p. 15). Upon reading Sumaturel (1946), Gilson wrote to de Lubac that the difference between the scholastic and the humanist theologians, like de Lubac, in part lies in the way they understand propositions. The scholastics " understand only univocal propositions and those that seem to be univocal. The former [humanist theologiansJ, by contrast, are more interested in the truth that the proposition attempts to formulate and that partly escapes it" (p. 14). In their incomprehension and fear of analogy, the scholastics are represented as hankering after a security that... (shrink)

Odon Lottin, O.S.B. was an historian and a moral theologian. As an historian, he studied the scholastic attention to human psychology and morality. As a theologian, he studied the roles that thought and action play in the development of the moral agent. His influence in historical and moral theology has been significant. Nonetheless, moralists and medievalists independently have appropriated his insights. No one has yet studied the relationship between his historical investigations and his moral theology. This work accomplishes that (...) study. ;This dissertation considers Lottin's contributions to both historical and moral theology. Lottin studies the medieval history and understanding of free choice, moral action, the acquired virtues and conscience. He traces this history to uncover specific ideas, expose the development of thought, recognize the emergence of consensus, and find whether satisfying resolutions were achieved. Many of his contemporaries in the manual tradition misinterpreted this history. This misinterpretation was due to their inaccurate or undeveloped historical method. And, just as there was deficiency in their method, there were significant shortcomings in the scope of their theological investigations. Thus, by looking back to history, Lottin presents a moral theology more substantive than the manuals. Each of the first four chapters of this dissertation presents Lottin's historical studies of the major debates, examines his incorporation of that material into his own contribution to the debates' resolutions, and concludes with how his work has been appropriated and where it may yet lead. The final chapter considers Lottin's contribution to the discipline of moral theology. ;Moral theology can neither be ahistorical nor impersonal. Lottin's work demonstrates the necessity of accurate history for interpretation and of critical reflection on the cause of human action. His return to medieval moral theology is a return to human agency. His agent-centered moral theology retrieves prudence and the moral virtues as dynamic means for rightly forming consciences and determining action. Historical and agent-centered moral theology is concerned with theory and practice. The theory of the moral life looks at human intentionality, the practice is its free expression; together they comprise the meaning of self-determination. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy by Daniel Garber, Michael AyersDonald RutherfordDaniel Garber, Michael Ayers, editors. The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pp. xii + 1616. Cloth, $175.Over a decade in preparation, this latest addition to the Cambridge History of Philosophy is an enormous achievement—both in its size and the contribution it makes to redefining [End Page 165] the landscape (...) of seventeenth-century philosophy. The editors make no bones about their intention to rewrite the history of early modern philosophy, reversing the trend dominant through much of this century of reading seventeenth-century philosophers in the light of twentienth-century “interests and preconceptions” (4). As they note, the movement to historicize our understanding of seventeenth-century philosophy has been underway for some time in the English-speaking world, furthered in many cases by contributors to these volumes. From this perspective, the present work represents, if not the culmination, at least a progress report on these efforts and the success they have achieved.As in previous volumes of the Cambridge History, the subject matter is treated thematically. Consistent with their larger goal, the editors have further attempted to organize the volumes in a way that remains faithful to the expectations of the period. Part I sets the stage with chapters that establish the larger social and historical context: “The institutional setting” (Richard Tuck); “The intellectual setting” (Stephen Menn); and “European responses to non-European culture: China” (D.E. Mungello). For the rest, the editors write, “the structure of the collection corresponds to one way, at any rate, in which an educated European of the seventeenth century might have organized the domain of philosophy” (2). First comes logic (including method and general ontology); then, the primary categories of being (God, body, soul); finally, the basic operations of the soul (understanding, will, action), whose treatment comprehends the topics of epistemology and ethics.Part II, “Logic, Language, and Abstract Objects,” opens with three short chapters by Gabriel Nuchelmans that survey the terrain of seventeenth-century logic according to the traditional divisions of term, proposition/judgment, and argument. These are followed by contributions on “Method and the study of nature” (Peter Dear); “Universal, essences, and abstract entities” (Martha Bolton); and “Individuation” (Udo Thiel).The discussion of metaphysics proper begins in Part III with the most fundamental being: God. Included here are chapters that examine specific theological issues—“The idea of God” (Jean-Luc Marion); “Proofs of the existence of God” (Jean-Robert Armogathe); “The Cartesian dialectic of creation” (Thomas M. Lennon)—as well as ones that deal more broadly with the crucial connection between philosophy and religion: “The relation between theology and philosophy” (Nicholas Jolley) and “The religious background of seventeenth-century philosophy” (Richard Popkin).Part IV, “Body and the Physical World,” forms the single largest part of the book and its intellectual core. It opens with two chapters—“The scholastic background” (Roger Ariew and Alan Gabbey) and “The occultist tradition and its critics” (Brian Copenhaver)—that effectively mark out the boundaries of the “new philosophy” that emerges in conjunction with the development of seventeenth-century science. These are followed by a series of chapters that examine particular features of that philosophy: “Doctrines of explanation in late scholasticism and in the mechanical philosophy” (Steven Nadler); “New doctrines of body and its powers, place, and space” (Daniel Garber, John Henry, Lynn Joy, and Alan Gabbey); “Knowledge of the existence of body” (Charles McCracken); “New doctrines of motion” (Alan Gabbey); “Laws of nature” (J.R. Milton); and “The mathematical realm of nature” (Michael Mahoney). [End Page 166]The final section of Volume I takes up the third main category of being: “Spirit.” It begins with Daniel Garber’s overview of the positions of the major figures, “Soul and mind: Life and thought in the seventeenth century,” followed by chapters on “Knowledge of the soul” (Charles McCracken); “Mind-body problems” (Daniel Garber and Margaret Wilson); “Personal identity” (Udo Thiel); and “The passions in metaphysics and the theory of action” (Susan James).Volume II of the History is devoted to topics that, in one way or another, elaborate operations of the soul. Part V, “The... (shrink)

Deborah J. Brown - Descartes as a Moral Thinker: Christianity, Technology, Nihilism - Journal of the History of Philosophy 46:1 Journal of the History of Philosophy 46.1 173-175 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents Reviewed by Deborah Brown University of Queensland Gary Steiner. Descartes as a Moral Thinker: Christianity, Technology, Nihilism. JHP Book Series. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2004. Pp. 352. Cloth, $60.00. This work takes as its starting point the need to ground Descartes's moral philosophy in something more fundamental (...) than human reason. Finding inspiration in Heidegger's lament, "In what soil do the roots of tree of philosophy find their support?" , Steiner proceeds to ground the "concrete content and absolute authority" of Descartes's moral principles in his Christian faith . This is a book with a mission: to keep the secularizing readers of Descartes's philosophy from the Church door. It stands as an important reminder that in understanding Descartes we cannot ignore his theology and achieves this goal in a lucid and erudite fashion. But the central tenet of the book—that Descartes subordinated much of his thinking about morals to the authority of religion—is, in my view, fundamentally mistaken. Steiner's Descartes is the pivotal transitional figure between the orthodox Christianity of the late scholastic period and the secular modernism of.. (shrink)

The principle _determinatio est negatio_—that determination is achieved through negation—has philosophical roots extending back to Plato and Aristotle, and it later influenced early modern thinkers such as Francisco Suárez and Spinoza. This paper has two aims. The first demonstrates how the principle of negation functions as a tool for conceptual determination across various philosophical frameworks, and the second demonstrates that the principle plays a key role in the analysis and resolution of the Burali-Forti paradox within the context of the naïve (...) and axiomatic set theories. In the first section, the analysis focuses on the evolution of the principle from ancient philosophy to early modern metaphysics, examining Plato’s dialectics, Aristotle’s metaphysical distinctions, Suárez’s scholastic theories, and Spinoza’s monist metaphysics. The second section shifts to mathematics, where _determinatio est negatio_ plays a key role in resolving set-theoretical paradoxes, particularly the Burali-Forti paradox. By exploring Cantor’s solution and its reliance on the distinction between consistent and inconsistent sets, this study demonstrates how this principle is essential for avoiding self-referential inconsistencies. The contributions of Zermelo and von Neumann, who developed axiomatic frameworks to address these paradoxes, further elaborate the philosophical foundations of set theory. Ultimately, the study reveals a deep connection between metaphysical principles and the mathematical treatment of paradoxes, emphasizing the ongoing relevance of _determinatio est negatio_ in both domains. (shrink)

The centenary of the Louvain Institute of Philosophy (which was founded to contribute to a renewal of philosophy within the Christian community „by adhering as closely as possible to the doctrine of Thomas Aquinas”) is the occasion for a critical examination of the particular form of Thomism developed by Désiré Mercier, the first president of the Institute. In Mercier's view, the appeal to Thomas can not be a submission to tradition or authority. Since philosophy is always a personal, free, rational (...) investigation, the only reason for adhering to a certain doctrine, is its intrinsic philosophical value. The mean argument for preferring Thomas „in philosophicis” is the fact that he „combines observation and rational-speculation, analysis and synthesis”, whereby all empirical facts are integrated and made intelligible in a larger metaphysical frame. By so doing Thomas avoids the extremes of empiricism, which leads to materialism, and idealism, which goes hand in hand with dualistic spiritualism. One may doubt whether this is a good characteristic of the „essence of Thomism”. However, Mercier follows Thomas, not so much for any original doctrine, but because he best represents the great scholastic tradition starting from Aristotle. This tradition should not be admired as an ideal of perfection that cannot be improved upon, but should be further developed and renewed, especially by integrating the achievements of modern experimental investigations within it. (Besides the sciences, we should expect not too much from modern philosophy, except in the discussion of the „critical problem”). Mercier thus bases his philosophical option for Thomism on his judgment that it better than any other philosophy offers a metaphysical synthesis within which the investigations of the modern sciences can be integrated, while at the same time being in concordance with the Christian view on man and world. However, when one studies the Thomism as elaborated in Mercier's manuals, it turns out that his attempt at integration fails. For there is no intrinsic link between the scientific findings he considers and the philosophical theses he develops. Herein lies the inherent weakness of the neo-scholastic construction as it was advocated by Mercier. When one defends Thomism by arguing that it offers a „comprehensive synthesis of all knowledge”', and at the same time one stresses the autonomy of scientific inquiry without apologetic intentions, one can expect that as these sciences develop, there will also arise the need for new conceptual schemes and new philosophical models which better fit these new findings. At that moment Thomistic doctrine also seems to fall away as a superfluous superstructure. One can argue that Mercier too easily understood philosophy as a „natural complement” of the sciences and that for that reason he could not really succeed in renewing Thomism. Most neothomists will try to base their option for Thomas upon the originality of his metaphysics. But this search for the „essence of Thomism” is problematic. At the end of the paper it is argued that no intrinsic philosophical arguments can be given for a normative preference for Thomas. The demand to philosophize „ad mentem Thomae” only makes sense when the relation of reason to faith is considered. As É. Gilson has shown, most neothomists were reluctant to develop this argument, except in a negative way : to argue for the autonomy of their philosophical (thomistic) arguments (although they were, in fact, motivated by a religious interest). (shrink)

Descartes, an acknowledged founder of modern philosophy, is identified particularly with mind-body dualism--the view that the mind is an incorporeal entity. But this view was not entirely original with Descartes, and in fact to a significant extent it was widely accepted by the Aristotelian scholastics who preceded him, although they entertained a different conception of the nature of mind, body, and the relationship between them. In her first book, Marleen Rozemond explicates Descartes's aim to provide a metaphysics that would accommodate (...) mechanistic science and supplant scholasticism. Her approach includes discussion of central differences from and similarities to the scholastics and how these discriminations affected Descartes's defense of the incorporeity of the mind and the mechanistic conception of body. Confronting the question of how, in his view, mind and body are united, she examines his defense of this union on the basis of sensation. In the course of her argument, she focuses on a few of the scholastics to whom Descartes referred in his own writings: Thomas Aquinas, Francisco Suarez, Eustachius of St. Paul, and the Jesuits of Coimbra. This new systematic account of Descartes's dualism amply demonstrates why he still deserves serious study and respect for his extraordinary philosophical achievements. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Philosophy and the Language of the People: The Claims of Common Speech from Petrarch to Locke by Lodi NautaPatrick RysiewLodi Nauta. Philosophy and the Language of the People: The Claims of Common Speech from Petrarch to Locke. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Pp. 275. Hardback, $39.99.What type of language should philosophers use? Granted that such things as clarity and communicative efficacy are desiderata of a good language in (...) which to philosophize, are they best achieved by inventing a specialized language or by sticking to the common language we already possess? It might seem that using familiar terms would be among the nonnegotiable starting points in philosophical theorizing. After all, how else are we to ensure that our theories make and maintain contact with the subjects that prompted us to philosophize in the first place? On reflection, however, perhaps our common language is so beset with defects—imprecision, the encoding of various prejudices, an inability to express certain types of truths, and so on—that philosophers, like specialists in other fields, have no alternative but to devise their own technical language. So, even if we agree that philosophers should use “clean tools,” as J. L. Austin famously put it, that does not settle the question of whether they should adhere to a common language or whether such a language is ill-suited for philosophical purposes.In contemporary analytic circles, the debate just rehearsed is likely to prompt thoughts of the twentieth-century back-and-forth between those who thought that philosophical advancement required developing a logically ideal language (e.g. Russell and Frege) and those who were deeply suspicious of such a project (e.g. Austin and Wittgenstein). But then, contemporary analytic philosophy tends to be pretty ahistorical. And one of the main aims, and most welcome accomplishments, of Lodi Nauta’s Philosophy and the Language of the People is to demonstrate that this type of debate is not a recent phenomenon. In particular, Nauta’s stated goal is to increase awareness of the role that a critique of language—and, in particular, an insistence upon the need to respect common language—played in helping to bring about the erosion and eventual demise of Aristotelian-scholastic philosophy.Of course, Aristotle himself was hardly indifferent to the workings of ordinary language, drawing important lessons from how we use certain words. But neither was he averse to coining new terms when ordinary Greek fell short. The example of Aristotle thus makes it clear that, as Nauta notes (16), in adjudicating between common and technical language there is plenty of room for intermediate positions that do not simply champion one or the other. This general point notwithstanding, attempts to render Aristotle’s ideas in Latin and to capture the subtleties of various proposed additions to the Aristotelean framework historically led to significant increases in the stock of technical terms used to philosophize. With this came the growing sense that philosophy had lost contact with its subject matter and lost track of its proper aim of making sense of the world of everyday experience.As Nauta suggests (4), the concern that philosophy is just so much technical tire-spinning will be all too familiar to contemporary philosophers. Much less familiar, however, is that precisely this was the complaint of many Renaissance humanist and early modern philosophers. Hence the need for Nauta’s book: over eight central chapters—book-ended [End Page 506] by an introduction and conclusion—Nauta recounts the various ways in which an insistence upon the importance of “common language” played destructive and constructive theoretical roles in the writings of a selected range of thinkers.Chapter 1 considers early humanist critiques of scholastic jargon by Francesco Petrarch and Leonardo Bruni. Chapter 2 examines Lorenzo Valla (the subject of Nauta’s previous monograph) and his attempt to cast classical Latin as the natural common language in which learned scholarship should be conducted. Chapters 3–5 survey three humanists who built differently on Valla’s foundation—Giovanni Pontano, via a genealogical approach to language and an emphasis on its role in our affective, social, and cognitive lives; Juan Luis Vives, as part of his wider views on human culture... (shrink)

In our paper, we explore the question of what is wrong with Neurath’s “plank-by-plank” method, which Quine later also adopted with enthusiasm. Shipbuilding experts will confirm that plank-byplank replacement is only possible in the dock and never on the open sea. This is simply empty talk, flatus vocis, often attributed to philosophers. The main problem with Neurath’s ship metaphor is that it is completely alien to the seafarers’ way of life, or even in stark contradiction to it. If it is (...) the task of philosophy to bring order into the house of concepts, the use of metaphors should also be scrutinized. Any practical test of the plank-by-plank methodology would prove unsuccessful, for as soon as one would remove a plank from the ship, the ship would sink very quickly due to the onslaught of the water. If the philosophers argue for empiricist epistemology, as Neurath and Quine do, they should not use such utopian metaphors in which the practical life world is completely ignored. When philosophers argue for an empiricist epistemology, as Neurath and Quine do, they should be more careful in their use of metaphors that exclude empiricism, practice, and the practical world of life. It is rather a vivid example of abstract armchair philosophy to explain how science works. Finally, it remains a problem to elaborate a concept of epistemology by “philosophizing” abstractly about empiricism and empiricist epistemology without referring to concrete life experiences. Neurath’s boat metaphor, praised by Quine, is, unfortunately, an example of epistemology without reference to concrete forms of life, and it is still questionable whether we can achieve anything factually with such non-functional metaphors, let alone make the process of cognition scientifically plausible. The whole thing is reminiscent of the scholastic witty remark about how someone convincingly tries to talk about swimming without jumping into the water. Every sailor knows that a ship could only be serviced and repaired in a dock. Seafaring as a way of life, all the turbulence associated with this form of life, obviously remained unknown to Neurath, who spent most of his life in a continental, mountainous country, so it is fair to say that he used a very unusual metaphor not grounded in the practice of life, which, to make the paradox even greater, is meant to represent a naturalistic-empiricist concept of knowledge. (shrink)

This is a sequel to the author's The Language and Logic of the Bible: The Earlier Middle Ages. The period of the reformation saw immense changes of approach to the study of the Bible, which in turn brought huge consequences. This book, seeking to show the direction of endeavour of such study in the last medieval centuries, examines the theory of exegesis, practical interpretation, popular Bible study and preaching, and looks especially at the areas of logic and language in which (...) the scholars of the period had considerable expertise. The condemnation of the scholastics has tended to sink with them a proper recognition of what they achieved. In looking forward to the reformation, Dr Evans demonstrates a greater continuity of attitude than has often been allowed and describes how the enquiries of later medieval scholars opened out into the explorations of the sixteenth century made by Protestant and Roman Catholic thinkers alike. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:MEISTER ECKHART AND THE NEOPLATONIC HERITAGE: THE THINKER'S WAY TO GOD RICHARD Wooos, O.P. Loyola University of Ohioago Ohicago, Illinois IN BOTH HIS LIFE rand preaching, Meister Eokrhart's " way" was pre-eminently.a spirituality of the mind. The srpeoulat:ive inqui.rires.and p:roibings thaJt animate his iSChD'l-·arly woliks 1also f!:>iervrude his sermons ·and treatisies, while a pastoral, homiletic inrberrtion iieciproca:1ly permeates the scholarly.worrks, particularly in regard to.the Meister'1s fascination with rthe Woil1d. (...) Heinrich Deni:fle, 1who disonviered and first commented upon Eckhart's Laitin writings in the 1880s, concluded that the Meister faclmd the clarity of conception and precision of expression characteristic of the great scholastic figmes who preoeded him, partiou1ady Albert the Grea:t 1and 'lihomas Aquinrus.1 B:ut more reoent Eckhart scholars have increasingly •argued that Denifle's oonoern to :ve£ute uncritically inflated characteriz,ations of Eckhart's philosophloa:l genius, notrubly that of Wilhelm Preger,.led him to undel'V'alue and indeed misrepvesen:t •the Meister's ireal goal a;nd bme achievement. Indeed, tto the modern critical eye, aided :by a oontury 1 "Eckhart ein unklarer Denker war, der sich der Consequenzen seiner Lehrer resp. seiner ausdruckweise nicht bewusst war. Gerade bei den schwierigen Lehrpunkten, wo Klarheit und Scharfe der Begriffe und des Ausdrucks mehr als je geboten ist, tritt dies zu Tage. Gerade in den entscheidenden Momenten verlasst ihn die Klarheit.... Eckhart besass aber nicht die geistige Begabung iiber die Scholastik hinauszugeben und doch innerhalb der Granzen der Wahrheit zu bleiben." "Meister Eckharts lateinische Schriften, und die Grundanschauung seiner Lehre," in A.rahiv fii,r Literatur unCl Kirchengeschichte Cles Mittelalters, ed. H. Denifie and Franz Ehrle (Graz: Akademische Druck u. Verlagsanstalt, 1956), vol. 2, pp. 482, 521. 609 610 RICHARD WOODS, O.P. of ]urbher di:s:cioverieis 1rund study, " the scholastic Eckhart is an original.and spooulaxbivie til:rintker, 1and not only a spirit's itineriary fa~om.aJJJd ha:ck to its eternail. Sourioe-4hie Ohristian NoopLatonic schema th.at Eckhart im.heri'bed room St. Albert tb!e Greait rund, 1behind him, Hugh and Richa;rid of St. Victo:r, Thomas Ga1lus, John Sarraoenus, John Soottus Eriugena, Diornysiius the Areop1aigibe, P!l.'odus, and, penultimrutely, Pilotinus!himself. For thls gre:art theoa Meister Eckhart: Die deutschen und lateinischen Werke: Herausgegeben im Auftrage der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft, 11 Vols. to date (Stuttgart and Berlin: Verlag W. Kohlhammer, 1958-). German sermons will be identified hereafter by their number in the Deutsche Werke and, for English translation, by the corresponding page number in the Walshe edition. 9 " Eine Koiner Handscrift mit lateinischen Eckhart-Exzerpten," Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum 31 (1961) : 204-12. In volume three of his edition, Walshe includes a translation of a fragment of one of Eckhart's sermons discovered by Prof. Kurt Ruh in 1967 and published in the Zeitschrift fii,r deutohes Aitertum 111 (1982) : 219-25. See ed. cit., pp. 131-35. ECKHART AND NEOPLATONISM 618 ~ogical tradition, liecently examined in some detail iby John Macquarrie alllld Andrew Louth, stretches hack evoo £artlier to tbie Oappadocian Fraithe'I"s, Origien, Philo, :and at the source, Pilato.in Smee the 1app1e1amance of Eoklhamt'1s more aoadiemic Laltin wiorrks, op;inion has heen divided as 1 00 their importance :velative ibo the more familiar German sermons iand tT1eatises for understarndmg the Meister~s authentic tooching. Some recent commenibato 'l.1s 1 sti1l 1:Jend to favor the lattier aJ.moot enti'11ely, even wihile acknOW11edging t:hie impo'11tooce of the forn11er; some favor the Latin.11 Critical opinion :seems 'bo have turned in the direction of remphrusizing the importalllice of both.the Latin and the German :works in 01der 1bo unders:tand the whole Eckhartthe teacher and the p:veacheT.12 But to understand to what extent Ed.mart ias,a tlheologian, philosopher, arrd mystic was indebted to Obrisltian Nooplatmrism it is raliso n:ecess1acy to see him in the oonteJct of his,w;orks, his method, and his scholarly and apostolic career. The Scholar and His Temper While Echltart had ra ik!een phi1osorphica1 temperament, he did not 1rus,a rule compose racrudemic 1weatises. Ratiher, he scatltJeTed... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:156 BOOK REVIEWS ject could never arrive at a viable metaphysics and shows effectively that Marechal's subject was never in isolation from the objects of sensation and thought. On the other side, he presents the PDM as an alternative to the soft theism of thinkers like Hans Kiing and as a promising approach in contemporary epistemological debates involving Thomas Kuhn, Richard Rorty, Joseph Margolis, and many others. The historians (...) of philosophy will have to take up the critique of Matteo and Marechal on the many figures which they survey in PDM and QA. No one writer can cover so much ground without raising the ire of the specialists in particular thinkers or epochs. I shall simply say that the overview is helpful and that Matteo deserves credit for putting Marechal's readings to the test of his own reading of the works at issue. QA presents and evaluates this history with remarkable brevity, a virtue which can have its vicious side. I found the brevity to be a particular problem in the handling of Kant and of Marechal. The Critique of Pure Reason and PDM are elaborate analyses of thought, and Matteo proceeds in such summary fashion towards the big conclusions that he does less than justice to these analyses. Being so summary turns out to be a problem in showing that PDM can escape the accusations of subjectivism and relativism made by its scholastic attackers and that it has a way around those problems in present-day controversies. I myself am a partisan of the epistemology and metaphysics Marechal and Matteo advocate, but I find many of my doubts about the project unresolved by its presentation in QA. My particular concerns here center on conceptual relativism and theistic objectivity, hut anyone who can resolve those doubts definitively will have done a monumental service not just for the reviewer but for humankind. Marechal himself had intended a sixth volume more straight-forwardly along the Aristotelian-Thomist line, something which bad health prevented. We should wish Matteo the good health to develop the ideas of PDM and QA at the greater length required to achieve fully the promise claimed for them in this fine book. MICHAEL J. KERLIN La Salle University Philadelphia, Pennsylvania The Priority of Prudence. By DANIEL MARK NELSON. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992. Pp. ix + 164. $26.95 (cloth). In recent years, we have seen a number of attempts to recapture the natural law doctrines of Thomas Aquinas. This book is another such BOOK REVIEWS 157 attempt, and in it Nelson attempts to do two things. First, he tries to show that prudence is the most important of the virtues and is prior to nature in the process of determining the moral character of actions. Prudence is undoubtedly a highly important virtue because it is the train that carries the agent to the moral good and it must stay on track for the agent to realize fully the aims of morality. But it is not clear that it is prior to other virtues, or to nature itself, as Nelson contends, and a strong case can he made that charity is first among the virtues, and that prudence is determined by charity. Prudence is prior to the other virtues in the sense that they are all weakened by prudential failures, hut prudence wanders aimlessly, not only in the absence of the guidance of the other virtues, hut also without the guidance of nature itself. Cut loose from its secure grounds in nature, prudence and the other virtues collapse, and they need not only the secure standards provided by justice, fortitude, and charity, hut also of nature to he authentic. Second, he is trying to show that Aquinas is not so much a natural law moralist as he is a rationalist and a virtue theorist. To do this, he argues that nature serves merely an explanatory and foundational function for morality, and provides no information about moral judgments (p. 100). He subordinates nature to reason in order to resolve disputes between modern deontologists and consequentialists, hut in doing this he transforms Aquinas from a natural law moralist to a rationalist. He gives priority to reason at the... (shrink)

This Handbook documents the main trends in current research between logic and language, including its broader influence in computer science, linguistic theory and cognitive science. The history of the combined study of Logic and Linguistics goes back a long way, at least to the work of the scholastic philosophers in the Middle Ages. At the beginning of this century, the subject was revitalized through the pioneering efforts of Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, and Polish philosophical logicians such as Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz. (...) Around 1970, the landmark achievements of Richard Montague established a junction between state-of-the-art mathematical logic and generative linguistic theory. Over the subsequent decades, this enterprise of Montague Grammar has flourished and diversified into a number of research programs with empirical and theoretical substance. This appears to be the first Handbook to bring logic-language interface to the fore. Both aspects of the interaction between logic and language are demonstrated in the book i.e. firstly, how logical systems are designed and modified in response to linguistic needs and secondly, how mathematical theory arises in this process and how it affects subsequent linguistic theory. The Handbook presents concise, impartial accounts of the topics covered. Where possible, an author and a commentator have cooperated to ensure the proper breadth and technical content of the papers. The Handbook is self-contained, and individual articles are of the highest quality. (shrink)

We are living in an era of development and innovation through research and learning. The nation that has achieved its development goals, has done through education reforms and a keen focus on strengthening its National Innovation System. In Pakistan, this role has fallen to the Higher Education Commission, commonly known as HEC. The Higher Education Commission has attempted various activities for ceaseless improvement of the nature of advanced education as per the worldwide norms and to patch up post-auxiliary instruction to (...) improve the instructive guidelines at the alumni level. Public Academy for Higher Education has been built up with the mean to plan and convey nonexclusive and need-based limit building and preparing programs in instructing and exploration for personnel just as a spotlight on scholastic administration and authority for the workforce and the board. Education Testing Council has additionally been modified to normalize passage tests for the universities of Pakistan. The study focuses on the different programs run by HEC to develop the country’s formal learning program and education sector. Since its commencement, we investigate various projects created by HEC to encourage Higher Education Institutions and build up a superior staff for this reason. (shrink)

In the introduction to Substance and Individuation in Leibniz, Jan Cover and John Hawthorne inform us that the aim of the book is to “grasp more clearly the metaphysical problems of individuation by taking seriously how these are played out in the hands of one influential philosopher standing as the important mediary between scholastic and modern philosophers.” Were the book to succeed in this modest aim it would be a significant achievement. In fact, it achieves this aim and (...) a good deal more. One can fairly say that the book is nothing short of a philosophical tour de force of most major metaphysical themes in Leibniz. (shrink)

This book provides the first systematic reconstruction of Ibn S n s concept of metaphysics, and, given the considerable influence his achievement had on the Islamic tradition as well as on scholastic philosophers, it is relevant to the ...

This study examines how and why peoples of African descent access and utilize community-based pedagogical spaces that exist outside schools. Employing a theoretical framework that fuses historical methodology and border-crossing theory, the researchers review existing scholarship and primary documents to present an historical examination of how peoples of African descent have fought for and redefined education in nonschool educative venues. These findings inform the authors? analysis of results from an oral history project they conducted into how Black Bermudian men utilized (...) learning spaces outside schools, such as the family, Black church, and athletics clubs, to augment their personal and scholastic development. Based on their historical and empirical research findings, the authors argue that educational actors (including teachers, administrators, policy makers, and researchers) focused on school-based issues like the academic achievement gap would do well to recognize the impact learning spaces outside of schools may have on student scholastic success, particularly for minority men. (shrink)

Clearly a Late Antiquity’s phenomenon, the Neoplatonism represented to the ancient men the last bastion of its old traditions, the religion of their ancestors and classical culture. Especially the neoplatonic philosophy of Plotinus, that had engendred precepts which, by its meanings, resounded through the last voices of paganism and survived the Middle Ages into the scholastic philosopy. Although the ideas of Plotinus achieved such later importance, it were the main problem conceiving the conflicts between the philosophers Porphyry and Iamblichus. (...) That will be the starting point of this paper, which analyzes the layers of Neoplatonism throught its historical context. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Human Nature in Early Franciscan Thought: Philosophical Background and Theological Significance by Lydia SCHUMACHERJohn Marshall DiamondSCHUMACHER, Lydia. Human Nature in Early Franciscan Thought: Philosophical Background and Theological Significance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023. xiv + 343 pp. Cloth, $120.00Lydia Schumacher’s recent work, Human Nature in Early Franciscan Thought: Philosophical Background and Theological Significance, is a welcome contribution to the study of the development of scholastic thought on (...) the subject of human nature. Schumacher’s work explores the various facets of theological anthropology in the first half of the thirteenth century by focusing primarily on scholars belonging to the Franciscan Order such as Philip the Chancellor, Alexander of Hales, and William of Auvergne, as well as early Dominican scholars such as Roland of Cremona and Hugh of St. Cher. Of central focus in the study is John of La Rochelle, whom the author notes “was the only member of his generation to deal robustly and comprehensively” with not only traditional questions on the soul but also matters of philosophy that had previously been considered beyond the purview of the theologian, topics that included the processes of the body and the psychological makeup of the human being. In addition, John was among the first to embrace the newly translated Arabic sources into his work, most notably the writings of Avicenna.The work is divided into eleven chapters, the first four of which provide a theological background on various authors and their views on the relation between the body and soul and the powers of the soul. The fifth and sixth chapters focus on two works of John of La Rochelle, the Tractatus and the Summa de anima, followed by a study of the reception of Averroes in the first half of the thirteenth century. The work concludes with chapters on the cognitive powers, the affections, free choice, and angels. Schumacher’s study is thorough, providing robust examinations of the individuals and topics, even those who are not central to the study, such as Roland of Cremona and Guerric of St. Quentin. [End Page 161]The book is well written and clearly elucidates the complex schemas of the topics at hand, particularly the nature of the intellect. This is particularly evident in the middle chapters, which examine the ideas of John of La Rochelle, in whose works one finds a multifaceted account of the human intellect. In addition, Schumacher notes an interesting facet of John’s view of cognition, according to which “the mind ‘predetermines’ or influences its understanding of the world.” Thus John’s theory of the act of human rationality, as Schumacher summarizes it, is “arguably achieved at the level of perception, and perception, in turn, is permeated and guided by reason’s quest to know the ‘thing in itself’ apart from matter.” John’s view is then briefly compared to that of William of Auvergne, who argued that perception is “virtually irrelevant” for human understanding. This comparison underscores the rifts that took place during the development of early thirteenth-century thought regarding the nature and function of the intellect as it underwent a profound change from traditionally Augustinian ideas to attempts to reconcile the former with the ideas found in the newly available works of Aristotle and his Arab commentators, namely, Avicenna.The only criticism one might have is that, at times, the chapters seem out of order. For example, after the two chapters that deal extensively with the works of John of La Rochelle, the following chapter is “The Reception of Averroes in Early Scholasticism,” which examines the possible sources “of the three-fold intellectual schema” that is found in John of La Rochelle’s works. Possible sources include not only Averroes but also Aristotle and Alexander of Aphrodisias, as well as two anonymous works that John knew and utilized. The chapter itself is presented effectively but makes the work feel somewhat disjointed. On occasion, readers might also find themselves wondering if Schumacher uses John of La Rochelle as a primary example of Franciscan thought in the early thirteenth century, or if the book is indeed about him, and the other figures are considered only to better explain John’s preceding and current... (shrink)

This volume includes translations of three separate Tibetan works composed by individuals who are now regarded as iconic figures of the Geluk school of Buddhism. The first work is Banisher of Ignorance: An Ornament of the Seven Treatises on Pramāṇa, by Khedrup Gelek Palsang (1385-1438), and the second is On Preclusion and Relationship, by Gyaltsab Darma Rinchen (1364-1432). The authors-popularly known as Khedrup Jé and Gyaltsab Jé-are represented as the foremost disciples of Tsongkhapa Losang Drakpa (1357-1419), and each succeeded him (...) as the Ganden throneholder. The third text, Mighty Pramāṇa Sun, a commentary on Candrakīrti's Clear Words (Prasannapadā), is by Jamyang Shepa (1648-1721), a later luminary in the Geluk school. These works concern themselves primarily with the Buddhist theory of knowledge-the means by which we are able to know things and how we can be certain of that knowledge. Encapsulating this theory is the notion of pramāṇa, a concept derived from India, the Buddhist understanding of which was shaped most significantly by the masters Dignāga (fifth to sixth century) and Dharmakīrti (seventh century). Based on their explanation, pramāṇa is often translated as "valid cognition," a literal reference to the kind of cognition that they proposed could be relied upon to supply indisputable knowledge. In recognition of the crucial role that reasoning is held to play in gaining certain knowledge, the Buddhist Pramāṇa tradition that the treatises of Dignāga and Dharmakīrti gave rise to is described as a logico-epistemological system. The works in this volume demonstrate how important a component scholastic rigor has been to Tibetan religion. They illustrate how those who follow the tradition have viewed the ordered, systematic approach as necessary not only for textual analysis, for those seeking to unravel the complexities of the Indian Buddhist scriptures and treatises, but also for practitioners aiming to progress along the spiritual path and achieve the higher Buddhist goals. (shrink)

Displayed on school walls during holidays, attached to floats and triumphal arches in processions, emblems played a part in all public events organized by the Jesuits in the 17th century. These verbal-iconographic compositions, which were used to illustrate the principal themes of the ceremony, were not a mere period detail or an ornamental device but constituted a means of expression which, by virtue of the particular relations governing the association of text and image, mobilized complex rhetorical, moral, and spiritual elements (...) simultaneously. By associating an image - seen as the “body” - with a textual element (inscriptio et subscriptio) - the “soul” - the emblem-maker sought to achieve a unity of meaning in which the two forms of communication complemented each other: it is precisely the way in which the two elements are connected, and the laws that regulate their composition, that constitutes the foundation of the language of the emblem. This language, which is used in a corresponding manner in a variety of other symbolic compositions (devices, hieroglyphs, symbols, coats of arms, medals, etc.), is based on the rhetorical operations of the metaphor, applied here as a model both for the word, with its mimetic properties, and for figurative codes. However, the metaphor, as a product of human ingenuity, is not only situated at the crossroads of a system of thought crystallized in a great number of inventions, but also bears witness to an ornamental aesthetic, typical of the 17th century's aristocratic culture and social rituals. While there does exist a vast bibliography of materials on the function and role of metaphor in Baroque culture, questions nevertheless remain about the numerous cultural practices to which the Baroque gave rise and the particular processes that the 17th century brought into play. My intention here is not to resolve all such questions but rather to provide an analytical framework by focusing my observations on emblematic compositions produced in the scholastic milieu of the Society of Jesus. (shrink)