In this article the Reformer Martin Luther is to be situated against the backdrop of his medieval theological context – considering especially Bernard of Clairvaux. It is well-known that he held in great esteem Bernard and the theology he represented. First of all, Luther's relationship to Bernard is to be investigated by way of a historiographic review of the research that was done in the past 150 years. How did one consider Luther’s attitude toward Bernard, and how did Luther research (...) specifically value this attitude? In this research, denominational positions appear to have played a important role. Secondly, the attempt is made here to sketch Bernard’s place in Luther’s own tradition. Next to the medieval scholastic theology, there were diverse other influences that became important for the young Luther. Bernard’s specific place within the complexity of medieval traditions is to be determined. This is being explained by presenting seven significant texts mainly from Luther’s works, which are added to this article. Finally, the attempt is made to determine more closely Bernard’s place in Luther’s theology between Scholasticism and Mysticism. If one wants to do justice to Bernard in Luther's works, one must take into consideration the way in which Luther has perceived him, namely as a theologian of the Scriptures, a theologian of experience and a preacher of Christ par excellence along the lines of monastic theology. (shrink)

It is a well-known fact that the reformer Martin Luther highly esteemed Bernhard of Clairvaux. But what exactly was the significance of Bernhard for him? During the last years some Luther scholars became highly interested in the theological and historical relations between these two remarkable theologians. Recently Franz Posset published an article on this subject in Luther Jahrbuch. He discusses Bernhard of Clairvaux's Sermons of Christmas-time, Lent- and Easter-time as a source for Martin Luther. Theo Bell contributes to this discussion (...) firstly by examining some of the references, which are given by Posset. Did Luther refer to the Bernards second Easter sermon indeed? Was he not familiar at all with his Lenten sermons on Ps. 90? Secondly he argues, that Posset's statement, that Luther is a Bernardus redivivus, is a questionable one. Finally: the main question to the relation Luther-Bernard no longer is: did Luther read Bernard's writings and which ones did he explicitely know, but how did he read and understand them from his sixteenth century point of view? This reception problem should get the proper attention it deserves. (shrink)

By way of conclusion we may add the following three items to A. Maier's and G. Federici-Vescovini's investigations: 1. The Questiones super libris Physicorum in the ms. Cesena, B. Malatestiana S.VIII.5 have been incorrectly attributed to John Buridan. Their real author is Albert of Saxony. 2. The ms. Cesena, B. Malatestiana S.VIII.5 ff. 4ra-4vb contains the Prologue and the tabula questionum of the Questions on De gen. et corr., whereas the ms. Vat. lat. 3097 ff. 103ra-146rb has the complete text. (...) This Prologue and the questions 1 and 3 can also be found in Vat. lat. 2185 ff. 50ra-50vb. This text certainly cannot be considered as another copy of Buridan's well known Questions on De gen. et corr. Neither is it certain that Nicole Oresme is their author, as A. Maier seems to believe. There are indications pointing in the direction of a redaction other than the one known, of Buridan's Questions. In any case this possibility cannot be ruled out by the material that has been presented here. 3. The ms. Cesena, B. Malatestiana S.VIII.5 has at one time had the same owner as the codices Vat. lat. 2159, 2160, 2185 and 3066, and the codices Cesena, B. Malatestiana S.VII.5 and S.VIII.2. This owner was in all probability Bernardus a Campanea of Verona, a physician. (shrink)

Die Sculpturen des Vaticanischen Museums, im Auftrage und unter Mitwirkung des kaiserlick deutschen archaeologischen Instituts beschrieben von Walter Amerlung. Berlin: In Kommission bei Georg Reimer. Vol. I., 1903; Vol. II., 1908. Text, 8vo, pp. x + 935, 768. Plates, 4to, 121 + 83. M. 50 per vol.Guida illustrata del Museo Nazionale di Napoli; approvata dal Ministero della Pubblica Istruzione. Compilata da D. Bassi, E. Gábrici, L. Mariani, O. Maruchhi, G. Patroni, G. de Petra, A. Sogliano; per cura di A. (...) Ruesch. Naples: Richter & Co.; Munich: Buchholz, 1908. 8vo. Pp. 500. 129 illustrations in the text. Lire 25. (shrink)

Hermeneutics, the Bible and Literary Criticism. Edited by Ann Loades and Michael McLain.The Craft of Theology: From Symbol to System. By Avery Dulles.The Shape of Soreriology. By John McIntyre.Not the Cross But the Crucfied. By H.‐E. Mertens.Verbum Curo: An Encyclopedia on Jesus, the Christ. By Michael O'Carroll.The Search for the Origins of Christian Worship: Sources and Methods for the Study of the Early Liturgy. By Paul Bradshaw.Worship: Initiation and the Churches. By Leonel L. Mitchell.The Eucharistic Mystery: Revitalizing the Tradition. By (...) David Power.Church of Churches: The Ecclesiology of Communion. By J.‐M. Tillard.God and History, Aspects of British Theology 1875‐1914. By Peter Hinchliff.Clear Heads and Holy Hearts: The Religious and Theological Ideal of John Henry Newman. By Terrence Merrigan.The Desert Fathers on Monastic Community. By Graham Gould.John Moschos, ‘The Spiritual Meadow’. Introduction, translation and notes by John Wortley.A Gentle Touch. By David Pailin.The Eye of the Storm: Spiritual Resources for rhe Pursuit of Justice. By Kenneth Leech.The Church and the Arts. Edited by Diana Wood.Anti‐Christian Polemic in Early Islam: Abu Isa al‐Warraq's ‘Against the Trinity’. Edited by David Thomas.Bernardus Magister: Papers Presented at the Nonacentenary Celebration of the Birth of St Bernard of Clairvaux. Edited by John R. Sommerfeldt.Church and City 1000‐1500: Essays in Honour of Christopher Brooke. Edited by David Abulafia, Michael Franklin and Miri Rubin.‘Piers Plowman’ and the Problem of Belief. By Britton J. Harwood.Ignutius of Luyola: The Psychology of a Saint. By W. W. Meissner.Jerome Naahl, S. J., 1507‐1580: Tracking the First Generation of Jesuits. By William V. Bangert, edited and completed by Thomas M. McCoog.From Bishop to Witch: The System of the Sacred in Early Modern Terra d'Otranto. By David Gentilcore.Civic Politics in the Rome of Urban VIII. By Laurie Nussdorfer.Michel de Montaigne: The Complete Essays. Translated by M. A. Screech.Montaigne and Melancholy: The Wisdom of the ‘Essays’. By M. A. Screech.Religion and Philosophy. Edited by Martin Warner.What is Faith? Essays in the Philosophy of Religion. By Anthony Kenny.Truth and Hisroriciry. By Richard Campbell. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Natural Philosophy: On Retrieving a Lost Disciplinary Imaginary by Alister E. McGRATHJack ZupkoMcGRATH, Alister E. Natural Philosophy: On Retrieving a Lost Disciplinary Imaginary. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023. viii + 248 pp. Cloth, $39.95This book attempts to retrieve and reimagine the tradition of natural philosophy as an antidote for what the author sees as the fragmented, instrumentalized, and ethically disengaged understanding of the natural world most of us (...) have today. The idea is not to reinstate the older vision of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, with its final causes and animated spheres, or even the early modern culmination of natural philosophy in Newton’s universe of mathematically fixed natural laws; rather, the author hopes to engender a newer and deeper understanding of nature that is at once scientific, ethical, and poetic, which he explains in terms of the conceptual framework of Popper’s “Three Worlds”: objective, subjective, and theoretical. What is recovered thereby is said to be a “lost conceptual space” wherein human beings learn both about and from nature, modes of knowing rendered obsolete by disciplinary specialization in the sciences as well as our commitment to objective methods that leave no room for ethical or spiritual approaches to understanding the natural world and our place in it.The author covers quite a bit of ground on the historical side, from the ancient Greeks through the Middle Ages, moving on to the idea of natural philosophy as it was gradually transformed during the early modern period by Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Bacon, Boyle, and Newton—a picture finally eclipsed by the objective, empirical concept of natural science familiar to us today. Curiously, the book says very little about the Platonic tradition of natural philosophy that grew up around the Timaeus. Because it was available in Latin (or the first half of it, anyway, in a Latin translation by the Roman Neoplatonist Calcidius, who also wrote an influential commentary on the work), the Timaeus was, for almost a millennium, the authoritative text in natural philosophy in the West, at least until Aristotle’s nonlogical and scientific writings were recovered in the twelfth century. The Timaeus was the subject of many commentaries and philosophical discussions, from Calcidius in the fourth century to Bernardus Silvestris, William of Conches, and Alan of Lille in the twelfth. It fell out of favor among philosophers with the rise of Aristotle’s Physics and Aristotelian natural philosophy, though it continued to shape the popular imagination of nature in other genres, such as art and literature—recall, for example, the well-known image of “God the Geometer” (c. 1230), measuring the cosmos with a compass. If the author’s project is about “retrieving” natural philosophy “as a lost disciplinary imaginary” (the book’s subtitle), then surely the Platonic vision of the universe deserves equal billing with the Aristotelian. [End Page 158]That said, there is much to like in the project sketched here. The author’s diagnosis of the epistemic malaise of modern-day science sounds right to anyone familiar with the history of philosophy and natural science. So, even though we can now correctly describe the velocity constant of earth’s gravity as 9.8 m/s2, among other scientific achievements, we take ourselves to be wearing a different hat when we wax poetic at the beauty of the sky and the stars. Early-and pre-modern authors were more adept at bringing together science and poetry, but that might be because their epistemic position was radically different from our own. Calcidius, for example, finds it easy to draw moral and aesthetic conclusions from the motions of the cosmos because he really believed heavenly bodies are, like us, animated by souls. Even a materialist like Lucretius accepts that the gods exist; his (still) very radical thesis is that they don’t care about us. (And why should they? The Pythagorean theorem is much more beautiful and edifying to consider than the troubles of ignorant and weak-willed mortals.) Enlightened moderns that we are, we no longer believe the heavens are populated by super-intelligent beings; yet we continue to marvel at Van Gogh’s Starry Night and feel it is wrong to cause gratuitous... (shrink)

Die Sculpturen des Vaticanischen Museums, im Auftrage und unter Mitwirkung des kaiserlick deutschen archaeologischen Instituts beschrieben von Walter Amerlung. Berlin: In Kommission bei Georg Reimer. Vol. I., 1903; Vol. II., 1908. Text, 8vo, pp. x + 935, 768. Plates, 4to, 121 + 83. M. 50 per vol.Guida illustrata del Museo Nazionale di Napoli; approvata dal Ministero della Pubblica Istruzione. Compilata da D. Bassi, E. Gábrici, L. Mariani, O. Maruchhi, G. Patroni, G. de Petra, A. Sogliano; per cura di A. (...) Ruesch. Naples: Richter & Co.; Munich: Buchholz, 1908. 8vo. Pp. 500. 129 illustrations in the text. Lire 25. (shrink)

Now in a thoroughly revised and expanded third edition, this authoritative Handbook reviews current knowledge about all aspects of emotion and its role in human ...

The considerable attention to financial interests in clinical research has focused mostly on academic medical centers, even though the majority of clinical research is conducted in community practice settings. To fill this gap, this article maps the practices and policies in 73 community hospitals and several hundred specialized facilities around the country for reviewing clinical investigators’ financial relationships with research sponsors. Community hospitals face a substantially different mix of issues than academic medical centers do because their physician researchers are usually (...) not employees, and more of their studies are later-phase, multicenter trials. Accordingly, community physicians stand to benefit personally from per capita payments, but they tend to have less direct influence over research findings when compared with their academic peers. These and other contrasts require separate guidance for community-based organizations that takes into account their particular needs, circumstances, and institutional capacities. (shrink)

"The availability of a paperback version of Boyle's philosophical writings selected by M. A. Stewart will be a real service to teachers, students, and scholars with seventeenth-century interests. The editor has shown excellent judgment in bringing together many of the most important works and printing them, for the most part, in unabridged form. The texts have been edited responsibly with emphasis on readability.... Of special interest in connection with Locke and with the reception of Descarte's Corpuscularianism, to students of the (...) Scientific Revolution and of the history of mechanical philosophy, and to those interested in the relations among science, philosophy, and religion. In fact, given the imperfections in and unavailability of the eighteenth-century editions of Boyle’s works, this collection will benefit a wide variety of seventeenth-century scholars." --Gary Hatfield, University of Pennsylvania. (shrink)

A detailed attempt to ground the topological properties of time in the laws of micro- and macro-physical processes. The reversible processes of mechanics are used to define an order among temporally separated events, which is invariant under reversals of time direction. So long as consideration is limited to a single isolated system, a time ensemble, the transfer of the reversibility of the constituent processes of such a system to the system as a whole makes it impossible to define time direction (...) by means of the entropy curve. The directionality of time, accordingly, can only be defined as the direction of the entropy increase of multiple systems, of a space ensemble. A macrostatistical definition of time direction is then based upon the causal relation. The author's view of causation is non-deterministic: the conjunction of two events is caused if they occur together more frequently than can be expected from their chance coincidence. Reichenbach's analyses and arguments are careful and thorough; the book as a whole is a solid achievement. -- M. F. (shrink)

What can the actions of stockbreeders, as they select the best individuals for breeding, teach us about how new species of wild animals and plants come into being? Charles Darwin raised this question in his famous, even notorious, Origin of Species (1859). Darwin's answer - his argument by analogy from artificial to natural selection - is the subject of our book. We aim to clarify what kind of argument it is, how it works, and why Darwin gave it such prominence. (...) As we explain more fully in our Introduction, we believe that the argument becomes much more intelligible when set, contextually, in a story stretching from classical Greek mathematics to modern evolutionary genetics: a long story, and a broad one too, encompassing everything from Darwin's earliest notebook theorising on the births and deaths of species, to agrarian capitalism as a distinctive form of economic life, to shifting Western reflections on art-nature relations. (shrink)

Like the virtue it purports to explain, St Thomas Aquinas' treatment of modestia in the Summa Theologiae is something that can easily be overlooked. Such neglect is unfortunate, for it is liable to obscure the surprising character of Aquinas' account, departing as it does from many of his philosophical sources , to say nothing of our own contemporary assumptions. This novel treatment is especially significant given its potential value in addressing the social and political needs of the current age, for (...) rather than being the virtue least fitted for contemporary life, the modesty that emerges in Thomas' moral theology may have an enduring civic significance. This essay therefore begins with an exegesis of Aquinas' account of modestia and concludes with an analysis of its political dimensions. (shrink)

The article examines the viability of called ‘the knowledge argument’ that was designed to prove the irreducibility of the subjective, phenomenal aspect of experience to the physical. It is argued that this argument can successfully be defended against its criticism. Its critics are represented here by two physicalist approaches: the mode of presentation hypothesis (here Paul Churchland), and the ability hypothesis (here David Lewis and Laurence Nemirow). The defense of the general soundness of the knowledge argument is based on some (...) important insights on the issue in question of Frank Jackson and Howard Robinson. It is argued that the physicalist counterarguments to the knowledge argument seem inadequate. The article concludes that it appears that the knowledge argument has still kept a significant amount of its initial force. (shrink)