In 1245 Canon Law reaches an apex. A Lawyer-Pope Innocent IV proclaims at the Œcumenical Council of Lyons the prestige of Canon Law and his professors. Canon Law is perceived as a new and sometimes controversial ecclesiastical science of power. This new status can be explained by the growth of the ius commune in Italian universities and the rivalries between Roman Law, Canon Law and theology. Innocent IV promotes the figure of the ecclesiastical judge. He also delineates an ecclesiology (...) where the world would be united by an universal religion of Natural Law. (shrink)

The fundamental thought of moral relativism is set out as follows: moral criteria, derived from overall moral points of view, are used to derive particular moral judgments. Thus such a judgment might be correct relative to one overall moral point of view and incorrect relative to another. The evaluation of an overall moral point of view does not involve the application of moral criteria. Rather, the evaluation of a morality takes us outside the province of morality. The result of sharpening (...) this view is a doctrine called system relativism. System relativism is contrasted with other conceptions of moral relativism that have recently been propounded. It is argued that system relativism is the most defensible version. (shrink)

Table of Contents 0. Introduction Part I. Life and mechanism 1. Guido Giglioni (Macerata) Scaliger Bacon Harvey: A Trajectory in the Early Modern History of Vegetative Life 2. Andreas Blank (Klagenfurt) Jacob Schegk on Plants, Medicaments, and the Question of Emergence 3. Oana Matei (Arad/Bucharest) Particles, universal spirit, and seeds: John Evelyn's theory of matter in Elysium Britannicum 4. Luca Tonetti (Bologna) Stimulus and fibre theory in Giorgio Baglivi’s medicine: A reassessment 5. Antonio Clericuzio (Roma Tre) ‘Febris non est morbus, (...) sed bellum contra morbum’. A study of seventeenth-century theories of fevers. 6. Riccardo Chiaradonna (Roma Tre) Plotinus and Ficino in Ralph Cudworth’s philosophy of nature 7. Raphaële Andrault (CNRS-ENS Lyon) The chain of motions and the chain of thoughts. The diachronic mechanism of Spinoza's friends. 8. Antonio M. Nunziante (Padova) Both Natural and Supernatural: Leibniz’s Integrated Model of Life 9. Marco Storni (Neuchâtel) Experience, Analogy and Mechanism in Maupertuis’s Theory of Generation 10. Cécilia Bognon-Küss (Louvain-La-Neuve) Intussusception, vital mechanisms and the ontology of life 11. Charles Wolfe (Toulouse) Expanded mechanism or heuristic vitalism? Part II. Mechanisms of the mind 12. Emanuela Scribano (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice) Powers of the Body and Eclipse of the Soul. From Descartes On 13. Ursula Renz (Graz) Shaftesbury’s Conception of Human Thought 14. Matteo Favaretti Camposampiero (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice) Psychology and Mechanism: Christian Wolff on the Soul-Body Analogy 15. Federico Boccaccini (Brasilia) Mental Machinery and active powers from Hartley to Ward 16. Paolo Pecere (Roma Tre) Mechanism, organization, mind: a Kantian legacy in 19th century psychology 17. Lydia Patton (Virginia Tech) Organic Memory and the Perils of Perigenesis: the Helmholtz-Hering Debate. (shrink)

This book presents the current thinking of some of the most famous people in the intellectual world. Two opening essays by Lewis Mumford and Robert Theobald dis­cuss the role of technology in history, man and technology, and technological possi­bilities for the future. Other contributors include such well-known figures as Max Lerner, Edgar Z. Friedenberg, Seymour Melman, Seymour Martin Lipset, and Ash­ley Montagu. Essays center around key is­sues in the study of technology, its rela­tionship to authority or leadership elites, its potential (...) impact on forms of social organization, its effect in producing counter-culture alternatives and its relationship to humanism. (shrink)

One of the major objectives of this book is to make Thomistic metaphysics--an inquiry into the act of existing, the act of "to be,"exercised by all beings to some degree--more understandable to the man of ordinary intellectual training. Therefore, the various problems of metaphysics and their solutions are presented in the simplest terms possible, with special emphasis on their significance for the contemporary mind.

In this paper, I have two primary goals. First, I show that the causal-based story approach in A hybrid formal theory of arguments, stories and criminal evidence is ill suited to negative causation. In the literature, the causal-based approach requires that hypothetical stories be causally linked to the explanandum. Many take these links to denote physical or psychological causation, or temporal precedence. However, understanding causality in those terms, as I will show, cannot capture cases of negative causation, which are of (...) interest to the Law. In keeping with this, I also discuss some of the difficulties Hybrid Theory invites by remaining silent on the nature of the causal links. In my second aim, I sketch a way for Hybrid Theory to overcome this problem. By replacing the original, underlying causal structure with contrastive causation in the law, Hybrid Theory can represent reasoning in which the evidence that is appealed to is causally linked via negative causation to the explananda. (shrink)

Charles A. Baylis; VII—Foundations For a Presentative Theory of Perception and Sensation, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 66, Issue 1, 1 June 19.

The author has written critiques of Whitehead’s theory of perception and here gives new reasons to doubt the cogency and consistency of this theory of Whitehead’s. In particular, he argues that Whitehead’s account of perception in the mode of causal efficacy is question-begging.