Father Raphael C. McCarthy Doctor of Philosophy of London University and Professor of Experimental Psychology at St. Louis University, contributes this paper as a general estimate of the influence which one man has exerted upon the vast and complex network of scientific world thought. We also acknowledge our indebtedness for this paper to Mr. William J. Miller of the School of Philosophy, who prepared it for those pages.

David Friedrich Strauss is a central figure in 19th century intellectual history. The first major source for the loss of faith in Christianity in Germany, his work Das Leben Jesu was the most scandalous publication in Germany during his time. His book was a critique of the claims to historical truth of the New Testament, which had been the mainstay of Protestantism since the Reformation. As the father of unbelief, his critique of Christianity preceded that of Nietzsche, Marx, Feuerbach, (...) and Schopenhauer. His views imposed a harsh fate upon him - he was persecuted for his beliefs by religious and political authorities and was denied employment in the university and government, forcing him to live as a free-lance writer. He led a wandering and isolated life as an outcast. Here, Frederick C. Beiser studies the intellectual development of Strauss and recounts his fate, which began in faith as a young man but finally ended in unbelief. (shrink)

Recently a child’s right to a father was invoked to justify the prevention of single women from obtaining access to IVF. This article explores the conceptual and normative issues about the nature of the right and its conflict with a woman’s right to procreative autonomy. The discussion relates the conceptual issues to those raised in the context of ‘wrongful life’ tort cases. It concludes that the right to be born with a father, although conceptually sound, does not justify (...) the restriction on the procreative right of single women. (shrink)

This study explores company support for men's participation in child care in Sweden, where the government promotes gender equality. The authors investigate the influence of two ideologies about gender, the doctrine of separate spheres and masculine hegemony, on the responsiveness to fathers shown by Sweden's largest corporations. Father-friendly companies had adopted values associated with the private sphere and prioritized entrance of women into the public sphere. Companies with less masculine hegemony provided some informal but no formal support to fathers. (...) Following social justice theory, future research could focus on how fathers come to perceive the lack of corporate responsiveness as unfair. (shrink)

The notion of “inherited guilt,” or ancestral fault, has played a prominent role in scholarship on ancient Greek religion and literature. Although it corresponds to no clearly circumscribed ancient concept, it has acquired something of a self-evident value in philological research. Shaped by centuries of ideological involvement with the Greek material, and by the apparently equivalent Judeo-Christian notions of corporate responsibility and original sin, the term “inherited guilt” imposes a heavy baggage of assumptions and resonances on the material it is (...) meant to describe and translate. Rather than abandoning “inherited guilt” altogether, or simply deconstructing it away, as some scholars have suggested in recent years, a new perspective grounded in a detailed understanding of its tradition is needed to make sense of the abundant and complex material at hand. A thorough engagement with the religiously charged tradition of scholarship is one of the keys to a fruitful redefinition of Greek ancestral fault. The present paper proposes to revisit the seminal discussions of the two contemporary scholars who pioneered the modern professional study of Greek religion: C.A. Lobeck and K.O. Müller. (shrink)

Excerpt from Man and His Divine Father This book aims to bring cheer and hope to human souls. All are puzzled with the problems of their own being and happiness. This is philosophy, and all men are philosophers; but largely without method, and with poor logic, and no first principles. Hence, there is little agreement; and what is called "Reason and Common Sense" is, in a great degree, nonsense. In the chaos of opinions, we try to find the line (...) and system of plain truth. The beginning of wisdom is knowledge of man, the knower, in himself, his powers and limitations. So we first try to discover our Self, and to portray a man. In consciousness is found a selfhood and positiveness, and a consistent, self-proving philosophy of personal life. This describes beings by their doings. It develops the conception of causation into a connected line and system of the whole philosophy of the nature, relations, and destinies of persons. It gathers to itself, and conserves, all known truth; and from it all the errors, follies, and "Isms," philosophical and religious, fall, of their own weight, discredited. This conductive philosophy rejects many, and conserves many, of the old beliefs of men. It confirms itself by rigid logic, lays itself parallel with all other philosophies and sciences, and courts the attacks of all logic that does not use consciousness and activity for its premises. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

A monumental work of scholarship, consisting of thorough and comprehensive treatments of four relatively distinct motifs in the thought of the early Church Fathers. Part One deals with the origin of the problem of faith and reason, together with the various solutions proposed; Part Two treats the Trinity, the Logos, and Platonic Ideas; Part Three examines the three Christian "mysteries"--the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the generation of the Logos; and Part Four details the rise of the heresies, particularly gnosticism. This (...) is a work of exposition rather than of philosophical evaluation, but its scope and detail make it an indispensable starting-point for any future effort to appraise the thought of the early Church Fathers.--A. C. P. (shrink)

Early life -- The decline of Athens -- The making of a philosopher -- A self-proclaimed gadfly -- Socrates on trial -- Socrates' execution and legacy.

The initial impact of John Henry Newman’s 1845 Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine has previously been downplayed because scholars have neglected Roman sources on the question. These sources show that one of the most influential theologians in Rome at the time, Giovanni Perrone, S.J., learned from Newman’s theory and even advocated it publically in the city. After an 1847 exchange with Newman on the question of doctrinal development, Perrone employed Newman’s theory in publications that contributed to the discussions (...) preceding the decree of the Immaculate Conception in 1854. The article goes on to illustrate how Perrone’s influence upon these discussions helped to shape the Church’s official language regarding doctrinal progression in history. (shrink)

Professor C. A. Mace, the psychologist, once wrote: ‘It is difficult … to present and defend any sort of behaviourism whatever without committing oneself to nonsense.’ I shall illustrate this thesis. I shall comment on the writings of some psychologists. This is relevant to my topic; for psychologists' expositions of behaviourism contain much more philosophy than science, and the inconsistencies which permeate their versions of behaviourism reappear in the works of eminent philosophers. My quotation from Mace comes from a paper (...) defending what he calls ‘analytical behaviourism’; which he distinguishes from ‘methodological behaviourism’ and ‘metaphysical behaviourism’. According to Mace, analytical behaviourism does not question the truth of our everyday statements about a person's mind or states of consciousness; what it claims is that such statements ‘turn out to be, on analysis, statements about the behaviour of material things’, that is, about a person's ‘bodily acts, bodily states, bodily dispositions, bodily “states of readiness” to act in various ways’. The father of behaviourism, J. B. Watson, rarely says anything suggesting this doctrine. As he presents it, behaviourism is both a methodological principle and a metaphysical theory. (shrink)

The career of the father of Claudius Etruscus is of special importance in the history of the Imperial administration in the first century A.D. In the course of a long life he rose from slave status under Tiberius to be head of the Imperial financial administration and to equestrian status under Vespasian. He was one of the most important, wealthy, and influential of the Imperial freedmen in the first century when their influence was at its peak; he is one (...) of the best documented of their number outside the pages of Tacitus; yet we do not know his personal name—he has to remain simply ‘the father of Claudius Etruscus’ —and even his nomen gentilicium and the date of his appointment to be the secretary a rationibus are subject to disput. (shrink)

In a discussion-note in Mind, Father P. M. Farrell, O.P., gave an account, in what he admitted to be an embarrassingly brief compass, of the Thomist doctrine concerning evil. There is one sentence in this discussion which at first glance appears paradoxical. Father Farrell has been arguing that a universe containing ‘corruptible good’ as well as incorruptible is better than one containing ‘incorruptible good’ only. He continues: ‘If, however, they are to manifest this corruptible good, they must be (...) corruptible and they must sometimes corrupt.’ The final words, despite Father Farrell's italics, strike one as expressing, not a self-evident truth, but a non sequitur. The fact that I am capable of committing murder does not entail that I will at some time commit it. It is not immediately obvious that a similar entailment holds in the case of corruption and corruptibility. (shrink)

This article shows how there is a great kinship between Polanyi's thought and that of Bernard Haring, "the father of modern moral theology" in the Roman Catholic Church. Haring advocated an ethics of personal responsibility that calls for an epistemology such as Polanyi developed for history and social sciences in The Study of Man.

In this paper I begin by arguing that there are significant intellectual and normative continuities between pre-Victorian hereditarianism and later Victorian eugenical ideologies. Notions of mental heredity and of the dangers of transmitting hereditary 'taints' were already serious concerns among medical practitioners and laymen in the early nineteenth century. I then show how the Victorian period witnessed an increasing tendency for these traditional concerns about hereditary transmission and the integrity of bloodlines to be projected onto the level of national health. (...) Tracing the gradual emergence of eugenical thought, I also highlight some of the more fundamental social, political and intellectual factors that promoted this predilection for extrapolating from the individual lineage to the nation and race. In doing so I argue that fully fledged eugenical thought was always unlikely to emerge prior to the early Victorian period. However, I am also able to show that Francis Galton's 1865 eugenical proposals were far from innovative and that identifying him as the 'father' of the eugenics movement is highly misleading. (shrink)

On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of C. S. Lewis’s death, a special annotated edition of his Christian classic, The Screwtape Letters, with notes and excerpts from his other works that help illuminate this diabolical masterpiece. Since its publication in 1942, The Screwtape Letters has sold millions of copies worldwide and is recognized as a milestone in the history of popular theology. A masterpiece of satire, it offers a sly and ironic portrayal of human life and foibles from the (...) vantage point of Screwtape, a highly placed assistant to “Our Father Below.” At once wildly comic, deadly serious, and strikingly original, The Screwtape Letters comprises the correspondence of the worldly-wise devil Screwtape and his nephew Wormwood, a novice demon in charge of securing the damnation of an ordinary young man. For the first time, The Screwtape Letters will be presented in full-text accompanied by helpful annotations in a striking two-color format. These annotations will give fans a deeper, more nuanced understanding of the popular book, providing background information, explanations of terms, historical significance, and excerpts from Lewis’s other works that more fully explain the ideas in this volume. For both expert Lewis fans and casual readers, The Screwtape Letters: Annotated Edition will be a beautiful and insightful guide to a beloved classic. (shrink)

After consulting the commentaries and the fine remarks of ‘Longinus’ on this passage, a reader may still reasonably feel dissatisfied. Lines 1405–7 are normally taken to mean ‘you have shown fathers, brothers, sons and brides, wives, mothers to be kindred blood’; for the position of Schneidewin-Nauck compare Od. 4.229–30.

Joan of Arc was as a mere 13-year-old girl when she first heard voices and saw visions of the Archangel Michael, Saint Catherine of Alexandria, and Saint Margaret of Antioch in her fathers garden. Both of her female saints were popular in the Middle Ages when these hallucinations began and she would have been familiar with their images as displayed in the local church in Domremy. But it is difficult to understand how a young and inexperienced girl could produce, accept, (...) and follow through on the daunting charge to save France from English incursion during the Hundred Years War, notably in the Battle of Orleans. Was she divinely inspired, mentally ill, or an intuitive genius with paranormal powers of perception? This paper will discuss previous theories by literary figures, as well as by scientists, both past and present, to shed modern neuroscientific insights onto her powers of perception. (shrink)

A thought-provoking comparative take on two seminal thinkers in Christian history In this book -- the first volume in the Kierkegaard as a Christian Thinker series -- Lee Barrett offers a novel comparative interpretation of early church father Augustine and nineteenth-century philosopher-theologian Soren Kierkegaard. Though these two intellectual giants have been paired by historians of Western culture, the exact nature of their similarities and differences has never before been probed in detail. Barrett demonstrates that on many essential theological levels (...) Augustine and Kierkegaard were more convergent than divergent. Most significantly, their parallels point to a distinctive understanding of the Christian life as a passion for self-giving love. Approaching Kierkegaard through the lens of Augustine, Barrett argues, enables the theme of desire for fulfillment in God to be seen as much more central to Kierkegaard's thought than previously imagined. (shrink)

Belief in propositions has had a long and distinguished history in analytic philosophy. Three of the founding fathers of analytic philosophy, Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, and G. E. Moore, believed in propositions. Many philosophers since then have shared this belief; and the belief is widely, though certainly not universally, accepted among philosophers today. Among contemporary philosophers who believe in propositions, many, and perhaps even most, take them to be structured entities with individuals, properties, and relations as constituents. For example, the (...) proposition that Glenn loves Tracy has Glenn, the loving relation, and Tracy as constituents. What is it, then, that binds these constituents together and imposes structure on them? And if the proposition that Glenn loves Tracy is distinct from the proposition that Tracy loves Glenn yet both have the same constituents, what is about the way these constituents are structured or bound together that makes them two different propositions? In The Nature and Structure of Content, Jeffrey C. King formulates a detailed account of the metaphysical nature of propositions, and provides fresh answers to the above questions. In addition to explaining what it is that binds together the constituents of structured propositions and imposes structure on them, King deals with some of the standard objections to accounts of propositions: he shows that there is no mystery about what propositions are; that given certain minimal assumptions, it follows that they exist; and that on his approach, we can see how and why propositions manage to have truth conditions and represent the world as being a certain way. The Nature and Structure of Content also contains a detailed account of the nature of tense and modality, and provides a solution to the paradox of analysis. Scholars and students working in the philosophy of mind and language will find this book rewarding reading. (shrink)

Lazare Carnot was the unique example in the history of science of someone who inadvertently owed the scientific recognition he eventually achieved to earlier political prominence. He and his son Sadi produced work that derived from their training as engineers and went largely unnoticed by physicists for a generation or more, even though their respective work introduced concepts that proved fundamental when taken up later by other hands. There was, moreover, a filial as well as substantive relation between the work (...) of father and son. Sadi applied to the functioning of heat engines the analysis that his father had developed in his study of the operation of ordinary machines. Specifically, Sadi's idea of a reversible process originated in the use his father made of geometric motions in the analysis of machines in general. (shrink)

Pierre Bayle can lay claim to having fathered the history of philosophy or the history of ideas. Marx at any rate said of his Dictionnaire that it "wrote the epitaph of philosophy." He was also the founder of the journal Nouvelles de la République des Lettres—one of the forerunners of the modern academic journal—in whose Preface he wrote: "il s'agit [ici] de Science: on doit donc mettre bas tous les termes qui divisent les hommes en différentes factions et considérer seulement (...) le point dans lequel ils se réunissent, qui est la qualité d'Homme illustre dans la République des Lettres." Mme. Labrousse devotes the first two chapters to an elucidation of the connection between Bayle's active interest in science and in the history of ideas, a connection all the more obscure because science for Bayle meant roughly Cartesian mechanism, and Descartes was notably anti-historical. While the author's observations are pertinent, it would seem that the connecting link is overlooked: the Discours de la méthode is itself a history. However that may be, this well executed work will serve as an appropriate introduction to the issues in the very extensive writings of one of the moving spirits of the Enlightenment.—H. C. (shrink)

Father Raphael C. McCarthy Doctor of Philosophy of London University and Professor of Experimental Psychology at St. Louis University, contributes this paper as a general estimate of the influence which one man has exerted upon the vast and complex network of scientific world thought. We also acknowledge our indebtedness for this paper to Mr. William J. Miller of the School of Philosophy, who prepared it for those pages.

Prowse, Christopher C On 27 October 2010, His Holiness, Pope Benedict XVI, announced that the topic for the XIII Ordinary General Assembly in Rome (7-28 October 2012) would be 'The New Evangelisation for the Transmission of the Christian Faith.' This was not entirely unexpected given the importance this topic has generated in the documents of the Second Vatican Council, and in the teachings of Popes Paul VI, John Paul II and now Benedict XVI. Clearly, with the establishment of the ad (...) hoc dicastery (21 September 2010) on evangelisation, the Holy Father, Benedict XVI, wishes to raise the promotion of this vital topic to an even higher level. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Primacy of God: The Virtue of Religion in Catholic Theology by R. Jared StaudtD. C. SchindlerThe Primacy of God: The Virtue of Religion in Catholic Theology. By R. Jared Staudt. Steubenville, Ohio: Emmaus Academic, 2022. Pp. xii + 409. $49.95 (hardcover). ISBN: 978-1-64585-167-7.Echoing and amplifying a theme from his predecessor, Benedict XVI was known for insisting that the deepest problem of our age, which has not only (...) distorted the culture of the West but has indeed in some ways infected the life of the Church itself, is the forgottenness of God. Recalling the “memory of God” is arguably what Benedict conceived to be the central mission of his papacy, and by that he meant recovering a sense of the primacy of God, not just in matters of private faith, but as a fundamental principle ordering the whole of human existence. In this respect, one can imagine that Benedict would have been heartened to see the new book by R. Jared Staudt, The Primacy of God: The Virtue of Religion in Catholic Theology, which draws not only on Joseph Ratzinger, but also Hans Urs von Balthasar, Christopher Dawson, and, most fundamentally, Thomas Aquinas, to show, indeed, that there is nothing more fundamental than religion.What prompts the need for such an effort is the pervasive sociological reduction of religion in the contemporary imagination to a culturally conditioned set of beliefs and practices that concern God, the divine, or in any event the “afterlife.” In other words, religion is wholly immanentized, understood as an essentially human contrivance, by which man attempts to relate himself to what he takes to be God. It is just this interpretation that lies behind the general assumption of the phenomenon of “religious pluralism”: the world is made up of a potentially infinite number of “different religions,” all of which must be “tolerated” (i.e., must be relegated to a circumscribed social space that renders them more or less politically innocuous) because they offer no rational basis for any sort of arbitration. In contrast to the more typically Protestant response to this “humanistic” reduction of religion, exemplified by Karl Barth, which would insist that Christianity is not “a religion,” Staudt attempts to recover a more robust tradition that recognizes both the deep natural roots of religion and the supernatural distinctiveness of Christianity. To do so, he wisely adopts what he calls a “ressourcement Thomist” approach, but what we might call a genuinely Catholic—and catholic—perspective, namely, one that affirms Thomas Aquinas as a culminating figure of the classical Christian tradition, rather than as one [End Page 685] current of that tradition that defines itself principally in contrast to other currents. In other words, Staudt reads Aquinas in light of Scripture, the Fathers of the Church, and classical philosophy, on the one hand, and in positively disposed engagement with more recent thinkers, such as Ratzinger and Balthasar, on the other. In treating such a fundamental theme as religion, it is especially fitting to attempt to take a fundamental, rather than a “partisan,” approach.The book falls into three basic parts. The first part seeks, in three chapters, to lay out the basic principles of the argument. In chapter 1, Staudt contrasts the opposition Barth presents between religion and the revelation of Scripture, to Aquinas’s interpretation of religion, which integrates philosophy—in this case, Cicero—with Scripture. Chapter 2 considers another objection to Christian religion, this time from the other side, namely, Kant’s attempt to rethink religion from within the limits of reason, and therefore in separation from God. The third chapter sets up the book’s second part by considering religion “as an unfolding of law” (11), specifically, as a matter that, while rooted in natural law, must contend, in its historical enactment, with the distorting reality of sin and the redemption of grace. In other words, religion must be considered in its fundamental expression in the Old Law, and in its fulfillment in the New.The second part of the book investigates in more depth the specifically Christian reality of religion, again in three chapters. Chapter 4 presents religion as exemplified in the... (shrink)

The author attempts "a critical rethinking of the metaphysics of the Aristotelian and Thomistic tradition." There is no single argument or theme, but rather a series of fairly distinct though interrelated treatments of the main topics of Thomistic metaphysics--being, the thinking of being, analogy, substance, causation, etc. Father Hawkins tries always, on the basis of certain traditional presuppositions, to think through a problem in his own way, often in the light of contemporary developments in metaphysical theory, and to express (...) his results in clear and simple language, refreshingly free from jargon.--V. C. C. (shrink)

Two-thirds of this book are devoted to an examination of the variants in "the" Christian attitude towards sex, from the "essentially positive" Biblical view, through its replacement by the negative views of the early Church Fathers, influenced by Hellenistic dualisms, to the positions of certain contemporary theologians, both Catholic and Protestant. The book's concluding section makes a strong case against the rigidity and artificiality of much modern theological thinking about sex, and urges, on the basis of the discoveries of psychoanalysts (...) as well as of good sense, a return to a naturalism more in keeping with the Biblical spirit. Mr. Cole's writing is graceful and sensitive, his points generally sound and well taken, and his arguments compelling. --V. C. C. (shrink)

Two of the most influential arguments in favour of the permissibility of abortion were put forward in the latter half of the twentieth century by Judith Jarvis Thomson and Mary Anne Warren. The implications of these arguments for unwilling putative fathers have largely not been considered. Some have argued that Thomson's defence of abortion might allow a man under certain circumstances to terminate his parental responsibilities and rights. To my knowledge, nobody has considered the implications of Warren's argument for men. (...) I will consider the implications of both arguments for men. I will argue that if they are successful defences of abortion then they are also successful in justifying a male counterpart to abortion which I label ‘elective abandonment’. I will not be defending or attacking these arguments as defences of abortion, but will defend the claim that they apply as well to elective abandonment as they do to abortion. (shrink)

ASD VIII, 1 publishes texts by Erasmus related to the Church Fathers: the Vitae of Jerome, John Chrysostom and Origen, the forgery ‘Cyprian’s _De duplici martyrio_, and the prefaces to the Fathers of the Church.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Birth-Mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary HistoryC. S. SchreinerThe Birth-Mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History, by Susan Howe; 189 pp. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1993, $40.00.In the interview which concludes The Birth-Mark, Susan Howe says that during childhood her Boston household was visited by such pioneers of American studies as Perry Miller and F. O. Matthiessen. Career-wise, however, Howe’s path to academia has be (...) en indirect: born in 1937, she gained her first professorship in 1989 in the Poetics Program at SUNY Buffalo. A visual artist by [End Page 192] training, Howe veered into a genre of writing in the 1970s that seeks to “install certain narrativ es somewhere between history, mystic speech, and poetry” (p. 44). Her poetry includes Secret History of the Dividing Line (1978), Pythagorean Silence (1982), and Defenestration of Prague (1983). In 1985 she published an original criti cal study, My Emily Dickinson, which criticized editors for having homogenized the format and typography of Dickinson’s manuscripts, taming the unruly rigor of poems which were originally “multifaceted visual and verbal productions.” Howe also argu ed that the Amherst poet should not be viewed as a victim of repression, as many feminists see her, but as a refuser of congregations, a powerful will-to-reclusion in art—“One unchosen American women alone at home and choosing.” Emily’s home was a nomadi c space between orthodoxies.An understanding of Howe’s kinship with Dickinson’s poetic daring is helpful for reading The Birth-Mark, whose prose is poetic, and whose protagonist, Mary Rowlandson, shared Dickinson’s “stubborn strength in isolation.” The captivity narratives ar e portals into the antinomian controversy of New England, which was “the primordial struggle of North American literary expression” (p. 4). It is not Gilbert and Gubar to whom Howe has recourse in her analyses of hostage consciousness. She cites the philo sophy of Emmanuel Lévinas. As with feminism, which she extends rather than follows, Howe takes up the philosophy of alterity without its orthodoxy. (In the face of frontier brutality she cannot discern the “Father of orphans and defender of widows” of Psalm 68.) Encounters in the wilderness of tribes, woods, and waters aroused an immodest otherness within the American literary unconscious, unsettling the styles of expression and selfhood which the puritan colonies were trying to instantiate. The literary awakening of Dickinson, Rowlandson, Melville, Hawthorne, and other writers was not due to the Great Awakening urged by churches, but to the traumatic transfer of sovereignty from God to frontier, a permanent revolution to which these writers’ imaginations would remain exposed.Howe’s new foray into criticism tracks the textual marginalia which yield the visionary utterances of Rowlandson and Hutchinson. A self-confessed “library cormorant,” Howe gathers a quiet spectacle of testimonies, those of separated loved ones dragged int o “Removes” by tribes of Native Americans. These resonant texts from New England village libraries and major collections at Harvard, are melded together by Howe’s intuitive, almost telepathic sensibility into a kind of spiritual drama informed by critical acumen. Howe takes her bearings from Patricia Caldwell’s essay “The Antinomian Language Controversy,” which appeared in the Harvard Theological Review in 1976. The dislocating frontier experience for Hutchinson, Rowlandson, and others forced the c reation of a different language. It is with this antinomian language that Howe develops a sensitive rapport, echoing its myriad haunting voices in her commentaries. What Gadamer calls effective history broods and rustles inside her [End Page 193] writing with lyrical unease. Indeed, Howe’s work is a creative example of the fusion of horizons which Gadamer says epitomizes the hermeneutic event. Howe’s personal method as revealed in her interview: “Not to explain the work, not to trans late it, but to meet the work with writing... Not just to write a tribute, but to meet her [Dickinson] in the tribute. And that’s a kind of fusion” (p. 158). Some scholars will find her method obscure. But it’s hard to find anything negative at this height. Howe would have us meet others at their most exposed, delicate point, where their vulnerability... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Was Isaac Newton an Arian?Thomas C. PfizenmaierHistorians of Newton's thought have been wide ranging in their assessment of his conception of the trinity. David Brewster, in his The Life of Sir Isaac Newton (1831), was fully convinced that Newton was an orthodox trinitarian, although he recognized that "a traditionary belief has long prevailed that Newton was an Arian."1 Two reasons were used to defend his conclusion that Newton was (...) orthodox. The first was a letter from John Craig, a friend of Newton, written shortly after Newton's death to John Conduitt, the husband of Newton's niece. In this letter Craig remarked that Newton's theological opinions "were sometimes different from those which are commonly received" but that he hoped Conduitt would publish Newton's theological papers, "that the world may see that Sir Isaac Newton was as good a Christian as he was a mathematician and philosopher."2 The second reason with which Brewster defended his conclusion was his acknowledgment that the doctrine of the trinity itself had variations.I had no hesitation when writing the Life of Sir Isaac Newton in 1830, in coming to the conclusion that he was a believer in the Trinity; and in giving this opinion on the creed of so great a man, and so indefatigable a student of scripture, I was well aware that there are various forms of Trinitarian truth, and various modes of expressing it, which have been received as orthodox in the purest societies of the Christian Church.3L. T. More in his biography Isaac Newton gently chided Brewster for not publishing some of the crucial manuscripts, which eventually became [End Page 57] part of the Keynes collection.4 From these additional manuscripts More reached the conclusion that Newton was not orthodox but an Arian. He proceeded to say that Newton was not only an Arian but, because of the manner in which he understood Jesus' role as prophet, a Unitarian.5More recently the famous British economist John M. Keynes, who considered it a great "impiety" that the Portsmouth family's collection of Newton's non-scientific manuscripts were dispersed at the Sotheby's auction in 1936 and who recovered about half of them creating the "Keynes" collection at Cambridge, provided yet a third interpretation of Newton's thought.Very early in life Newton abandoned orthodox belief in the Trinity. At this time the Socinians were an important Arian sect amongst intellectual circles. It may be that Newton fell under Socinian influences, but I think not. He was rather a Judaic monotheist of the school of Maimonides. He arrived at this conclusion, not on so-to-speak rational or skeptical grounds, but entirely on the interpretation of ancient authority. He was persuaded that the revealed documents give no support to the Trinitarian doctrines which were due to late falsifications. The revealed God was one God.6Among contemporary scholars, the consensus is that Newton was an Arian rather than a Socinian.7 This view is clearly expressed by Richard [End Page 58] Westfall who writes, "Well before 1675, Newton had become an Arian in the original sense of the term. He recognized Christ as a divine mediator between God and man, who was subordinate to the Father who created him."8 Yet Frank Manuel, in his The Religion of Isaac Newton (1974), advises that we not try to push Newton into a theological categorization too quickly. He reminds us that Newton was, if nothing else, an original thinker.It is an error to seize upon his antitrinitrianism in order to pigeonhole him in one of the recognized categories of heresy—Arian, Socinian, Unitarian, or Deist.9So how did Isaac Newton conceive of the trinity? In exploring his writing on the subject we will be guided by two principles mentioned above. The first is Brewster's insight that the trinitarian doctrine has in fact been understood with a certain degree of variety within the sphere of orthodoxy. The second is from Manuel's reminder, that we must resist the temptation to make Newton "fit" some predetermined category or school of trinitarian thought. We will begin by looking at the resources available for studying... (shrink)

Launched in 1971, _Adolescent Psychiatry_, in the words of founding coeditors Sherman C. Feinstein, Peter L. Giovacchini, and Arthur A. Miller, promised "to explore adolescence as a process...to enter challenging and exciting areas that may have profound effects on our basic concepts." Further, they promised "a series that will provide a forum for the expression of ideas and problems that plague and excite so many of us working in this enigmatic but fascinating field." For over two decades, _Adolescent Psychiatry_ has (...) fulfilled this promise. The repository of a wealth of original studies by preeminent clinicians, developmental researchers, and social scientists specializing in this stage of life, the series has become an essential resource for all mental health professionals working with youth. Volume 20 of the series serves as a tribute to editor emeritus Sherman C. Feinstein. In addition to an appreciation of, and contributions by, Dr. Feinstein, it contains heretofore unpublished papers by two other major figures in adolescent psychiatry, founding father William Schonfeld and a Viennese colleague transplanted to America, Siegfried Bernfeld. With sections on general considerations of adolescence, specific syndromes, and treatment modalities, volume 20 presents the work of many of today's preeminent minds in adolescent psychiatry. (shrink)

The history of philosophy has been unkind to philosophers who lived after Ockham and before Descartes, and Randall's great work here does much to make amends. With rare scholarship, he traces the outworking of the Medieval themes of neo-Platonism, Aristotelianism, and Ockhamite nominalism through the later Scholastics and early Italian Renaissance thinkers to their issue in the fathers of modern science. Then he traces the assimilation of those themes into the 17th century systems which posed the problems still in the (...) center today. His discussion of the following periods takes into account ethics and psychology as well as the relation between reason and science which dominated his earlier discussion; Randall is at his best in his comparative development of themes rather than in simple exposition of those modern thinkers who have received more detailed and careful treatment in extensive commentaries.--R. C. N. (shrink)

In this Festschrift some of Paul Weiss's friends, colleagues, and students have produced a splendid collection of original philosophical essays. Contributions by Charles Hendel, Charles Hartshorne, Robert Brumbaugh, Nathan Rotenstreich, A. Boyce Gibson, John Wild, and fourteen others are included. Outstanding are Father Johann's introduction of a contemporary view of experience into Neo-Thomism, William Earle's phenomenological analysis of love, and Father Clarke's discussion of causality. While the doctrines urged are not uniform, the standard of excellence is. I. C. (...) Lieb, whose editorial skill is evident throughout, has produced a distinguished volume which honors Paul Weiss by its contribution to contemporary philosophical inquiry. --R. C. N. (shrink)