In this huge study the author presents a systematic and thematic overview of all concepts and ideas, that are basic and gave shape to Western thinking about history: Jewish and Christian concepts of redemptive history, particularism vs. universal concepts, ethnocentric concepts, typology, eschatology and the apocalyptic. He considers concepts of history in the Classical Age, the Middle Ages, Reformation, the Age of Enlightenment, the Romantic Age, Humanism, Positivism, the impact of the Holocaust and Postmodernism. He offers a critical treatment of (...) themes as the periodizing of history, continuity and discontinuity, optimistic and pessimistic theories, repetitive and non-repetitive theories. (shrink)

The scientific advances made in the last two centuries have drastically improved the quality and structure of human existence. Exploring the history of that technological progress, and the numerous and complex elements that propelled its development, the _Encyclopedia of Technological Progress_ attempts to comprehensively classify the theories and hypotheses proposed in modern human history on the effects, meaning, and control of these advances. This massive and learned reference work draws on a wide range of disciplines in its study of technological (...) development, including philosophy, sociology, theology, history, and literature, as well as writings found in newspapers, political speeches, letters, and sermons, among other sources. “It is exceedingly important... that we should seek to understand more deeply the nature of technological development and very timely that this book should have appeared now to give distance and perspective to our efforts in this direction.”—Alexander King, president of the Club of Rome. (shrink)

In this paper, we examine the relationship between Christian religiosity, attitudes towards corporate social responsibility, and CSR behavior of executives. We distinguish four types of CSR attitudes and five types of CSR behavior. Based on empirical research conducted among 473 Dutch executives, we find that CSR attitudes mediate the influence of religiosity on CSR behavior. Intrinsic religiosity positively affects the ethical CSR attitude and negatively affects the financial CSR attitude, whereas extrinsic religiosity stimulates the philanthropic CSR attitude. Financial, ethical, and (...) philanthropic CSR attitudes significantly affect some types of CSR behaviors. However, because religiosity has opposing effects on the three attitudes, the joint mediation effect of the three attitudes is negligible. Furthermore, we find a direct negative influence of intrinsic religiosity on diversity and a direct positive influence on charity. (shrink)

Bijdragen over de actuele betekenis van de filosofie, met name de Reformatorische Wijsbegeerte.

This monograph deals with the aboutness of language.

The Faculty of Theology at the University of Pretoria celebrates its centenary in 2017. Theological training at the university started in 1917 when the Nederduitsch Hervormde Kerk van Afrika decided to train its own ministers. In 1937 the Dutch Reformed Church decided to establish a faculty of its own at the university. This led to a faculty with two sections: Section A for the Nederduitsch Hervormde Kerk and Section B for the Dutch Reformed Church. This was the situation until 2000 (...) when the two faculties merged to become one. Although theological training by the Dutch Reformed Church only started in 1938, their faculty, Section B was an important partner through the 100 years of theological training. This article gives a chronology of the history of the Faculty of Theology Section B as partner in the history of theological training at the University of Pretoria. (shrink)

Eighteenth-century German Statistik was an empirical and descriptive discipline of "the land and the people." As the study of material conditions it provided governments with information to assess the strength of their own state in comparison with others. Its adherents' claim that Statistik was a useful science, however, was severely tempered by their empirical method and holistic view of society. As a "science of the present" it was seriously challenged by the recognition of the essential historicity of its subject matter. (...) Both circumstances explain the decline of Statistik from which mathematical statistics, political economy, and political historiography profited. (shrink)

The Rawlsian conception of constituent power in Alessandro Ferrara’s Sovereignty Across Generations is burdened by a deep contradiction that renders the central argument in the book highly questionable. On the one hand, Rawls is (correctly in my view) presented as the thinker that confronted contemporary political theory with the problem of divisive pluralism. On the other hand, Rawls is also presented (incorrectly in my view) as the thinker who then suddenly found a solution for this divisive pluralism in the ‘common (...) values’ that all the members of these divisively pluralist societies share ‘unproblematically’. The combination of these two moves leaves one with the sense that Rawls rather frivolously put up the problem of divisive pluralism like a strawman that he could shoot down again without much ado. This article proposes a different reading of Rawls that considers him a serious thinker who did not amuse himself and his readers with strawman-problems. For this reading of Rawls, guidance is drawn from Hans Kelsen, the very thinker whom Sovereignty Across Generations casually dismisses for failing to grasp or appreciate the ‘common values’ that pluralist societies share so ‘unproblematically’. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Microscope of Experience: Christian Garve’s Translation of Cicero’s De Officiis (1783)Johan van der ZandeDuring the negotiations leading to the Treaty of Teschen of 1779, ending the phony War of Bavarian Succession, Frederick II and his court stayed in Breslau, the capital of Silesia. There, in conversation with Christian Garve, the city’s most famous son, the king strongly recommended a new German translation of Cicero’s On Moral Duties (...) (De Officiis), one of the classical texts of humanist philosophy and his favorite book. Frederick’s faithful subject dutifully obliged his sovereign. Four years later, in the subservient language of a dedication to a royal patron, Garve offered in due obedience to Frederick a result that, “perhaps flawed,” was “vindicated by the efforts directed toward the execution of the command.” 1Yet Garve’s interest in Cicero differed markedly from that of Frederick. After all, as Garve wrote in the preface to the philosophical commentary on his translation, Cicero’s book was written for “persons of the higher classes who participated in the affairs of state” and for whom “moral prescription often transformed into political instruction.” Clearly that was not the world in which Garve lived. The son of an artisan, Garve, after a brief stint as a professor of philosophy in Leipzig in the early 1770s, was forced by his illness to spend the rest of his life as a reclusive private scholar in his hometown. He admitted that Cicero sometimes “condescended to deal with those classes who occupy themselves as educators and scholars.” The producing classes, however, “this vast, indispensable, and valuable part of humankind,” could only find prescriptions [End Page 75] for the virtuous life in Cicero’s work insofar as they were human beings, not in relation to their station in life. In general terms Garve thought that Cicero had neglected to deal sufficiently with domestic duties, a reproach which he also leveled against another intellectual pedigree, Adam Ferguson. This did not mean, however, that Garve reduced the citizen’s actions to the private sphere, where they could be productive economically and concerned only with their own Bildung. On the contrary, for Garve useful citizens were those who committed themselves to sociability and to political engagement. Moral actions were not only to be judged according to their motivation (as Kant asserted) but also on their effects on society at large.This different emphasis, I suggest, was typical of the German popular philosophers, who in the time span between Christian Wolff and Immanuel Kant formulated a philosophy of life and among whom Garve emerged as the foremost representative. As a group they constituted a philosophical movement in their own right and were not merely, as they are usually described, the popularizers of Wolff’s philosophy. Rather, popular philosophy was a characteristic compound of Wolffian rationalism and British empiricism. Some popular philosophers, mostly the older generation, were more inclined to the rationalist and others, among them Garve, to the empirical end of this spectrum. Little concerned with epistemological problems or with the irrational cult of life as were the life philosophies of the nineteenth century, the popular philosophers were primarily interested in the virtuous life, in a philosophical theory of moral and aesthetic action. Theirs was a “science of man,” that is, a combination of practical philosophy and literary skills with the goal of morally educating a literate but non-specialized public to be useful citizens of the absolute state. They wanted to speak with propriety on all themes of human existence rather than pursue those philosophical questions not directly related to human life. 2 I entirely agree with a recent commentator who describes Garve’s concerns as non-bourgeois, or better, pre-bourgeois and deeply rooted in humanist values. 3This approach shows in Garve’s Cicero translation and commentary. In Leipzig he had attended the lectures of the classical philologist Friedrich Wilhelm Reiz, who trained his students in precise, critical scholarship. When Garve became a professor himself, he and Reiz anonymously published a Latin edition of Aristotle’s Rhetoric. Later, Garve wrote that his own philosophy was indebted to Reiz who had pointed out to him the close relationship between linguistic and... (shrink)

Hoewel in de laatste jaren sterk de nadruk is gelegd op de “autonomie” van het geschrevene ten opzichte van de schrijver en diens belevingswereld, wil deze auteur graag beginnen met een persoonlijke betuiging van erkentelijkheid. Een mens is toch wel zodanig verbonden met een geesteskind dat hij lang bij zich gedragen heeft, dat hij de aandacht en de grondigheid die uit de hiervoor geplaatste reacties spreekt, alleen maar in hoge mate kan waarderen. Hij heeft ze ervaren als toonbeelden van “ontmoeting”. (...) De verschillen tussen de drie reacties laten nog eens zien dat ontmoeting verre van monotoon is. Juist ook die verschillen vond ik leerzaam. Bij de opzet van mijn repliek wil ik aan de diversiteit zo goed mogelijk recht doen door de reacties stuk voor stuk te bespreken. Af en toe zal een “intertekstuele” opmerking wenselijk of onvermijdelijk zijn. Overigens vrees ik dat binnen het bestek van deze repliek niet voldoende ingegaan kan worden op alle vragen en tegenwerpingen. (shrink)

Education in Africa is in a crisis. Some scholars go as far as to say that it is broken. This was also noted when the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, linked to the Agenda 2063: The Africa We Want, were developed. One of the goals was defined as to ‘Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all’. This article explores the important role of education in transforming societies. To achieve this objective, the research in this (...) article is based on a qualitative literature search. It focuses on relevant literature that included books, scholarly articles, online articles and scientific data provided by Statistics South Africa. It starts off by describing the brokenness of education in South Africa through the latest statistics that provide a very dark picture of education in the country. In the second place, the article revisits the Reformation to indicate that the church can and is called to play an important role in the improvement of education. The article concludes with two examples of how church organisations and specific churches in South Africa take up the challenge to transform societies through specific educational programmes.Contribution: Specific mention is made of the programme of the South African Council of Churches called The South Africa We Pray For and Little Seeds, which is a combined programme in Early Childhood Development. As such, what happens in South Africa can be an example to the rest of Africa. (shrink)

This monograph-length contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium “Peace by Other Means” reviews and assesses the state of ethnographic and political scholarship concerning how nonstate, tribal societies deal with peacemaking and peacekeeping. A central argument is that the condition among nonstate societies was and is neither one of permanent war nor one of permanent peace but one of permanent peacelessness. Nonstate societies recognize the danger of warfare and take measures to reduce its likelihood, or at least try to mitigate its (...) destructiveness. This article treats the politics, strategies, and practices of peacemaking in tribal societies throughout the world, as well as the full spectrum of attempts at war mitigation. (shrink)

In January and February 2023, the University of Luxembourg hosted a series of four online seminars on Frank Michelman’s then just recently published book Constitutional Essentials ( CE), a book which in Frank’s own words aimed to work out the implications of Rawls' theory of political liberalism for constitutional theory and debates between constitutional lawyers regarding a number of constantly recurring questions of constitutional law. Eleven of the invited contributions to the four seminars (presentations of 15–20 minutes) plus one additional (...) contribution by Silje Langvatn, are now collected in this special issue of Philosophy & Social Criticism, followed by a response by Michelman. This introduction to the discussions between Michelman and his interlocutors begins with a brief synopsis of some of the key lines of argument that Michelman develops in CE and then moves on to survey all the arguments offered in response. The last section takes a briefly look at Michelman’s replies to these responses. (shrink)

Prof. W.A. Dreyer played an important role in the continuous reformation of the Nederduitsch Hervormde Kerk van Afrika (NHKA). This contribution to his Festschrift is not about him. He would not want that. It is about the church and how his understanding of reformed ecclesiology became the basis on which the transformation from ‘ Volkskerk ’ to missional church took place. According to himself, that was his calling and his life’s work. The importance of his contribution cannot be understood without (...) the historical background in which it played out. Neither is it possible to envisage what really happened without acknowledging the theologians who played an important part in his life. This article therefore starts with a short overview of the history of the NHKA. It then proceeds with an overview of how important theologians in the NHKA influenced his ecclesiology. It concludes with three specific contributions that Prof. W.A. Dreyer made which makes him a key role player which led the NHKA on the way of Ecclesia reformata semper reformanda. Contribution: Prof. W.A. Dreyer became an important church leader in the Netherdutch Reformed Church. His leadership resulted in important changes in the church and especially in the ecclesiology of the church. This article, which is part of his Festschrift, gives an overview of his theological contribution through the lens of semper reformanda. By doing so, it indicates how important is the role of church leaders. All the research is based on his scholarly work. (shrink)

The Rustenburg Conference of churches that took place in 1990 was a critical turning point for Christianity in South Africa. Besides the important declaration at the end of the conference, a statement was also made by the women at the conference. Although this statement is lesser known, it was and still is of utmost importance because it addresses the plight of women in South Africa. The focus of this article is the relevance of the statement made by the women more (...) than 30 years later. The article is written from a church historical perspective. To achieve this objective, the research in this article is based on qualitative literature search. It focuses on relevant literature that includes books, scholarly articles, online articles and scientific data provided by Statistics South Africa. It starts with a brief overview of the conference and important events that took place; it then moves on to the statement by the women at the conference before arguing that the content of the statement still is an important voice from the past that reminds us of the plight of women in South Africa. The role of the church as an important agent of change is then discussed briefly before concluding with an example of a programme by the South African Council of Churches (SACC) that is aimed at change in society. Contribution: In the conclusion, the author proposes a South African conference for women where current programmes can be synchronised and planning for the future can be done. (shrink)

In this introduction to the first installment of the Common Knowledge symposium “Peace by Other Means,” the journal's editor questions the assumptions that underwrite standard approaches in the social sciences to the issue of how non-state, tribal societies have dealt with matters of war and peace. He in particular examines and finds wanting the approach that Jared Diamond takes in The World until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?. Whereas Diamond's theme is that modern states can learn much (...) about many things from traditional hunter-gatherer societies, with respect to peacemaking and peace-keeping he finds traditional societies distinctly inferior, and the arguments by which he reaches this conclusion are tautological and also beg the question. This prefatory essay explains that “Peace by Other Means” will analyze and detail non-Western and premodern European means of keeping peace that modern theorists of conflict resolution are reluctant to credit or incompetent to assess. (shrink)