INTRODUCTION Three years ago, at the suggestion of Professor Jacques Etienne of Institut Superieur de Philosophie, a probing mission into the problem of ...

There is a single unified conception of religious faith in Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling and Concluding Unscientific Postscript: existential faith is absolute trust in an eschatological promise, i.e. a miraculous realization of ethical ideals that is beyond all human power to accomplish or even predict. Faith in this sense has the precondition of "infinite resignation," which is a purified state of ethical willing in which the agent accepts her/his own inability to actualize the ethical, outwardly or inwardly. This condition is (...) explored extensively by Climacus in this discussion of "existential pathos," which shows why the resigned agent has to trust in an absolute source of eschatological possibilities to guarantee the ultimate meaningfulness of his/her ethical striving. The distinction between Religiousness A and B, along with different senses of "the absurd" and "the absolute paradox" can all be explained in terms of different kinds of eschatological possibility. /// Segundo o autor do artigo, há uma única concepção do religioso presente nas obras Temor e Tremor e Postscript Conclusivo e Não-Científico de Søren Kierkegaard, concepção essa fundada na ideia de que a fé existencial consiste numa confiança absoluta na promessa escatológica, ou seja, numa realização miraculosa de ideais éticos que estão para além de todo e qualquer poder humano de os realizar ou mesmo sequer de os antecipar. Neste sentido, a fé tem como condição prévia a "resignação infinita", a qual consiste num estado purificado de vontade ética em que o agente aceita a sua própria incapacidade de actualizar o ético, seja isso de forma exterior ou interior. Esta condição é extensivamente explorada por Climacus na sua discussão do "pathos existencial", o qual mostra precisamente por que razão o agente resignado tem que confiar numa fonte absoluta de possibilidades escatológicas em ordem a poder fazer face ao mais radical sem-sentido inerente ao seu processo de actualização do ético. Assim, o artigo pretende mostrar até que ponto a distinção kierkegaardiana entre Religiosidade A e B, bem como os diferentes sentidos do "absurdo" e do "paradoxo absolute" podem ser explicados em termos dos diferentes tipos de possibilidade escatológica que o pensamento pode identificar. (shrink)

Before imagination became the transcendent and creative faculty promoted by the Romantics, it was for something quite different. Not reserved to a privileged few, imagination was instead considered a universal ability that each person could direct in practical ways. To imagine something meant to form in the mind a replica of a thing—its taste, its sound, and other physical attributes. At the end of the Renaissance, there was a movement to encourage individuals to develop their ability to imagine vividly. Within (...) their private mental space, a space of embodied, sensual thought, they could meditate, pray, or philosophize. Gradually, confidence in the self-directed imagination fell out of favor and was replaced by the belief that the few—an elite of writers and teachers—should control the imagination of the many. This book seeks to understand what imagination meant in early modern Europe, particularly in early modern France, before the Romantic era gave the term its modern meaning. The author explores the themes surrounding early modern notions of imagination (including hostility to imagination) through the writings of such figures as Descartes, Montaigne, François de Sales, Pascal, the Marquise de Se;vigne;, Madame de Lafayette, and Fe;nelon. (shrink)

Pursuing the Forms: Equality and Excellence in Plato's Republic and Symposium -- Equality and Excellence in the Education of Cyrus -- Splendid Equality in the Nicomachean Ethics: Munificence -- How Excellence Bows to Equality in Aristotle's Politics -- First Among Equals: Philosophers, Statesmen, and Citizens in Spinoza's Democracy -- Excellence and Equality in Fénelon's Telemachus -- The Seductive Danger of Equality and Excellence: The Moderating Wisdom of Montesquieu's Science of Ovidian Metamorphosis -- Equality and Excellence in Rousseau's Emile, Book III (...) -- Hegel's Evaluation of Liberalism: Equality of Rights without Human Excellence -- Democracy, Nobility, and Freedom: The Political and Moral Aesthetics of Tocqueville -- Does Kierkegaard Have a Concept of Excellence? -- Nietzsche: The Indignity of Equality -- The Good and the Excellent: John Rawls's Egalitarian Liberalism. (shrink)

In dialogue with key theorists of catastrophe and trauma--including Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, George Lamming, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Derek Walcott, as well as key figures in Holocaust studies--Glissant and the Middle Passage hones a sharp sense of the specifically Caribbean varieties of loss, developing them into a transformative philosophical idea. Using the Plantation as a critical concept, John E. Drabinski creolizes notions of rhizome and nomad, examining what kinds of aesthetics grow from these roots and offering reconsiderations of (...) what constitutes intellectual work and cultural production.Glissant and the Middle Passage establishes Glissant's proper place as a key theorist of ruin, catastrophe, abyss, and memory. Identifying his insistence on memories and histories tied to place as the crucial geography at the heart of his work, this book imparts an innovative new response to the specific historical experiences of the Middle Passage. - from the publisher. (shrink)

The main conclusion of Nigel Hiscock's important but ill‐arranged book is that the ground plans of abbeys and cathedrals of the tenth and eleventh centuries incorporate Platonic wisdom—hence the “wise” in the title catchwords, which come from Paul's first letter to the Corinthians . There Paul likens himself to a sapiens architectus who lays the foundations on which others erect the building. In three of the four translations in The Complete Parallel Bible, however, Paul does not declare himself wise but, (...) rather, “skilled” or “trained.” The discrepancy makes an emblem for Hiscock's investigation: Did the architects deliberately express geometrical ratios significant in Platonic philosophy in their designs or did they proceed by applying their practical skill and training to the lie of the land and the resources available? A subsidiary question is also symbolized in Paul's verse: Was the designer a wise cleric who set the proportions and left the heavy work to someone else?Hiscock builds his answers in two ways. For one, he delivers a chrestomathy of Platonic snippets known in the tenth century and a few telling quotations from wise clerics—the latter concern the expression of significant numbers in the church fabric: a baptistery is octagonal because of an association between creation and the number eight, and a church with a half‐dozen altars is complete because of the perfection of the number six. But, Hiscock emphasizes, numerology does not account for floor plans, and to test the wisdom of the designers he scrutinizes plans of two dozen churches, especially those associated with monastic reformers. He expresses his results in color‐coded lines superposed on the plans, some one hundred of which comprise a valuable appendix.An example will indicate the interest of the findings and the riskiness of the business. The crossing of the transept at St. Michael's Abbey, Hildesheim, makes a square ABCD, proceeding clockwise from A in the northeast corner. AD and BC prolonged give the line of nave piers, AB and DC prolonged that of the arms of the transept. Lines drawn from B at angles of 54° and 60° with BC cut CD extended in E and F, respectively, locating the end piers in the side aisles. Now 60°, as the invariable angle of a three‐sided figure all of whose parts are equal, carries a cornucopia of Platonic and Christian symbolism. Also 54°, because derivable from a pentagon, has the pregnant significance of the figure five, which is the sum of the first male and first female numbers. Repetition of the transept square fixes the nave piers. Then lines between piers, pillars, and pilasters make the special angles with the north‐south and east‐west lines of the grid all over the plan.How much of this construction is mere coincidence? Requiring the intervals between piers in the same line to be equal, we have DE = FE = FD/2. And so it is: / = 0.51. Otherwise put, if angle FBC is 60° and E divides FD equally, angle EBC must be 54° without reference to a pentagon. Against such arguments, Hiscock observes that his analysis has uncovered previously unknown relations between churches confirmed by documents and that his technique, when applied to large nineteenth‐century buildings with repeated bays such as the Crystal Palace, picks out relatively few structurally significant elements.Hiscock is senior lecturer on the design, theory, and history of architecture at Oxford Brookes University and a master craftsman. His scrupulously prepared color‐coded drawings contain much of interest and pleasure for a geometer. Has he definitively answered the old vexed question whether the sapiens architectus intended to express ancient wisdom in his plans? If the architect thus proposed, did his builder faithfully dispose? Paul again may give guidance. “The Lord knows the thoughts of the wise, that they are futile”. (shrink)

Se establecen las relaciones internas entre tres núcleos fundamentales del pensamiento de Newman: conciencia, fe y desarrollo de la doctrina cristiana; y se muestran, además, como claves interpretativas de su biografía, fundamentalmente hasta su conversión a la Iglesia Católica en 1845. La tesis es que la fe, como contenido de verdad, es la piedra clave que sostiene este edificio de pensamiento y vida. A ella tiende el mandato de la conciencia, el primero de los elementos que sostienen el acto libre (...) de la fe. El desarrollo de la doctrina cristiana establece el vínculo entre la fe revelada y el lugar donde esta fe vive, la Iglesia Católica Romana. (shrink)

This research aims at a dialogue between Theology and Psychology in order to understand the Catholic faith and their possible mobilization within the psychic processo of assimilation and elaboration of mourning, using the clinical history of two Catholic bereaved patients followed up in psychoterapy in their first years of bereavement as a concrete object of analysis in a longitudinal study. The Project is part of a historical and philosophical literature on death and then supplies from the contribuitions of Jurgen Moltmann (...) in the Theology of Hope, the psychoanalyst John Bowlby’s productions and his sucessor, the psychiatrist Colin Parkes on data about the mourning and recovery. Conclusively, from the analysis of the theological content found, it was established that the fight arouses intense and profound theological transformation process that reached three categories: faith, God and the Communion of Saints,causing changes that potentially infer the recovery conditions of the bereaved, as well as their way of being and living after the loss, pointing to the need for a differentiated listening to the data found on faith, against human care in bereavement. (shrink)

No processo de reconstrução da filosofia, está colocado para John Dewey o desafio da articulação entre filosofia e ciência e, como consequência disso, a mudança no método de operar da primeira. Dewey desenvolveu um programa doutrinário que visa mostrar como o conhecimento se funda na experiência. Essa é a dimensão científico-naturalista da sua obra, cuja influência advém do naturalismo darwinista. Nesse sentido, o seu projeto consiste numa rigorosa argumentação contra as explicações em que a experiência e a natureza são (...) apresentadas com base em distinções arbitrárias. Na obra Reconstruction in Philosophy, Dewey desenvolveu seu projeto metafísico de dimensão historicista, propondo uma reconstrução para a filosofia. Essa perspectiva é de inspiração hegeliana, considerando a história como “fluxo dos acontecimentos”. Sua argumentação consiste em reivindicar uma filosofia da experiência, na medida em que se apropria do método científico. Dewey tenta pensar um sistema desenvolvido a partir da aplicação do método científico à filosofia, mas tendo como base uma concepção filosófica da experiência. As concepções de Dewey acerca do conhecimento, do uso inteligente da razão e da natureza social da filosofia concorrem para a constituição de sua concepção de ciência. O objetivo do filósofo é desenvolver um projeto científico e metodológico que exigirá outra forma de fazer filosofia, que ele caracteriza como uma filosofia empírica. Embora Dewey defenda uma filosofia com uma visada científica, isso não significa que ele subordine a filosofia à ciência. Ocorre que Dewey se opõe à forma pela qual o problema epistemológico foi formulado pela tradição, ou seja, desconsiderando o processo de conexão entre as coisas e entre o conhecedor e as coisas. No presente artigo apresentamos este projeto filosófico denominado por nós de metafísica empírica. Iniciamos, argumentando a partir de Dewey, com a necessidade da constituição e formação de uma mentalidade científica tendo em vista os fins sociais. Esta reivindicação decorre do fato de Dewey considerar que ciência e democracia compartilham não apenas o mesmo padrão de investigação, o “método da inteligência”, mas também as mesmas virtudes morais: uma disposição para questionar, para procurar clareza e evidência, para ouvir e respeitar as opiniões dos outros, para considerar alternativas de forma imparcial, para mudar de ponto de vista em virtude da investigação e da comunicação. Por fim, discutiremos a teoria pragmatista da existência, cujo objetivo é a constituição de uma nova metafísica que consiste em administrar, no domínio temporal, o finito e o humano em sua relação com o eterno e o infinito, ou seja, visa apreender a realidade enquanto produto dos seus condicionantes. Em sua crítica à metafísica tradicional, Dewey deixa subentendido que o que se tem em termos dessas metafísicas não passa de técnicas intelectuais refinadas, derivadas das ideias rudimentares da fé popular acerca do sobrenatural e do natural, do divino e do humano. (shrink)

Es impresionante la aportación del Bto. John H. Newman para la renovación de la teología católica y de la vida misma de la Iglesia. Desde su confesión anglicana y con una rectitud ejemplar de conciencia, luchó incansablemente en la búsqueda de la verdad, como lo atestigua en la Apología pro vita sua. Próximo a ingresar en la Iglesia católica, quiso hacerlo tras una ardua reflexión de la fe y la razón. Llegó a la conclusión de que las afirmaciones católicas, (...) que los protestantes rechazan como añadidura ilegítimas a la doctrina neotestamentaria, son en realidad verdaderos desarrollos de esta doctrina y por lo mismo, dignos de nuestra aceptación. Esta es la conclusión de su Ensayo sobre el desarrollo de la doctrina cristiana, que comentamos en este artículo. El Concilio Vaticano II acogió esta conclusión (DV 8). El Bto. J. H. Newman, como miembro del Oratorio de S. Felipe Neri, desarrolló una fecunda labor en pro de la educación católica y de la integración del laicado en la misión de la Iglesia. (shrink)

John Dewey’s philosophy has the notion of experience as backbone. The following paper regards experience as a method for doing philosophy, and a compromise grounding the entire philosophical project made by Dewey. Experience allows connecting cognition and affection in a natural way. Smart researching and arts creationappreciation are two modes to guide the progress of experience to a deeper level of meaning and from its own resources. The ideal way (the general description) of making part of the experience –which (...) is argued, smart and aesthetic– becomes stronger in the ideal of democracy. For this reason, Dewey’s philosophy of the experience works as a manner of interpreting democratic ideals. (shrink)

This book is a collection of essays exploring adaptive systems from many perspectives, ranging from computational applications to models of adaptation in living and social systems. The essays on computation discuss history, theory, applications, and possible threats of adaptive and evolving computations systems. The modeling chapters cover topics such as evolution in microbial populations, the evolution of cooperation, and how ideas about evolution relate to economics. The title Perspectives on Adaptation in Natural and Artificial Systems honors John Holland, whose (...) 1975 Book, Adaptation in Natural and Artificial Systems has become a classic text for many disciplines in which adaptation play a central role. The essays brought together here were originally written to honor John Holland, and span most of the different areas touched by his wide-ranging and influential research career. The authors include some of the most prominent scientists in the fields of artificial intelligence evolutionary computation, and complex adaptive systems. Taken together, these essays present a broad modern picture of current research on adaptation as it relates to computers, living systems, society, and their complex interactions. (shrink)

Resumen A partir de la Ilustración, la ciencia y la fe ―otrora caminos comunes para alcanzar conocimiento―, se han visto divorciadas y constituidas como realidades divergentes que se oponen cada vez más. La modernidad trajo consigo la insistencia en estas ideas y el divorcio entre ciencia y fe parece no detenerse. El presente artículo propone en un dialogo con John Henry Newman reconocer el lugar propio de la ciencia positiva respecto de la fe religiosa, presentando la distinción epistemológica, o (...) el modo de comprender el conocimiento que hace de la fe un camino plausible y posible que tiene su propia estructura epistémica dirigida hacia la credibilidad de la fe religiosa.Since the Enlightenment, science and faith -once common ways to achieve knowledge- have been divorced and incorporated as divergent realities that increasingly oppose. Modernity brought with it the insistence on these ideas and the divorce of science and faith does not seem to stop. The present article proposes in a dialogue with John Henry Newman to recognize the proper place of positive science regarding religious faith, presenting the epistemological distinction, or the way of understanding the knowledge that makes of faith a plausible and possible path that has its Own epistemic structure directed towards the credibility of religious faith. (shrink)

La pregunta por la fe religiosa y sus posibilidades en el mundo moderno, suponen una determinada comprensión del ser humano. En efecto, dependiendo de cómo el hombre se comprenda a sí mismo será la manera que tenga de reconocer sus posibilidades hacia una experiencia creyente, y abrirse a la acogida de ella como una realidad posible y plausible. Esto es lo que entendió muy bien, desde el principio de su ministerio, el cardenal John Henry Newman. En efecto, la pregunta (...) por el ser humano, y sus consideraciones hacia la fe religiosa pasan a ser el eje central de su predicación anglicana. Este artículo muestra, bajo un estudio estadístico-heurístico, la centralidad temática de la predicación anglicana de Newman que acontece entre 1824 y 1843. The question of religious faith and its possibilities in the modern world supposes a particular understanding of being human. Indeed, depending on how man understands himself will influence how he recognizes his possibilities of a believing experience, and openness to this as a possible and plausible reality. This is what Cardinal John Henry Newman understood very well, from the beginning of his ministry. Undoubtedly, the question on being human and his considerations on religious faith became the centerpiece of his Anglican preaching. This article examines, as a statistical and heuristic study, the thematic centrality of Newman Anglican preaching between 1824 and 1843. (shrink)

RESUMEN:Este trabajo tiene por objeto analizar la articulación entre la afirmación del carácter racional de la fe, esto es, su dimensión latitudinaria, el escepticismo epistemológico, y su derivación práctica en un concepto de tolerancia restringido al interior del protestantismo. Se subrayará, en este sentido, el carácter estratégico de la articulación entre racionalidad de la fe y escepticismo, en cuanto permite apelar a la ignorancia con vistas a la tolerancia, sin por ello dejar de sostener la interpretación protestante del cristianismo, en (...) detrimento de la interpretación católica.PALABRAS CLAVE:LOCKE - LATITUDINARISMO - ESCEPTICISMO - TOLERANCIA - PROTESTANTISMOABSTRACT:This paper aims to analyze the articulation between faith rationality assertion, i.e. its latitudinarian aspect, its epistemological skepticism, and its practical implication in a restricted concept of tolerance within Protestantism. In this regard, we will emphasize the strategic feature of the link between faith rationality and skepticism, as it allows appealing to ignorance towards tolerance, without dropping the Protestant interpretation of Christianity, to the detriment of Catholic interpretation.KEYWORDS:LOCKE - LATITUDINARIANISM - SKEPTICISM - TOLERATION - PROTESTANTISM. (shrink)

Sir John Eccles, a distinguished scientist and Nobel Prize winner who has devoted his scientific life to the study of the mammalian brain, tells the story of how we came to be, not only as animals at the end of the hominid evolutionary line, but also as human persons possessed of reflective consciousness.

In a world plagued by disagreement and conflict one might expect that the exact sciences of logic and mathematics would provide a safe harbor. In fact these disciplines are rife with internal divisions between different, often incompatible, systems. Do these disagreements admit of resolution? Can such resolution be achieved without disturbing assumptions that the theorems of logic and mathematics state objective truths about the real world? In this original and historically rich book John Woods explores apparently intractable disagreements in (...) logic and the foundations of mathematics and sets out conflict resolution strategies that evade or disarm these stalemates. An important sub-theme of the book is the extent to which pluralism in logic and the philosophy of mathematics undermines realist assumptions. This book makes an important contribution to such areas of philosophy as logic, philosophy of language and argumentation theory. It will also be of interest to mathematicians and computer scientists. (shrink)

John Coggon argues that the important question for analysts in the fields of public health law and ethics is 'what makes health public?' He offers a conceptual and analytic scrutiny of the salient issues raised by this question, outlines the concepts entailed in, or denoted by, the term 'public health' and argues why and how normative analyses in public health are inquiries in political theory. The arguments expose and explain the political claims inherent in key works in public health (...) ethics. Coggon then develops and defends a particular understanding of political liberalism, describing its implications for critical study of public health policies and practices. Covering important works from legal, moral, and political theory, public health, public health law and ethics, and bioethics, this is a foundational text for scholars, practitioners and policy bodies interested in freedoms, rights and responsibilities relating to health. (shrink)

_A major theoretical statement by a distinguished political scholar explains why a policy of liberal hegemony is doomed to fail_ In this major statement, the renowned international-relations scholar John Mearsheimer argues that liberal hegemony, the foreign policy pursued by the United States since the Cold War ended, is doomed to fail. It makes far more sense, he maintains, for Washington to adopt a more restrained foreign policy based on a sound understanding of how nationalism and realism constrain great powers (...) abroad. It is widely believed in the West that the United States should spread liberal democracy across the world, foster an open international economy, and build institutions. This policy of remaking the world in America’s image is supposed to protect human rights, promote peace, and make the world safe for democracy. But this is not what has happened. Instead, the United States has ended up as a highly militarized state fighting wars that undermine peace, harm human rights, and threaten liberal values at home. Mearsheimer tells us why this has happened. (shrink)

Several psychological experiments have suggested that concepts can influence perceived color (e.g., Delk and Fillenbaum in Am J Psychol 78(2):290–293, 1965, Hansen et al. in Nat Neurosci 9(11):1367–1368, 2006, Olkkonen et al. in J Vis 8(5):1–16, 2008). Observers tend to assign typical colors to objects even when the objects do not have those colors. Recently, these findings were used to argue that perceptual experience is cognitively penetrable (Macpherson 2012). This interpretation of the experiments has far-reaching consequences: it implies that the (...) way we think of objects determines how we see them, thus threatening the role of perception in justifying beliefs. In this paper, I show that the psychological findings can be accounted for without admitting cognitive penetrability. An underestimated but key feature of the experiments is that observers had to judge colors in borderline cases, in conditions of reduced acuity, or on the basis of color-concepts instead of matching. Such judgments are sensitive to the form of bias that Tversky and Kahneman (Science 185:1124–1131, 1974) have termed ‘anchoring’. Adopting a suggestion from Raffman (Philos Rev 103(1):41–74, 1994), I argue that the way subjects in the experiments think of the objects could affect their color judgments without altering their color experiences. (shrink)

This book, first published in 1990, takes a critical look at the major assumptions which support critical thinking programs and discovers many unresolved questions which threaten their viability. John McPeck argues that some of these assumptions are incoherent or run counter to common sense, while others are unsupported by the available empirical evidence. This title will be of interest to students of the philosophy of education.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THEOLOGY, PRAXIS, AND ETHICS IN THE THOUGHT OF JUAN LUIS SEGUNDO, S.J. JOEL ZIMBELMAN California State University, Chico Chico, California I. Introduction JESUS OF NAZARETH Yesterday and Today is Juan Luis Segundo's most recent contribution in an on-going effort to forge a distinctive post-conciliar catholic theology.1· This five-volume work establishes Segundo as one of the most prolific, methodologically sophisticated, and constructive Catholic theologians of this century. In these volumes (...) he moves beyond the task of reframing fundamental theology in political and social terms that he began in earlier works and undertakes a full elaboration of the theological method that he introduced in The Liberation of Theology.2 Better than any previous work, the recent effort witnesses to the author's range of interests and strengths, 1 Originally published in the Spanish as El hombre de hoy ante Jesus de Nazaret (Madrid: Ediciones Christiandad, 1982): Vol. I. Fe e ideologia; Vol. II/1 and 2 Historia y actualidad: Sinopticos y Pablo; Vol. II/3 El Cristo de los ejercicios espirituales; Vol. II/4 Lineas actuates de interpretacion de Jesus de Nazaret. English translation Jesus of Nazareth Yesterday and Today, tr. John Drury (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books) : vol. 1 Faith and Ideologies (1984); vol. 2 The Historical Jesus of the Synoptics (1985); vol. 3 The Humanist Christology of Paul (1986) ; vol. 4 The Christ of the Ignatian Exercises (1987); vol. 5 An Evolutionary Approach to Jesus of Nazareth (1988). 2 The Liberation of Theology, tr. John Drury (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1976). For earlier efforts at political and social theology, see A Theology for Artisans of A New Humanity, tr. John Drury (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books): vol. 1 The Community Called Church (1973); vol. 2 Grace and the Human Condition (1973) ; vol. 3 Our Idea of God (1973) ; vol. 4 The Sacraments Today (1974); vol. 5 Evolution and Guilt (1974). 233 234 JOEL ZIMBELMAN including theology and philosophy, hermeneutics and critical social theory, linguistic theory, and biblical studies. Continuing analysis and assessment of liberation theory, and Segundo's recent effort in particular, is warranted for at least three reasons. First, Jesus of Nazareth and particularly its first volume, Faith and Ideologies, clarifies Segundo's constructive project. The volume reasserts much that is already familiar to Segundo's past readers : a deconstructive hermeneutic; the elaboration of the concepts of faith and ideology; and an interpretation of the relationship of faith to praxis, efficacy, and liberation. But it also breaks new and creative ground as it begins to construct the foundations of a moral epistemology and teleology, a more fully developed theory of value appropriation, and an anthropology grounded in transcendental-existentialist and process categories. One can only appreciate the scope and implications of Segundo's thought in a critical analysis of this recent work. Second, Segundo's ·effort calls for further discussion because of its inevitable influence on the development of other constructive and critical Christian theologies. The visions of " geotheology,'' "world Catholicism," and a "liberating theology" advanced by Latin and North American Catholics are no longer the preoccupations of a peripheral minority but reflect the aspirations of conservative, moderate, and progressive voices in the Christian church. As part of this constructive task, a growing number of contemporary thinkers are addressing concerns or appropriating categories and constructs developed or elaborated by Segundo.8 His theological breadth and sophistication means 8 For discussions of this shift, see Alfred Hennelly, "Today's New Task: Geotheology,'' America 18 (January 1975): 27-29; and Penny Lernoux, People of God: The Struggle for World Catholicism (New York: Viking/ Penguin, 1989). Those either indebted to or engaged in substantial conversation with Segundo include Matthew Lamb, Solidarity With Victims: Toward a Theology of Social Transformation (New York: Crossroads, 1982) ; Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, " Instruction on Christian Freedom and Liberation," Origins: N. C. Documentary Service 15 (17 April 1986): 713-27; Rebecca Chopp, The Praxis of Suffering: An Interpretation of Liberation and Political Theologies (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1986) ; Alfred Hennelly, Theology for a Liberating Church: The New Praxis of Freedom (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1989). TltOUGB:T OF JUAN LUlS SEGUNbO, S.J. 235 that... (shrink)

Kant -- drawing on his eighteenth-century predecessors -- provided a discerning and powerful characterization of what biologists had to explain in organic form. His difference from the rest is that he opined that was impossible to explain it. Its ’inscrutability’ was intrinsic. The third ’Critique’ essentially proposed the reduction of biology to a kind of prescientific descriptivism, doomed never to attain authentic scientificity. By contrast, for Locke, and ’a fortiori’ for Buffon and his followers, ’intrinsic purposiveness’ was a fact of (...) the matter about concrete biological phenomena; the features of internal self-regulation were hypotheses arising out of actual research practice. The difference comes most vividly to light once we recognize Kant’s distinction of the concept of organism from the concept of life. (edited). (shrink)

In a wide-ranging, provocative anatomy of modern society and its origins, novelist and historian John Ralston Saul explores the reason for our deepening sense of crisis and confusion. Throughout the Western world we talk endlessly of individual freedom, yet Saul shows that there has never before been such pressure for conformity. Our business leaders describe themselves as capitalists, yet most are corporate employees and financial speculators. We are obsessed with competition, yet the single largest item of international trade is (...) a subsidized market in armaments. We call our governments democracies, yet few of us participate in politics. We complain about "invasive government," yet our legal, educational, financial, social, cultural and legislative systems are breaking down. While most observers view these problems separately, Saul demonstrates that they are largely manifestations of our blind faith in the value of reason. Over the last 400 years, our "rational elites" have gradually instituted reforms in every phase of social life. But Saul shows that they have also been responsible for most of the difficulties and violence of the same period. This paradox arises from a simple truth which our elites deny: far from being a moral force, reason is no more than an administrative method. Their denial has helped to turn the modern West into a vast, incomprehensible, directionless machine, run by process-minded experts - "Voltaire's bastards"--Whose cult of scientific management is bereft of both sense and morality. Whether in politics, art, business, the military, entertainment, science, finance, academia or journalism, these experts share the same outlook and methods. The result, Saul maintains, is a civilization of immense technological power whose peoples increasingly dwell in a world of illusion. Already known to millions of readers as the author of novels which portray the overwhelming effects of this power on the modern individual by weaving together international finance, the oil and arms business, guerrilla warfare, drug traffic, and the world of art, here Saul lays aside the mask of fiction to speak in his own voice. Only by withdrawing from our addiction to "solutions," he argues, reclaiming the citizens' right to question and participate in public life, and recovering a common sense capacity for intelligent panic, can we find a way out of our permanent crisis. (shrink)

John Rist surveys the history of ethics from Plato to the present and offers a vigorous defence of an ethical theory based on a revised version of Platonic realism. In a wide-ranging discussion he examines well-known alternatives to Platonism, in particular Epicurus, Hobbes, Hume and Kant as well as contemporary 'practical reasoners', and argues that most post-Enlightenment theories of morality depend on an abandoned Christian metaphysic and are unintelligible without such grounding. He also argues that contemporary choice-based theories, whether (...) they take a strictly ethical or more obviously political form, are ultimately arbitrary in nature. His lively and accessible 2001 study is informed by a powerful sense of philosophical history, and will be of interest to both students and scholars of ethics. (shrink)

This is a collection of John Hick's essays on the understanding of the world's religions as different human responses to the same ultimate transcendent reality. Hicks is in dialogue with contemporary philosophers (some of whom contribute new responses); with Evangelicals; with the Vatican and other both Catholic and Protestant theologians. The book is alive with current argument for all interested in contemporary philosophy of religion and theology.

The great biologist Louis Pasteur suppressed 'awkward' data because it didn't support the case he was making. John Snow, the 'first epidemiologist' was doing nothing others had not done before. Gregor Mendel, the supposed 'founder of genetics' never grasped the fundamental principles of 'Mendelian' genetics. Joseph Lister's famously clean hospital wards were actually notorious dirty. And Einstein's general relativity was only 'confirmed' in 1919 because an eminent British scientist cooked his figures. These are just some of the revelations explored (...) in this book. Drawing on current history of science scholarship, Fabulous Science shows that many of our greatest heroes of science were less than honest about their experimental data and not above using friends in high places to help get their ideas accepted. It also reveals that the alleged revolutionaries of the history of science were often nothing of the sort. Prodigiously able they may have been, but the epithet of the 'man before his time' usually obscures vital contributions made their unsung contemporaries and the intrinsic merits of ideas they overturned. These distortions of the historical record mostly arise from our tendency to read the present back into the past. But in many cases, scientists owe their immortality to a combination of astonishing effrontery and their skills as self-promoters. (shrink)

Nowadays, science is treated an instrument of policy, serving the material interests of government and commerce. Traditionally, however, it also has important non-instrumental social functions, such as the creation of critical scenarios and world pictures, the stimulation of rational attitudes, and the production of enlightened practitioners and independent experts. The transition from academic to ‘post-academic’ science threatens the performance of these functions, which are inconsistent with strictly instrumental modes of knowledge production. In particular, expert objectivity is negated by entanglement with (...) political and commercial interests. We cannot go back to the old academic model for science, but need to consider how to maintain its vital non-instrumental roles. (shrink)

"_The Moment of Complexity_ is a profoundly original work. In remarkable and insightful ways, Mark Taylor traces an entirely new way to view the evolution of our culture, detailing how information theory and the scientific concept of complexity can be used to understand recent developments in the arts and humanities. This book will ultimately be seen as a classic."-John L. Casti, Santa Fe Institute, author of _Gödel: A Life of Logic, the Mind, and Mathematics_ The science of complexity accounts (...) for that inscrutable mix of chaos and order that governs our natural world. Complexity explains how networks emerge and function, how species organize into ecosystems, how stars form into galaxies, and how just a few sequences of DNA can account for so many different life forms. Recently, the idea of complexity has taken the worlds of business and politics by storm. The concept is used to account for phenomena as varied as the behavior of the stock market, the response of voting populations, and the effects of risk management. Even Disney has used complexity theory to manage crowd control at its theme parks. Given the startling development of new information technologies, we now live in a moment of unprecedented complexity, an era in which change occurs faster than our ability to comprehend it. With _The Moment of Complexity_, Mark C. Taylor offers a timely map for this unfamiliar terrain opening in our midst, unfolding an original philosophy through a remarkable synthesis of science and culture. According to Taylor, complexity is not just a breakthrough scientific concept, but the defining quality of the post-Cold War era. The flux of digital currents swirling around us, he argues, has created a new network culture with its own distinctive logic and dynamic. Drawing on resources from information theory and evolutionary biology, Taylor explains the operation of complex adaptive systems in social and cultural processes and captures a whole new zeitgeist in the making. To appreciate the significance of our emerging network culture, he claims, we need not only to understand contemporary scientific and technological transformations, but also to explore the subtle influences of art, architecture, philosophy, religion, and higher education. _The Moment of Complexity_, then, is a remarkable work of cultural analysis on a scale rarely seen today. To follow its trajectory is to learn how we arrived at this critical moment in our culture, and to know where we might head in the twenty-first century. (shrink)

A passage on the origin of property in Grotius, De iure praedae , pp. 226-230 [Note 1] seems to contain echoes of the controversy between pope John XXII and William of Ockham on Franciscan poverty. Grotius's note (b) on p. 227 refers to the decretals..

Discussing the relations between logic and probability, this book compares classical 17th- and 18th-century theories of probability with contemporary theories, explores recent logical theories of probability, and offers a new account of probability as a part of logic.

The Human Condition is a response to the growing disenchantment in the Western world with contemporary life. John Kekes provides rationally justified answers to questions about the meaning of life, the basis of morality, the contingencies of human lives, the prevalence of evil, the nature and extent of human responsibility, and the sources of values we prize. He offers a realistic view of the human condition that rejects both facile optimism and gloomy pessimism; acknowledges that we are vulnerable to (...) contingencies we cannot fully control; defends a humanistic understanding of our condition; recognizes that the values worth pursuing are plural, often conflicting, and that there are many reasonable conceptions of well-being. Kekes emphasizes the importance of facing the fact that man's inhumanity to man is widespread. He rejects as simple-minded both the view that human nature is basically good and that it is basically bad, and argues that our well-being depends on coping with the complex truth that human nature is basically complicated. Finally, Kekes argues that the scheme of things is indifferent to our fortunes and that we can rely only on our own resources to make what we can of our lives. (shrink)

This volume of the collected writings of John Sallis presents his lecture courses on Immanuel Kant. Each course takes up one of Kant's three Critiques, and thus the text as a whole treats the entirety of the Kantian critical project. Sallis displays here, as he does in all of his lecture courses, an uncanny ability to open up dense philosophical texts. Sallis patiently and successfully lays out the issues-theoretical, practical, aesthetic, and philosophical-and his critical approach to them. For students (...) and seasoned scholars who require a step-by-step interpretation of Kant, these texts by Sallis are attuned to the spirit, structure, and principle of these foundational works. (shrink)

The presence of a kinship link between nuclear families is the strongest predictor of interhousehold sharing in an indigenous, predominantly Dolgan food-sharing network in northern Russia. Attributes such as the summed number of hunters in paired households also account for much of the variation in sharing between nuclear families. Differences in the number of hunters in partner households, as well as proximity and producer/consumer ratios of households, were investigated with regard to cost-benefit models. The subset of households involved in reciprocal (...) meal sharing is 26 of 84 household host-guest pairs. The frequency of reciprocal meal sharing between families in this subset is positively correlated with average household relatedness. The evolution of cooperation through clustering may illuminate the relationship between kinship and reciprocity at this most intimate level of food sharing. (shrink)

Research scientists are trained to produce specialised bricks of knowledge, but not to look at the whole building. Increasing public concern about the social role of science is forcing science students to think about what they are actually learning to do. What sort of knowledge will they be producing, and how will it be used? Science education now requires serious consideration of these philosophical and ethical questions. But the many different forms of knowledge produced by modern science cannot be covered (...) by any single philosophical principle. Sociology and cognitive psychology are also needed to understand what the sciences have in common and the significance of what they generate. Again, traditional modes of ethical analysis cannot deal adequately with the values, norms and interests activated by present-day technoscience without reference to its sociological, political and economic dimensions. (shrink)

This thesis investigates how children ought to be influenced with respect to religion. To answer this question, I develop a theory of cognitive curriculum content and apply it to the teaching of religious beliefs and beliefs about religions. By ‘a theory of cognitive curriculum content,’ I mean a theory that determines which truth-claims belong on the curriculum, and whether or not teachers ought to promote students’ belief of those claims. I extend this theory to help educators to decide which attitudes (...) address on the curriculum and whether or not to promote them. I then apply this to the case of religious attitudes and attitudes about religions. I argue that where having or failing to have a certain attitude makes a significant difference to students’ lives, it ought to be addressed by curricula. Where failing to have the attitude is irrational, this failure ought to be remedied; where having the attitude is irrational, that attitude ought to be discouraged; and where neither having nor failing to have the attitude is irrational, that attitude ought to be introduced and discussed without encouragement or discouragement. In so far as is practicable, educators should aim to acquaint students with arguments for and against having these attitudes and initiate them into the practice of assessing their soundness. The implications of this theory for extra-curricular influence, such as upbringing in the home, are also explored. (shrink)

It is based on extensive use of the twelve volumes of Ortega's Obras completas, the eighty microfilm reels of his archive in the Library of Congress, and his private library of fifteen hundred volumes in Madrid.

In Faithful Reason, the noted Catholic philosopher John Haldane explores various aspects of intellectual and practical life from a perspective inspired by Catholic thought and informed by his distinctive philosophical approach: "Analytical Thomism." Haldane's discussions of ethics, politics, education, art, social philosophy and other themes explain why Catholic thought is still relevant in today's world, and show how the legacy of Thomas Aquinas can benefit modern philosophy in its efforts to answer fundamental questions about humanity and its place within (...) nature. Drawing on a Catholic philosophical tradition that is committed to concepts of the world's intrinsic intelligibility and the objectivity of truth, Faithful Reason's bold and insightful perspectives provide rich matter for debate, and food for further thought. (shrink)

To define and explore contemporary philosophical critiques of Christian belief is the purpose of this book, which arises out of a conference held at Princeton Theological Seminary. In a frank and extensive confrontation, outstanding philosophers and theologians met to search for greater clarity on some important issues in the philosophy of religion. The book contains the papers written for the conference, the prepared criticism, and excerpts from the debates. The discussions revolved around the experiential grounds of religious belief; the question (...) as to what conclusions may legitimately be drawn from religious experience; the "emptiness" or otherwise of Christian belief and ethic in the modern world; the Freudian explanation of faith; and the Barthian defense of Christianity. (shrink)

Charles S. Peirce, William James, Josiah Royce, George Santayana, John Dewey, and George Herbert Mead: each of these individuals is an original and historically important thinker; each is an essential contributor to the period, perspective, and tradition of classical American philosophy; and each speaks directly, imaginatively, critically, and wisely to our contemporary global society, its distant possibilities for improvement, and its massive, pressing problems. From the initiative of pragmatism in approximately 1870 to Dewey's final work after World War II, (...) classical American philosophy has come to represent the critical articulation of attitudes, outlooks, and forms of life imbedded in the culture from which it arose. John Stuhr brings together the works of these foremost thinkers to present a comprehensive collection in American philosophy. Extensive introductory essays, written especially for this volume by leading scholars of the subject, provide not only the bibliographical and cultural contexts necessary to a full appreciation of each thinker, but also original critical and interpretive philosophical observations. (shrink)