The doctrine of imputation is common to Early Modern Lutheran and Reformed theology, but Reformed orthodox theologians employed the distinction between the active and passive justification of the believer. Active justification is the objective imputation of Christ’s righteousness and passive justification is the subjective reception of the same. This distinction is a unique contribution in Reformed orthodox dogmatics and was used in polemics against Roman Catholic, Arminian, and Socinian theologians. This essay also compares Reformed orthodox formulations with Lutheran orthodox understandings (...) of how they preserved the extra nos of Christ’s righteousness in justification. The Reformed orthodox employed the active-passive justification distinction in conjunction with the decree and the doctrine of the covenant of redemption, whereas the Lutheran orthodox logically placed justification first in the order of salvation. Both groups maintain the extra nos of Christ’s imputed righteousness but do so in different ways. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Historians of science, inasmuch as they are concerned with knowledges and practices rather than institutions, have tended of late to focus on case studies of common processes such as experiment and publication. In so doing, they tend to treat science as a single category, with various local instantiations. Or, alternatively, they relate cases to their specific local contexts. In neither approach do the cases or their contexts build easily into broader histories, reconstructing changing knowledge practices across time and space. (...) This essay argues that by systematically deconstructing the practices of science and technology and medicine (STM) into common, recurrent elements, we can gain usefully “configurational” views, not just of particular cases and contexts but of synchronic variety and diachronic changes, both short term and long. To this end, we can begin with the customary actors’ disciplines of early modern knowledge (natural philosophy, natural history, mixed mathematics, and experimental philosophy), which can be understood as elemental “ways of knowing and working,” variously combined and disputed. I argue that these same working knowledges, together with a later mode—synthetic experimentation and systematic invention—may also serve for the analysis of STM from the late eighteenth century to the present. The old divisions continued explicitly and importantly after circa 1800, but they were also “built into” an array of new sciences. This historiographic analysis can help clarify a number of common problems: about the multiplicity of the sciences, the importance of various styles in science, and the relations between science and technology and medicine. It suggests new readings of major changes in STM, including the first and second scientific revolutions and the transformations of biomedicine from the later twentieth century. It offers ways of recasting both microhistories and macrohistories, so reducing the apparent distance between them. And it may thus facilitate both more constructive uses of case studies and more innovative and acceptable longer histories. (shrink)

This review essay argues that the emphasis on the personal commitments sustaining all knowledge, while permitting some fruitful insights into structural parallels between Newman's and Polanyi’s epistemological positions, finally is not fully satisfactory for developing a theological program. Moleski’s effort to develop such theological insights may be advanced if it were supplemented by incorporating a more detailed structural analysis of the illative sense and of tacit knowing.

The 1982–1983 seminars of Cornelius Castoriadis (1922–1997) at the School for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (EHESS) in Paris are here translated as The Greek Imaginary: From Homer to Heraclitus, Seminars 1982–1983. They were originally published in French in 2004, with expert editing and supplemental notes provided by Enrique Escobar, Myrto Gondicas, and Pascal Vernay. For basic introductory information on these seminars, their context, and their content, see their excellent Editors’ Introduction which follows.

A follow up to 'The Easter God'. John V. Taylor sets out God's incarnation in Jesus and his interaction with the world.

Volume 10 of the Routledge History of Philosophy presents a historical survey of the central topics in twentieth century Anglo-American philosophy. It chronicles what has been termed the 'linguistic turn' in analytic philosophy and traces the influence the study of language has had on the main problems of philosophy. Each chapter contains an extensive bibliography of the major writings in the field. All the essays present their large and complex topics in a clear and well organised way. At the end, (...) the reader finds a helpful Chronology of the major political, scientific and philosophical events in the Twentieth Century and an extensive Glossary of technical terms. (shrink)

The nature of representation is a central topic in philosophy. This is the first book to connect problems with understanding representational artifacts, like pictures, diagrams, and inscriptions, to the philosophies of science, mind, and art. Can images be a source of knowledge? Are images merely conventional signs, like words? What is the relationship between the observer and the observed? In this clear and stimulating introduction to the problem John V. Kulvicki explores these questions and more. He discusses: the nature (...) of pictorial experience and "seeing in" recognition, resemblance, pretense, and structural theories of depiction images as aids to scientific discovery and understanding mental imagery and the nature of perceptual content photographs as visual prostheses. In so doing he assesses central problems in the philosophy of images, such as how objects we make come to represent other things, and how we distinguish kinds of representation - pictures, diagrams, graphs - from one another. Essential reading for students and professional philosophers alike, the book also contains chapter summaries, annotated further reading, and a glossary. (shrink)

1. The early philosophy--language as picture -- 2. Logic and ontology -- 3. "My world and its value" -- 4. The later philosophy--views and reviews -- 5. Method and essense -- 6. Meaning -- 7. Criteria -- 8. Knowing, naming, certainty, and idealism -- 9. The private language argument -- 10. Logical necessity and rules -- 11. Philosophy of mathematics -- 12. Persons -- 13. Psychology and conceptual relativity -- 14. Aesthetics, ethics, and religion -- 15. Elective affinities.

John Kulvicki explores the many ways in which pictures can be meaningful, taking inspiration from the philosophy of language. Pictures are important parts of communicative acts. They express a variety of thoughts, and they are also representations. Kulvicki shows how the meanings of pictures let us put them to a wide range of communicative uses.

In the 'Hippias Major' Socrates uses a counter-example to oppose Hippias‘s view that parts and wholes always have a "continuous" nature. Socrates argues, for example, that even-numbered groups might be made of parts with the opposite character, i.e. odd. As Gadamer has shown, Socrates often uses such examples as a model for understanding language and definitions: numbers and definitions both draw disparate elements into a sum-whole differing from the parts. In this paper I follow Gadamer‘s suggestion that we should focus (...) on the parallel between numbers and definitions in Platonic thought. However, I offer a different interpretation of the lesson implicit in Socrates‘s opposition to Hippias. I argue that, according to Socrates, parts and sum-wholes may share in essential attributes; yet this unity or continuity is neither necessary, as Hippias suggests, nor is it impossible, as Gadamer implies. In closing, I suggest that this seemingly minor difference in logical interpretation has important implications for how we should understand the structure of human communities in a Platonic context. (shrink)

This brief essay takes a look at Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), the English philosopher and social reformer, and his ideas about eugenics and dysgenics. It is evident from his works that like many other leading thinkers and social reformers of his time, Russell recognized the importance of genetics for human welfare and was deeply concerned about the dysgenic trends that he observed in his time. He included eugenics as an integral part of his moral philosophy and never abandoned the belief in (...) its importance, although he grew increasingly skeptical of some forms of genetic explanation and concerned about the real- world contexts of eugenic policies in his later years. (shrink)

These remarks are comments on Tihamér Margitay’s criticisms of Polanyi’s so-called “correspondence thesis” in his recent essay “From Epistemology to Ontology.”.

The aim of this essay is to display a congruence between several important features of Augustine’s theory of knowledge, including our knowledge of the world (sapientia) and our knowledge of the standards guiding our thought (sapientia), and Michael Polanyi’s theory of personal knowledge. Its purpose is to commendan interpretation of Polanyi’s thought which situates his major insights within an Augustinian intellectual tradition and which thereby offers fruitful possibilities for theological reflection, particularly on the reality of God.

In his Euclid commentary, Proclus states that mathematical objects have a status in between Platonic forms and sensible things. Proclus uses geometrical examples liberally to illustrate his theory but says little about arithmetic. However, by examining Proclus’s scattered statements on number and the traditional sources that influenced him (esp. the Philebus), I argue that he maintains an analogy between geometry and arithmetic such that the arithmetical thinker projects a “field of units” to serve as the bearers of number forms. I (...) argue that this conception of a “multitude,” wherein each unit differs in no way from the others, implies that Platonists need not recognize unqualifiedly what would become the principle of the identity of indiscernibles. I argue that Cratylus 432c in particular provides support for a reading of Plato as consistently thinking beyond the principle of identity. I conclude by drawing out an important epistemological and ethical lesson from this reading. (shrink)

Presents a chronological survey of some of the central topics in 20th century philosophy in the English-speaking world.

This article places Henry Corbin’s concept of creative imagination in conversation with the French phenomenological tradition. Section I explores Corbin’s phenomenological method and his view of the imaginal world, drawn from his interpretations of Suhrawardī and Ibn ‘Arabī. Section II then places this concept in conversation with the early Jean-Paul Sartre’s “annihilative” imagination and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s critique of it. This section argues that Corbin needs a strong distinction like Sartre’s between imagination and perception but also that he could be seen (...) as agreeing partly with Merleau-Ponty’s critique of Sartre. What Corbin ultimately maintains, as the article’s conclusion argues, is that our access to the distinctive imaginal world enables a characteristic duality to arise in all perceptual life, a duality that is required if we are to be able to relate to perception either critically or charitably. (shrink)

The Affordable Care Act1 promises to improve access to coverage and care for two vulnerable groups: low-income persons who are excluded by a lack of resources and chronically ill and disabled people who are excluded by the dysfunction of our existing insurance and care delivery systems. ACA’s sprawling provisions raise a wealth of implementation challenges that are exacerbated by the compromises required to move reform through Congress. In particular, the compromise between regulatory/public program advocates and advocates for private, market-driven programs (...) requires thoughtful regulatory coordination between public and private health systems. (shrink)

Following Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer states that the primordial way we experience the past is through forgetting rather than memory. This essay seeks to explore the various senses of forgetting as it appears in Gadamer’s thought with a particular emphasis on how forgetting and memory structure the unique temporality of the work of art. This exploration reveals that the interplay between forgetting and remembering is more complicated than mere opposition; this interplay is specifically revealed in Gadamer’s analyses of the epochal (...) transition and the transmissive event of history. In both cases, forgetting is revealed not as a lack or lacuna, but as a dynamic generating structure that elevates the work of art from its original past—constituting the immemorial dimension of the work. This essay concludes by gesturing toward the repercussions of forgetting on subjectivity and a theory of time in Gadamer’s hermeneutics. (shrink)

Health reform debate understandably focuses on large system design. We should not omit attention to the “last mile” problem of physician payment theory. Achieving fundamental goals of integrative, patient-centered primary care depends on thoughtful financial support. This commentary describes the nature and importance of innovative primary care payment programs.

Cornelius Castoriadis was an important intellectual figure in France for many decades, beginning in the late-1940s. Trained in philosophy, Castoriadis also worked as a practicing economist and psychologist while authoring over twenty major works and numerous articles spanning many traditional philosophical subjects, including politics, economics, psychology, anthropology, and ontology. His oeuvre can be understood broadly as a reflection on the concept of creativity and its implications in various fields. Perhaps most importantly he warned of the dangerous political and ethical consequences (...) of a contemporary world that has lost sight of autonomy, i.e. of the need to set limits or laws for oneself. (shrink)