L'érudition de Kilian McDonnell. o.s.b., un moine/prêtre bénédictin, a eu une grande influence sur le Pentecostalisme au niveau international et sur le renouveau charismatique dans les grandes Eglises grâce à l'attention anthropologique, psychologique et théologique que McDonnell apporte à sa recherche pentecostale, à sa direction dans le Dialogue International Classique Pentecostiste - Catholique-Romain, et à son rôle comme rédacteur de documents nationaux et internationaux. Il comprend les forces socio-culturelles à l'oeuvre dans le développement du Pentecostalisme, et contribua à déraciner une (...) image psychologique publique négative des Pentecostalistes. En théologie McDonnell fait justice à la densité christologique de la pneumatologie et en même temps insiste, en vertu d'une dynamique trinitaire, que l'Esprit n'est pas un partenaire mineur, mais égal au Fils, et aussi important que le Fils dans le plan de la rédemption. Par ses propositions trinitaires à la Société des Etudes Pentecostalistes il contribue à la réconciliation des Pentecostalistes Trinitaires et «de l'Unité», une division majeure dans le Pentecostalisme classique. Sa Confession des péchés de Mars 2000 apporte la guérison de vieilles blessures nécessaire pour le développement d'une compréhension oecuménique. Cette Confession des péchés peut marquer une phase nouvelle dans les rapports entre Pentecistalistes et catholiques. La force de McDonnell est essentiellement celle. (shrink)

A new axiomatic treatment of equilibrium thermodynamics—thermostatics—is presented. The equilibrium states of a thermal system are assumed to be represented by a differentiable manifold of dimensionn + 1 (n finite). The empirical temperature is defined by the notion of thermal equilibrium. Empirical entropy is shown to exist for all systems with the property that the total work delivered along closed adiabats is zero. Absolute entropy and temperature follow from the additivity of heat and energy for two separate systems in thermal (...) equilibrium considered as a whole. The absolute temperature is defined up to a multiplicative constant. The exterior differentiable calculus of Cartan is introduced and in a subsequent paper its use for the derivation of standard results in thermostatics will be explained. (shrink)

1. Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume.

Pain was one of the issues debated between Julian of Aeclanum and Augustine of Hippo. For Augustine pain was an evil caused by original sin. Julian argued that, in the context of creation as a whole, pain can be treated as a good, since its moderate forms are creational. Only in excess are they evil. This article aims at presenting Julian's position in detail, not only in the context of the debate with Augustine, but in the wider context of late (...) ancient philosophy and early Christian doctrine. Julian is well acquainted with philosophical and medical texts and with the biblical and patristic tradition. He rejects Augustine's attempt to work all these into a universal theological theory of pain and thereby deny, in Julian's view, philosophy and medicine their relative autonomy. Julian's plea—as a theologian—for a rational and empirical approach to pain draws as much upon ancient sources as it anticipates an attitude towards natural science and philosophy usually associated with much later periods in history. (shrink)

“This is a book about politics.” (XV) Bereits der erste Satz des Vorwortes gibt die Zielrichtung vor. Der an der University of California in Santa Barbara lehrende Althistoriker Harold A. Drake (D.) hat es sich auf mehr als 600 Seiten – der Verfasser spricht bescheiden von “a sketch” (XVII) – zum Ziel gesetzt, die facettenreiche Gestalt des spätantiken römischen Kaisers Konstantin (306–337) und seine Religionspolitik primär aus der Perspektive des begabten, auf einen umfassenden gesellschaftlichen Konsens hinarbeitenden Politikers zu beschreiben.

Hildebrand oftentimes said that his disciples—even when they believed they were deeply indebted to him for knowledge, wisdom, and truth—had a duty to criticize and overcome any error they would find in his philosophy, because the sole purpose of his writings was to state the truth. He himself gave some extraordinary examples of self-critique. In the following, I wish to treat such an example: a significant error about the nature of the free volitional response, which Stephen Schwarz was the first (...) to note and which Hildebrand himself later explicitly revoked. Furthermore, I wish to show that Hildebrand’s rejecting this error makes his ethics as a whole much more consistent, and opens the way to bringing his philosophy of love closer to our experience. (shrink)

It is well known that Maimonides rejects the Kalam argument for the existence of God because it assumes the temporal creation of the world, a premise for which he says there is no “cogent demonstration (burhan qat'i) except among those who do not know the difference between demonstration, dialectics, and sophistic argument.”Moses Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, trans. Shlomo Pines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), I:71:180. All references are to this translation; parenthetic in-text references are to part, chapter, (...) and page. By contrast, he claims to establish belief in the existence of God “through a demonstrative method as to which there is no disagreement in any respect” (I:71:182). Taken at his word, Maimonides’ proofs for the existence of the deity, like Aquinas’s five ways, have traditionally been read as models of medieval natural theology: of the power of human reason to independently establish revealed truth. In recent years, however, the same demonstrations have assumed a second kind of significance. For scholars, like myself, who argue that Maimonides holds severe views about the limitations of human knowledge of divine science and metaphysics, these demonstrations are the strongest conceivable counterevidence.The locus classicus for this view is Shlomo Pines, “The Limitations of Human Knowledge According to Al-Farabi, Ibn Bajja, and Maimonides,” in Studies in Medieval Jewish History and Literature, ed. I Twersky, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), I:82–109. See also his “Les Limites de la Métaphysique selon Al-Farabi, ibn Bajja et Maimonide; Sources et Antitheses de ces Doctrines chez Alexandre d’Aphrodise et Chez Themistius,” Miscellanea Mediaevalia 13 (1981): 211–25; “Dieu et L’Etre Selon Maimonide: Exégese d’Exode 3,14 et doctrine connexe,” in Celui qui est: Interprétations juives et chrétiennes d’Exode 3, 14, ed. A. de Libera et E. Zum Brunn (Paris: Les Editions du Cerf [Collection “Patrimoines”], 1986), 15–24; and “The Relation between Maimonides’ Halakhic and non-Halakhic Works,” in Maimonides and Philosophy, ed., S. Pines and Y. Yovel (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987). Pines concludes, on the basis of the limitations of the intellect with respect to knowledge of metaphysics, that Maimonides, like Kant, gives priority to the practical over the theoretical. For arguments drawing different ‘skeptical’ conclusions, see my “Maimonides in the Skeptical Tradition,” ms.; “Maimonides on the Growth of Knowledge and the Limitations of the Intellect,” to appear in Tony Levy, ed., Maimonide: Traditions philosophiques et scientifiques médievales arabe, hébraique, latine; “Logical Syntax as a Key to a Secret of the Guide of the Perplexed,” (in Heb.), Iyyun 38 (1989): 137–66; “Maimonides on Language and the Science of Language,” in Maimonides and the Sciences, ed., H. Levine and R. Cohen (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2000), pp. 173–226; and The Matter and Form of Maimonides’ Guide (forthcoming). If Maimonides really held that humans cannot apprehend metaphysical truths about the deity, how could he have demonstrated (or even thought he could demonstrate) the existence of God? If he does demonstrate it, then humans evidently do have knowledge of metaphysics. As one distinguished scholar has recently protested, it is nothing less than “perverse” to interpret Maimonides as “meaning that the existence of God is unknowable when he in fact prides himself on having demonstrated the existence of God in four different ways.”Herbert A. Davidson, “Maimonides on Metaphysical Knowledge,” Maimonidean Studies 3 (1992–1993): 49–103, 86. See also Alfred L. Ivry, “The Logical and Scientific Premises of Maimonides’ Thought,” in Perspectives on Jewish Thought and Mysticism, ed. Alfred L. Ivry, Elliot R. Wolfson, and Allan Arkush (Amsterdam: Harwood Publishers, 1998), pp. 63–97, 70. (shrink)

The funding of higher education is under stress. On the one hand, the benefits of universities for economic prosperity and growth are increasing as universities graduate more students; undertake a greater share of scientific research; and, through cooperation with business, stimulate the technological advance of the private sector. At the same time, government funding of higher education is stagnating or even falling in many countries. The book brings together the views of an international group of experts on the financing of (...) higher education. They examine funding trends in Asia, Europe and the United States and present practical proposals for the reform of university funding and operations and examples of successful ways of building links between industry and universities that can be mutually beneficial and supplement government funding of higher education. (shrink)

Cet article présente une vue d'ensemble de l'histoire de la recherche sur la structure et le sujet de «De vera religione», ainsi que de nouvelles suggestions.

This study aims to identify student attitudes to and perceptions of the topical phenomenon of plagiarism at the Faculty of Regional Development and International Studies at Mendel University in Brno, Czech Republic. The paper includes a theoretical framework describing plagiarism, academic ethics and provides a different perspective on plagiarism by many authors. Furthermore, the article presents a semi-structured questionnaire conducted in July 2018 with a sample of 235 respondents. The questionnaire was used in this research to explore students’ personal experiences, (...) recommendations and other information relating to their attitudes to and perceptions of plagiarism. The results indicate that FRDIS students were familiar with the concept of plagiarism but not always able to clearly identify the correct answers. The recommendation for the Faculty, based on the data analysis, is to hold a tutorial on all the important aspects of plagiarism, such as citations, referencing, and common mistakes. This paper concludes that plagiarism can only be eliminated if it is tackled at the prevention phase, not merely through the use of warnings and threats. (shrink)

We translate Socrates’ famous saying I know that I know nothing into the arithmetical sentence I prove that I prove nothing. Then it is easy to show that this translated saying is formally undecidable in formal arithmetic, using Gödel’s Second Incompleteness Theorem. We investigate some variations of this Socrates-Gödel sentence. In an appendix we sketch a ramified epistemic logic with propositional quantifiers in order to analyze the Socrates-Gödel sentence in a more logical way, separated from the arithmetical context.