This paper discusses the views of three medieval thinkers—Anselm, Thomas Aquinas, and John Duns Scotus—about a specific aspect of the problem of evil, which can be dubbed ‘the Lucifer problem’. What was the object of the first evil choice? What could entice a perfectly rational agent placed in ideal circumstances into doing evil? Those thinkers agreed that Lucifer wanted to be happier, but while Anselm thought that that was something Lucifer could achieve by his natural powers, Aquinas (...) held that it was not naturally possible for Lucifer to be happier, even though it was something he could obtain supernaturally. By contrast, Scotus posited that what Lucifer wanted was beyond what was logically possible, i.e. to be as happy as God (or to be God’s equal). An interesting consequence of Scotus’s hypothesis is that God could have done nothing to make Lucifer’s evil choice less likely. (shrink)

My thesis is that you can lie with ‘ P therefore Q ’ without P or Q being lies. For you can lie by virtue of not believing that P supports Q. My thesis is reconciled with the principle that all lies are assertions through H. P. Grice’s account of conventional implicatures. These semantic cousins of conversational implicatures are secondary assertions that clarify the speaker’s attitude toward his primary assertions. The meaning of ‘therefore’ commits the speaker to an entailment thesis (...) even though the speaker does not enter that commitment into the text. Insincere conventional implicatures are akin to insincerely asserted footnotes. An absence of lies in the text is compatible with the presence of lies in the meta-text. (shrink)

La Fraternidad de la Flecha Dorada, fundada por la ocultista Maria de Naglowska en el París de 1932, fue una de las distintas órdenes mágicas de la Edad Contemporánea sobre las que se ha investigado en contextos relacionados con el satanismo, aunque en un número muy reducido de obras y nunca con demasiada profundidad. La fraternidad, que destacó por su sacerdocio exclusivamente femenino y el gran protagonismo de la magia sexual, se basaba en la particular e integradora visión teológica de (...) Naglowska, de carácter no dualista, que incluía una trinidad compuesta por Dios, Jesús y, por último, Satán. Sin embargo, ni Satán ni Lucifer ejercen el papel de figura central dentro de este sistema esotérico cuya autora tampoco parece haber ejercido algún tipo de influencia en las bases del fenómeno conocido como «satanismo contemporáneo». Expuesto este fondo, mi comunicación tendrá un objetivo doble: presentar los cimientos teóricos de la Fraternidad de la Flecha Dorada, así como algunos de los rituales destacados de esta orden, para, en segundo lugar, determinar su naturaleza y revisar, debido a las razones mencionadas, la etiqueta de «satanismo» que ha sobrevolado la misma, tratando de clasificarla. Para ello, centraré mi análisis en el marco de las Ciencias de las Religiones, más concretamente en el de los nuevos movimientos religiosos y el esoterismo occidental, abordando los textos de Maria de Naglowska utilizados por la fraternidad. Además, me apoyaré en investigaciones anteriores con el fin de recopilar los datos históricos necesarios para introducir a la orden y a su carismática suma sacerdotisa. (shrink)

The famous Epistola Luciferi, written in late 1351 or early 1352, caused quite a stir in the Avignon of Pope Clement vi, quickly became a medieval best-seller, and thereafter remained topical, being copied and printed down to the present day. Traditionally ascribed to Nicole Oresme or Henry of Langenstein, the letter was attributed to the Cistercian Pierre Ceffons by Damasus Trapp in 1957. Trapp merely took Ceffons’ authorship for granted, however, and in the most thorough study of the Epistola Luciferi (...) and of the entire genre of Devil’s letters, her 1982 PhD dissertation, Helen C. Feng rejected the attribution. Presenting codices and works of Ceffons of which Trapp was unaware, this article argues in favor of Ceffons’ responsibility for the Epistola Luciferi, while offering a new critical edition of the letter, an English translation, and a supplemental list of manuscripts and editions. (shrink)

The article reviews the book The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, by Philip G. Zimbardo.

Routledge is now re-issuing this prestigious series of 204 volumes originally published between 1910 and 1965. The titles include works by key figures such asC.G. Jung, Sigmund Freud, Jean Piaget, Otto Rank, James Hillman, Erich Fromm, Karen Horney and Susan Isaacs. Each volume is available on its own, as part of a themed mini-set, or as part of a specially-priced 204-volume set. A brochure listing each title in the "International Library of Psychology" series is available upon request.

FERRAZ, Salma (org.). As malasartes de Lúcifer : textos críticos de Teologia e Literatura. Londrina: Editora da Universidade Estadual de Londrina, 2012. 281p. ISBN: 978 85 7216 618-8.

Humans were created in the image of God and animals are subordinate to them. The physical death of humans was a consequence of the Fall. Must that not automatically affect animals? Can superior human beings die whereas inferior animals not die? Therefore, animals were either already affected by the Fall of Lucifer or else the Fall of Man affected animals so that they would always be different in kind from humans. Hence, it is more logical to attribute animal pain (...) and death to Satan and not to an omnipotent God. (shrink)

I propose an ‘intellectual genealogy’ of the widespread contemporary lifestyle called ‘expressive individualism’, tracing it back first to the cult of the artist as genius, which flourished during the 19th century, but which has been democratized and universalized in our time. I then trace it back one step further, somewhat surprisingly, to the altered depiction of Lucifer John Milton gives in his poem Paradise Lost. Milton's Lucifer rejects not only Jesus as the highest creature, he rejects the Father (...) as father; he announces ‘I know none before me; I am self-begot.’ To the extent that we embrace the ethic of ‘expressive individualism’, therefore, we are implicitly committed to Milton's Lucifer as an archetype for human fulfilment, which I suggest, however, is a toxic model. (shrink)

This book argues that the sin of the devil compels a view of moral responsibility that undermines concerns about luck. It surveys the biblical account of the primal sin, its major interpretation in the tradition, and navigates that interpretation through objections from the perspective of moral luck.

The paper explores the philosophical and theological opinions of Friedrich Leubnitz (1597-1652), Leibniz’s father and the Dean of Philosophy in Leipzig, by examining an address he delivered in the magister ordination ceremony of 1646. The lecture depicts a perpetual conflict between Lucifer, who is also Apollo, the god of knowledge, and Christian philosophers. Among other features, the lecture presents Eve as a serpent and Christian philosophy as an occupation to avoid. Accordingly, Friedrich was probably more heterodox than usually portrayed, (...) a style of thinking that might have influenced his son. (shrink)

From Homeric heroes, Lucifer and Faust to the phenomenology of individual and social emotions, this book unfolds historical dimensions, literary recreations and philosophical analyses of the most ambivalent emotion of pride, from worst of sins to noblest feeling.

The author argues that Rand’s ethical theory is much closer in essence to the eudaimonist, self-perfectionist perspectives of Aristotle and the neo-Aristotelians, Douglas Den Uyl and Douglas Rasmussen, than to the “selfish,” egoistic ethics many assume to be her basic position. He discusses Rand’s anti-hedonist and pro-rational selfishness positions as corollaries of man’s life as the standard of moral value, as well as Rand’s point that treating either happiness or personal benefit as the standard of moral value is a reversal (...) of cause and effect. He also identifies the oppressive negativism in Rand’s discussion of the seven canonical Objectivist virtues. (shrink)

Isabel Paterson is the founding godmother of the libertarian movement, known best for her book The God of the Machine, which Ayn Rand credited for having done “for capitalism what the Bible did for Christianity.” Often overlooked is her twenty-five-year career as a literary columnist for the New York Herald Tribune. Culture and Liberty: Writings of Isabel Paterson, edited by Stephen Cox, presents a selection of those columns along with private letters and other essays. They are a treasure. Paterson’s critical (...) performances show us a systematic yet unpredictable mind at work—a model not only of the first but also of any future libertarian worthy of the name. (shrink)

This paper, based on some historical sources of the IV and the V century, aims to examine the existence of a fundamentalist Christian community, separated from the Catholics, in Sardinia, between 362 AD and the last decades of the IV century. After his years of exile, the bishop Lucifer returned to his diocese and made the Church of Rome community of Cagliari the symbol of the firm resistance by the intransigent anti-Arians to the conciliatory politics of the rest of (...) the Church towards Arianism. Nevertheless, this separation cannot be recognized as a schism from the Church; it was a voluntary isolation encouraged by Lucifer and perpetuated by his successors. (shrink)

La sombra del Supremo se adentra en la única contingencia que Occidente no puede admitir: que el engaño provenga de Dios. No ya del artero enemigo que tras la caída de Lucifer campa por la tierra, tampoco del azar o la necesidad, ni siquiera de la naturaleza oculta tras los fenómenos, sino directa y llanamente de la Causa Primera: de la voluntad original del Hacedor. Desde el Deus Prudens o Dios Sabio que por compasión oculta la verdad a los (...) humanos al Creador que finge el mundo con un bostezo provocado por el tedio de su soledad; desde el Yahveh que envía al diablo o la serpiente para que engañe a sus criaturas con sutiles celadas al Theos Agnostos o Dios Desconocido que permite al demiurgo levantar un universo infame, la falsedad del mundo sería solo la sombra inevitable del Supremo. (shrink)

In Boccacio's Decameron, Cervigni sees a parodic echo of the circles of Dante's Divine Comedy, and asks whether Bocaccio envisions the voyage of the brigata as similar to Dante the Pilgrim's journey toward the center, first the abysmal center of Lucifer, then towards the highest center, God.

What strikes me at the outset, and prompts the title, is that nothing exhibits more clearly than mathematics the complicity between man, God and Satan. That man should have knowledge so luminous, so absolute, would seem impossible did he not share, under whatever doubt or qualification, in the divine. On the other hand, the arrogation of that knowledge, its over-reaching distortion and delimitation of mind and world, hints how far it reenacts the revolt of Lucifer.

This paper surveys the doctrine on angels taught by theologians in the first century of scholasticism . This topic has received virtually no scholarly attention; but it is of interest for the light it sheds on the concerns of school theologians during this formative stage of their discipline. We can subdivide our target century into three parts, the first half of the twelfth century closing with the Sentences of Peter Lombard, the second half of the twelfth century, and the first (...) quarter of the thirteenth century. In the first of these three stages, scholastic theologians, for the first time, faced the challenge of creating a syllabus for the teaching of systematic theology and developed the sentence collection as their genre of choice for that purpose. The question of where to place angels within that context and genre, or even if they should be placed there at all, was the single most heavily debated topic on their angelological agenda. Another major matter on that agenda on which agreement reigned as to the desired outcome, although different masters proposed different itineraries to their common destination, was the felt need to refute Origen's claim that backsliding and conversion remained eternal options, so that Lucifer and the fallen angels might even be saved. Other issues that attracted attention had to do with the psychology of angels and their exercise of reason and will both before and after their fall or confirmation in glory. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 62.4 (2001) 593-610 [Access article in PDF] The Desire to Know the Secrets of the World Edward Peters I. The letter to Ferdinand and Isabella that Christopher Columbus intended to serve as the preface to the Libro de las profecías began with a remarkable observation about his own career and the particular temperament it had shaped in him: From a very young age (...) I began to navigate the seas, and I have continued to do so until today. This art inclines those who follow it to desire to know the secrets of this world. 1Although Columbus was certainly not unlearned, there is an artlessness and directness about his remark that suggest that whatever Columbus may have meant by "the secrets of the world" and the desire of navigators to know them, he was probably not speaking reconditely or mystically. 2 [End Page 593]Nor was Columbus the only early sixteenth-century practical man who spoke this way. The letters of Hernán Cortés, hardly a philosopher or a navigator, pointed out to correspondents that it was "a universal condition of man to want to know," and that he was first of all desirous of knowledge "of the secrets of these parts"; that "many new secrets" had been learned from the discoveries; of a volcano, "I wished to know the secret of this, which seemed something of a miracle." 3If practical folk could speak thus at the turn of the sixteenth century, it is not surprising that in the course of that century their rulers should appropriate the language of secrets, including the secrets of distant places, and the desire to know them and in doing so to transform their realms into information-gathering states, using detailed questionaires to assemble and organize new data just as they assembled cabinets of curiosities, libraries, zoos, observatories, and botanical gardens. As J. H. Elliott put it: But curiosity also had its due place within a wider Christian framework. At the end of the century, José de Acosta, in his great Natural and Moral History of the Indies, likened men to ants in their refusal to let themselves be deterred, once they had set out on their quest for facts. "And the high and eternal wisdom of the Creator uses this natural curiosity of men to communicate the light of His holy gospel to peoples who still live in the darkness of their errors." This assumption, that all knowledge was subordinated to a higher purpose and fitted into a providential design, was crucial for the assimilation of the New World of America by sixteenth-century Christendom. 4Elliott's characterization of an honorific Christian intellectual curiosity represented a very small part of a very complex semantic universe that centered on the Latin term curiositas and its vernacular cognates, not all of whose meanings were neutral or honorific. Just three years before Acosta wrote there had, after all, appeared the first printed history of Doctor Faustus, another sixteenth-century practical man who was also interested in the secrets of the world. 5 And not [End Page 594] too many years after Acosta wrote, another practical being, Milton's Lucifer, also went forth boldly to seek new worlds. 6 Only in a restricted sense could the desire to know the secrets of the world be understood in the way that Columbus, Cortés, Philip II, and Acosta celebrated it. In many cases it had to be extricated from a semantic universe in which it had long been identified with less honorable motives and more dangerous or ephemeral objects.The most influential exploration of part of that semantic universe appeared in Hans Blumenberg's long essay entitled, "The 'Trial' of Theoretical Curiosity," first published as part of a larger work in 1966, later slightly revised and separately reprinted, and translated into English in 1983. 7 Blumenberg's particular understanding of the history of philosophy, however, and his narrow focus on the natural sciences as the arena of "theoretical" curiosity limited both his conceptualization and his argument. In... (shrink)

En el siguiente trabajo de revision no solo examinamos la ya clásica obra de Zizek, El Titere y el Enano, sino que tomamos su parte más polemica para establecer una nueva lectura no solo del cristianismo sino de lo que en otros abordajes Korstanje llamo el capitalismo mortuorio, o Thana Capitalism. Con la muerte de Cristo comienza una nueva face donde el sufrimiento humano se hace atractivo para Europa. Como un gran tentador para la humanidad, por medio de Lucifer, (...) el hombre cree en Dios y al hacerlo encuentra “la vida eterna”. En un mundo donde el hijo de Dios vive por siempre aferrándose a su creencia, la muerte de los hijos se vive como una imposibilidad. Creemos que esta concepción es superadora de las limitaciones que deja Zizek en su desarrollo, sobre todo en su texto Is God dead, unconsciouss, Evil, Impotent, Stupid… or just Counter-factual?, publicado en forma reciente en Int. Journal of Zizek Studies. En el Capitalismo Mortuorio, la imagen de un Dios muerto es de vital importancia pues exhibe el “sufrimiento extremo”, como forma de entretenimiento. En la actualidad, desde los espectáculos deportivos donde sólo uno se queda con todo, o los films, donde todos mueren menos uno, el tema del sufrimiento se encuentra presente en Talk Shows, media, TV, revistas, magazines o programas de periodismo por doquier. Insistentemente, la tragedia ajena se ha transformado en un commodity que asegura mayores inversores y ventas; hecho por el cual, entre otras cosas, es imposible desprenderse de la fascinación, temor y obsesión por el terrorismo moderno. (shrink)

The role of divine power in Aquinas’s spiritual doctrine has often been neglected in favor of a focus on the primacy of charity, the controlling virtue of spiritual progress. The tendency among some thinkers (e.g. Polkinghorne) to juxtapose divine love and power stems from the stress on divine immanence at the cost of divine transcendence, and from an evolutionary (vs. classical) view of God with its ‘kenotic’ theodicy. A study of the ways in which divine power grounds and directs the (...) spiritual life highlights the robust role that metaphysics plays in spiritual ascent for Aquinas, and offers a philosophical entry point to his doctrine. Themes in his doctrine of the spiritual life incorporate Platonic transcendent causal plenitude and Aristotelian causal axioms and motifs of growth and unity. From the side of theology, divine power is analyzed through several lenses, including power through weakness in Christ, the sin of Lucifer against the gift of being in contrast to the counsel of obedience, and the role of Christ’s human nature in the Church. Taken together, these themes combine to characterize divine power as redemptive medicine, as opposed to a distant, arbitrary force, and to reveal the ways in which Aquinas applies metaphysical insights to the supernatural order. (shrink)

No doubt the years hunting monsters and saving the universe have had their toll on the Winchesters, but their toughest and most gruesome battles are contained in this book. Think Lucifer was diabolically clever? Think again. No son is more wayward than the one who squanders his intellect and academic career pursuing questions as poignant as “Half-awesome? That’s full-on good, right?” Gathered here for the first time since the formation of Purgatory, a collection of research so arcane and horrific (...) that it would make even the late, great Bobby Singer blush. _Supernatural and Philosophy_ tackles all the big ideas in the long-running hit show _Supernatural_, covering thorny issues in a fun and accessible way. Even those unfamiliar with the show will find fascinating insights into Heaven, Hell, Angels, Demons, God, and Lucifer. A unique collection of insights into the many philosophical, religious, and paranormal topics in the hit TV show, _Supernatural_ Accessible treatment of thorny issues for a general audience Written by philosophical fans of the show, for philosophical fans of the show Those unfamiliar with the show will still find fascinating insights into Heaven, Hell, Angels, Demons, God, Lucifer, and Good and Evil Contributors tackle issues ranging from the biological classifications of monsters, to the epistemological problems of ghost hunting. (shrink)

This paper explores what might be called the ‘diabolical principle’ in Vilém Flusser’s work, tracing its evolution from the early Brazilian to the last German texts. If God, as the German mystics asserted, is basically ineffable and, thus, comparable to absolute nothingness, the devil – at least within Western civilization – stands for the ultimate frailty and absurdity of all human endeavors, that is, for language, history, progress, and for our continuous attempts to create sense and impose form on the (...) unfathomable nothingness surrounding us. Western history, according to Flusser, is basically a diabolical pursuit. Flusser made use of the figure of the devil in A historia do diabo, first published in 1965, reinterpreting the history of the West from a diabolical point of view. The figure of the devil, the fallen angel inhabiting the dark abysses, however, plays also a major role in Vampyroteuthis infernalis, published in 1987, twenty-two years later. In the second text, it is the devil wearing the mask of Lucifer, the light-bearer. (shrink)

En la Antigüedad, ante los logros y hechos extraordinarios de una persona, especialmente si en la época no podían tener más explicación que la intervención sobrenatural, la comunidad encontraba una rápida vía aclaratoria en la atribución a una influencia demoníaca, a una traición a Dios cuyo responsable se afanaba en ocultar: a la persona de éxito se le relacionaba con el diablo a través de un pacto formal, de una hipoteca sobre la salvación de su alma que rubricaba como parte (...) interesada a cambio de un inmenso poder. Por su parte, y como parte contratante, Lucifer obraba de buena fe y de acuerdo a la relación contractual, a cambio de que la persona le cediera su alma, le confería un poder sobrenatural. (shrink)

In this article, Raphaël Larrère compares Agrostis, a genetically modified plant, and Lucifer, a clone of a bull. Based on these two examples, he reflects on the sociological and philosophical consequences of the introduction of artificial components into our environment. What both of these examples share is the belief in the Promethean power of genetic engineering. The border between nature and artifice is fading away, but a radical difference remains : the creation of a plant organism raises the issue (...) of the risk of proliferation and inopportune interaction with other ecosystems, and thus the principle of precaution, whereas the creation of an animal, a being with feelings, is an ethical or moral issue : it involves a decision on the life or death of a living being. If one denies the ethical dimension of these questions, one gives free rein to the monopolistic projects of global agro-business, or the Pentagon’s Promethean rhetoric of the « creation » of the soldier. (shrink)

Why do people do horrific things to one another? This article reviews two recent books that attempt to answer that question, Philip Zimbardo's The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil and Barbara Coloroso's Extraordinary Evil: A Brief History of Genocide . The author discusses the educational implications of these works and raises preliminary considerations for an education for heroism.

_In Boccacio's Decameron, Cervigni sees a parodic echo of the circles of Dante's Divine Comedy, and asks whether Bocaccio envisions the voyage of the brigata as similar to Dante the Pilgrim's journey toward the center, first the abysmal center of Lucifer, then towards the highest center, God._.

Do the various ascriptions of “violence,” e.g., to rape, logical reasoning, racist legislation, unqualified statements, institutions of class and/or gender inequity, etc., mean something identically the same, something analogous, or equivocal and context-bound? This paper argues for both an analogous sense as well as an exemplary essence and finds support in Aristotle’s theory of anger as, as Sokolowski has put it, a form of moral annihilation, culminating in a level of rage that crosses a threshold. Here we adopt Sartre’s analysis (...) of the “threshold of violence” as indicating a basic “existential” possibility wherein persons may and do adopt a posture of anti-god. This has considerable symmetry with the mythic and theological figure in the Abrahamic religions who is called “Lucifer.” This personage, at a unique timeless moment, found himself empowered to assume the right to exercise an infinite will-act which tolerated no superior normative perspective. I argue that this mythic stance is a live option for persons. Further, modern day nation-state military preparedness, where nuclear weaponry is a major tool of foreign policy, is a way of putting on ice and holding in reserve, but button ready, the onto-logical madness of the Luciferian moment. (shrink)

Police officers around the world must often select between equally unappealing, uncertain courses of action in an attempt to achieve the best outcome. Despite the immense importance of such decisions, there remains a lack of understanding in the study of individual differences in police decision-making. Here, using a sample of senior police officers recruited from decision-making training events across the United Kingdom (n = 96), we used the Least-worst Uncertain Choice Inventory For Emergency Responses (LUCIFER) to measure the effect (...) of maximization on both domain-specific (police) and domain-general (military) decisions. In line with a wealth of research on traditional “consumer” decisions, we found that police officers who were “maximizers” found decisions more difficult. Gender and previous military experience also influenced the process of decision-making. Specifically, police officers with military experience took more time to assess the situation but were faster to choose a course of action and commit to it. Female police officers also were slower to assess the situation. As recent events show, the outcomes of police decisions have significant consequences for the public, the officers involved, the police force as a whole, and the wider population, yet psychological research has yet to fully explore the role of individual differences in how such decisions are made. While this study does not seek to identify factors associated with “good” or “better” decision-makers, it provides strong support for the need to factor in perspectives of the individual when creating theory, or applied tools, in support of police decision-making. (shrink)

Let’s say that an act requires Person-Affecting Justification if and only if some alternative would have been better for someone. So, Lucifer breaking Xavier’s back requires Person-Affecting Justification because the alternative would have been better for Xavier. But the story continues: While Lucifer evades justice, Xavier moves on and founds a school for gifted children. Xavier’s deepest values become identified with the school and its community. When authorities catch Lucifer, he claims no Person-Affecting Justification is needed: because (...) the attack set Xavier on his life’s path, it’s no longer true that the alternative would have been better by the standard of what Xavier now values most. An unappealingly paternalistic way to hold Lucifer to account is to discount Xavier’s preferences as merely adaptive. Instead, I propose understanding the persons of Person-Affecting Justification to be not persons but person stages. This allows us to hold Lucifer to account without having to discount Xavier’s actual preferences, and has interesting implications for compensatory justice, including making sense of reparations for historical wrongs. (shrink)

Suárez was probably the first theologian to propose a political understanding of the order of subordination among the demons. According to Aquinas, this subordination immediately reflects the natural differences in perfection between the demons. Suárez charged that a natural-based order of demonic subordination could not ground the capacity of the demons’ ruler—Lucifer—to use his power to impose civic obligations on fellow demons so as to pursue their joint evil goals. But can there be obligations ad malum? This paper explores (...) a number of possible paths seemingly available to Suárez to defend his controversial view. I argue that the most promising interpretation of Suárez is one according to which the obligations created by Lucifer’s commands are not obligations in conscience but rather what we may call “non-moral obligations.”. (shrink)