While the 'image of God' continues to be a key concept in Christian anthropology, its toilsome reception bears witness to its linguistic and theological complexity. In their biblical commentaries Augustine and Luther tried to fathom the authentic meaning of Gn 1:26-27. In dialogue with the scientific world of their day, they carried out this task all through their eventful lives as they promoted the recta fides of their ecclesial communities. Interpreting the text in the light of the rule of faith, (...) their efforts were more of an exercise in systematics. The present study attempts to sketch the vitality and commitment of their undertaking, as it outlines its development. Shunning to the best of his abilities any facile solution, the Bishop of Hippo kept on looking for some more articulate understanding; the Reformer continued to treasure tradition just as he critically proposed a christocentric understanding meant to inspire his audience. (shrink)

Against certain positivistic and neopositivistic strictures still rooted in our society, Agazzi argues that knowing the invisible is possible, not just in science, but also in metaphysics, in morals, in aesthetics, and in other areas, including, in a sense, religion. The book also examines many examples of such knowledge, surveying not only the great classics of philosophy, but various immortal masterpieces of art, music and literature. It is not just a treatise in epistemology, but a book of philosophy in the (...) most complete and traditional sense, for it discusses knowledge not only for its own sake, but also as a guide to culture, morality, happiness and to the sense of life. Thus, it also provides some important suggestions on how to face our time of crisis and an uncertain future. Despite Agazzi’s proverbial rigor and clarity, his project is so momentous and demanding that I discuss certain points which might deserve further explication and argumentation. (shrink)

The notion of a hypothesis being deployed essentially in the derivation of a novel prediction plays a key role in the deployment realist reply to Laudan’s and Lyon’s attacks to the No Miracle Argument. However Lyons criticized Psillos’ criterion of essentiality, urging deployment realists to abandon this requirement altogether and accept as true all the assumptions actually deployed in novel predictions. But since many false assumptions were actually deployed in novel predictions, he concludes that the “no miracle argument” and deployment (...) realism fail. I reply that the essentiality condition is required by Occam’s razor, and a “no miracle argument” deprived of that condition is a straw man. While Lyons’ criticisms of Psillos’ formalization of essentiality may be well taken, I suggest that there is a simpler formulation which escapes those criticisms and is enough to deal with the supposed counterexamples to the No Miracle Argument and deployment realism: a hypothesis is essential when it does not have a proper part (in Yablo’s sense) from which the prediction could also be derived. I then show how this condition rescues deployment realism from Lyons’ purported historical counterexamples. Essentiality in this sense cannot be detected prospectively, but this is just what we should expect, and far from causing problems for deployment realists, this frees them from unreasonable obligations. (shrink)

Gerald Doppelt claims that Deployment Realism cannot withstand the antirealist objections based on the “pessimistic meta-induction” and Laudan’s historical counterexamples. Moreover it is incomplete, as it purports to explain the predictive success of theories, but overlooks the necessity to explain also their explanatory success. Accordingly, he proposes a new version of realism, presented as the best explanation of both predictive and explanatory success, and committed only to the truth of best current theories, not of the discarded ones. Elsewhere I criticized (...) his new brand of realism. Here instead I argue that Doppelt has not shown that Deployment Realism cannot solve the problems raised by the history of science, explaining explanatory success does not add much to explaining novel predictive success, and Doppelt is right that truth is not a sufficient explanans, but for different reasons, and this does not refute Deployment Realism, but helps to detail it better. In a more explicit formulation, the realist IBE concludes not only to the truth of theories, but also to the reliability of scientists and scientific method, the order and simplicity of nature, and the approximate truth of background theories. (shrink)

This article embarks on ethical trade-offs at the sustainability/finance interface by contrasting shareholders’ interest in short-term financial returns with society’s interest in counteracting ecological and social grievances. Scrutinizing share repurchases, we investigate a firm’s communicated sustainability orientation (i.e., its environmental and social value orientation) as well as its environmental and social sustainability performance. Our results are based on a large-scale panel dataset of 491 U.S. firms observed from 2004 to 2016. The dataset combines share buyback data with sustainability orientation scores (...) from shareholder letters and sustainability performance ratings. The econometric models suggest no association between social value orientation and repurchase volumes, but a significantly negative relationship between environmental value orientation and buybacks in a cubic form. Executive stock options partially attenuate this relationship. Share repurchases in turn negatively affect future environmental and social performance. This study grasps the consequences of firms’ short-term shareholder satisfaction and discusses its ethical implications in the context of firms’ contribution to sustainable development, thereby providing important insights to the business ethics discourse. (shrink)

Let M be an o-minimal expansion of a real closed field. Let G be a definably compact definably connected abelian n-dimensional group definable in M. We show the following: the o-minimal fundamental group of G is isomorphic to ℤn; for each k>0, the k-torsion subgroup of G is isomorphic to n, and the o-minimal cohomology algebra over ℚ of G is isomorphic to the exterior algebra over ℚ with n generators of degree one.

In his early works, Habermas wants to preserve both, the German idealist notion which gives primacy to self-reflection in the history of the human species, and the Marxist materialist conception that self-reflection is based on the material conditions of existence. ;Such dual preservation cannot be maintained; for the primacy given to self-reflection by German idealism is based on a prior spiritualization of the conditions of reflection. It is precisely with those alienated conditions that Habermas's "neo-Marxism" seeks to limit "materialistically" critical (...) self-reflection. This is a bad overcoming of Hegel, since it preserves the Spirit as alienated otherness. ;However, Habermas's more recent linguistic turn evinces an attempt to ground critical self-reflection by means of a de-historicized anticipation of an ideal speech situation through the formal rules of cogency of speech. ;An atheistic reading of Hegel's conception of life, which regards universal life as "congealed space" or pure positivity, allows for a transition to Marx's practical communism. ;The existential attitudes towards death have as their ontological correlate, the motion of life; that is, historical acts may be regarded as attempts to appropriate objectivity which, as pure positivity, cannot be appropriated in principle, especially after the notion of an all-encompassing transcendental subjectivity, which posits the object as alienated subject, has been rejected. ;In the early Marx, historical and social investigations were limited by the primacy of the subject, the object being subordinated to it. To this extent, he naively remained at the level of ideology, i.e., "lived relations." In this manner, the unconditioned supersensible, in the form of a transcendental subjectivity, clouds the examination of the objective conditions of existence. ;The mature Marx's turn to the object expresses the elimination of the unconditioned, and the concomitant consideration of social reality as the basis of positive and negative ideologies, to the extent that the consciousness of freedom arose from the forced emancipation of consciousness from and by material conditions. (shrink)

In this paper, we propose a unified account of conditionals inspired by Frank Ramsey. Most contemporary philosophers agree that Ramsey’s account applies to indicative conditionals only. We observe against this orthodoxy that his account covers subjunctive conditionals as well—including counterfactuals. In light of this observation, we argue that Ramsey’s account of conditionals resembles Robert Stalnaker’s possible worlds semantics supplemented by a model of belief. The resemblance suggests to reinterpret the notion of conditional degree of belief in order to overcome a (...) tension in Ramsey’s account. The result of the reinterpretation is a tenable account of conditionals that covers indicative and subjunctive as well as qualitative and probabilistic conditionals. (shrink)

Let R be an o-minimal expansion of an ordered group R has no poles, R cannot define a real closed field with domain R and order R is eventually linear and every R -definable set is a finite union of cones. As a corollary we get that Th has quantifier elimination and universal axiomatization in the language with symbols for the ordered group operations, bounded R -definable sets and a symbol for each definable endomorphism of the group.

This book investigates how, from the seventeenth century onward, philosophers, philologists and historians described various world "cultures", colonized the past (or national pasts), and thus invented Europe's philosophical nature. In the recent past, critical discussions concerning notions such as "cultural area" and "area studies", as well as their relativizations by means of conceptions that avoid splitting clearly identified areas (inter alia, "third space", "hybridity", "diaspora", or "cosmopolitism"), drew attention to the long history of cultural territorialization. This book attempts to open (...) the history of philosophy to reflexive and globalizing tendencies elaborated in the field of "world history". From the seventeenth century onward, in both modern Europe and North America, historical sciences - notably philosophical historiography and cultural history - colonized both the past (or national pasts) and the "rest" of the world. The contributions gathered in the present volume address both phenomena to the extent that they have been linked with modern historicization of philosophy, sciences, and culture. (shrink)

Research using Controlled Human Infection Models is yet to be attempted in India. This study was conducted to understand the perceptions of the lay public and key opinion makers prior to the possible introduction of such studies in the country. 110 respondents from urban and rural Bangalore district were interviewed using qualitative research methods of Focus Group Discussions and In-depth Interviews. The data was analyzed using grounded theory. Safety was a key concern of the lay public, expressed in terms of (...) fear of death. The notion of infecting a healthy volunteer, the possibility of continued effects beyond the study duration and the likelihood of vulnerable populations volunteering solely for monetary benefit, were ethical concerns. Public good outcomes such as effective treatments, targeted vaccines and prevention of diseases was necessary justification for such studies. However, the comprehension of this benefit was not clear among non-medical, non-technical respondents and suggestions to seek alternatives to CHIMs repeatedly arose. There was a great deal of deflection—with each constituency feeling that people other than themselves may be ideally suited as participants. Risk takers, those without dependents, the more health and research literate, financially sound and those with an altruistic bent of mind emerged as possible CHIM volunteers. While widespread awareness and advocacy about CHIM is essential, listening to plural voices is the first step in public engagement in ethically contentious areas. Continued engagement and inclusive deliberative processes are required to redeem the mistrust of the public in research and rebuild faith in regulatory systems. (shrink)

As we will show in the present work, the historical development of pure geometry did not arise as a direct “transition” from practical geometry into pure geometry, at least as these are usually understood. We can discern four phases related to this evolution. Initially, we have practical geometry as applied in ancient Greece and other ancient civilizations. This surveyors’ practical geometry was somewhat transformed in “didactic” contexts when applied to problem-solving. This not-so-practical geometry is the direct antecedent of the first (...) form of pure geometry, that of Hippocrates of Chios. Only afterward did pure geometry, as we usually understand it, emerge. The form of pure geometry that we find in Euclid’s Elements. (shrink)

Suppose G is a definably connected, definable group in an o-minimal expansion of an ordered group. We show that the o-minimal universal covering homomorphism equation image: equation image→ G is a locally definable covering homomorphism and π1 is isomorphic to the o-minimal fundamental group π of G defined using locally definable covering homomorphisms.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the nature of bureaucratization within public research bodies and its relationship to scientific performance, focusing on an Italian case-study. The main finding is that the bureaucratization of the research sector has two dimensions: public research labs have academic bureaucratization since researchers spend an increasing part of their time in administrative matters (i.e., preparing grant applications, managing grants/projects, and so on); whereas universities mainly have administrative bureaucratization generated by the increase over time of (...) administrative staff in comparison with researchers and faculty. In addition, I show that research units with higher bureaucratization have lower scientific performance. (shrink)

The following essay argues that the Husserlian idea of the epoché could be expanded to cover all aspects of practical life. The first part summarizes the extensive debate developed on this issue in English speaking Phenomenology in the 1970s, one that focused on the relation between the notions of epoché and reduction. In fact, the notion of reduction seems to run counter to the idea of expanding the epoché, insofar as it confines the latter within the narrow horizon of a (...) transcendental subjectivism. But Husserl himself cherished the ambition to return to the world. The second part emphasizes that reduction is an act that operates in the practical world in order to introduce a new type of action. According to the author, the phenomenon of ritual can be considered a sort of action in abeyance, i.e. action free from the burden of natural life. Thus the notion of “relief” could prove the most appropriate for introducing a phenomenological theory of rituals as rules without meanings. The third part deals with the relation between Husserl and the Japanese journal “Kaizō,” which asked him for some contributions. The upshot of this proposal was a certain misunderstanding between the Husserlian emphasis upon the idea of new and the perspective of Japanese culture, that tends to overcome the opposition between innovation and repetition through the juxtaposition of the new and the old. (shrink)