Recent science and technology studies have analyzed questions of nonexpert participation in science, technology, and science policy from an empirically grounded perspective. The introduction to this special issue offers a double contribution to this debate. First, it presents a summary of the state of the art and an outline of the historical emergence of the participatory question. The argument distinguishes four periods since the late nineteenth century, each with a specific relationship between expert and nonexpert knowledge ranging from a hybrid, (...) to a politicized, to an autonomous, to a participatory relationship. Second, the introduction summarizes the contributions to this issue. Their common concern is to take the debate one step further by critically reflecting the problems and limitations of participatory practices. The contributions point out the need for contextualizing the participatory question within the wider social, economic, and political circumstances in which participatory science and technology is set. (shrink)

Avantgarde in Halle: The Invention of Aesthetics and the Aestheticization of Christianity. The foundation of scholarly aesthetics by the Halle philosopher Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten and Georg Friedrich Meier in the middle of the 18th century took place within a milieu that was shaped by both pietism and the Enlightenment. Martin Fritz demonstrates that aesthetics in Halle itself can be considered a synthesis of pietism and Enlightenment ideas. The sensualization of basic Christian concepts is of eminent relevance for these aesthetics, (...) in order to reinvent the pietistic striving for intensive religious experiences through such „aestheticization.“ The romantic idea of „Kunstreligion“, which continues to be significant in cultural life today, is also based on this programmatic notion of aestheticization. Building on this historical background, this article’s concluding systematic considerations argue for a theological revaluation of pertinent contemporary cultural phenomena. (shrink)

L’auteur met en évidence la façon dont Thémistius, dans sa paraphrase, réorganise les parties du texte des lignes 71a17-b8 des Seconds Analytiques. Par une analyse détaillée du propos d’Aristote dans ces lignes, il montre que la réorganisation proposée par Thémistius est fidèle à l’esprit du texte aristotélicien, et s’appuie vraisemblablement sur des indices externes dont disposait le paraphraste.

In this article, I aim at problematizing the implied idea of causality in cognitive evaluations of horizontal justice events. I will draw on theories about retrospective sensemaking and its cognitive foundation in counterfactual belief formation. Issues related to horizontal or intraunit unfairness emerge in situations in which the actions of one employee influence the outcome of another due to relational interdependence. The authors of theories about horizontal unfairness have continued the traditional distinction between the three facets of justice, procedural, distributive, (...) and interactional. However, might employee A blame employee B because she (B) obtained qualitative (e.g., non-monetary appraisal) or quantitative (e.g., monetary compensation) recognition even though the latter did not, directly at least, bring about the event. The problem here is one of causality which asks the question, Can A be blamed by B for bringing about the event of outcome difference? While blame in evaluations of vertical justice certainly presumes causal agency, it might be questioned whether the same goes for horizontal unfairness. Counterfactual belief formation enables a step into the cognitive and retrospective nature of evaluations of horizontal justice events centered on the counterfactual belief “had the unfavorable event X not occurred, another and more favorable event X1 would have occurred.” This is related to the distance between the actual X and the potential event state X), in the sense that the closer the two appear, the more convincing becomes A’s belief to himself. The underlying causality of rewarding processes, however, states that some third party introduces the recognition, for example, a manager, and, therefore, B did not bring about the reward event, the third party did. It seems, then, that to understand this, we should take into consideration: 1) the formation of counterfactual beliefs and 2) the causality of blame. The article concludes that, due to the underlying causality of rewarding processes, one might solely consider one facet of horizontal justice, interactional horizontal justice. However, tapping into the phenomenological dimension of morality might allow one also to address the moral nature of distributive and procedural facets of horizontal justice as the experience of the psychosocial fabric of social reality related with feeling either “as if” one is being treated unfairly or “as if” one is treating others unfairly. (shrink)

Jean Porter intends to develop a fresh construal of the natural law tradition which in its essentials corresponds to the thought of Aquinas. Despite her great learning and subtleness of argument, she seems to promote an agenda of her own which, rather than being Thomistic, points in the direction of a theologically warranted kind of moral relativism under the name of `moral pluralism'. Porter disregards the core of Aquinas's concept of natural law as a natural and truth-attaining intellectual light, enabling (...) human beings to distinguish good from evil, and thus continues the tradition of opposing in moral theory `reason' to `nature'. (shrink)

Il saggio intende recuperare un’idea di utopia realistica e priva di illusioni come nucleo propulsivo del pensiero politico. Questo tipo di utopia si distingue sia dall’immaginazione fantastica di stati di cose non realizzabili, sia dall’avvicinamento asintotico a qualcosa che in realtà non corrisponde ai desideri umani, com’è per l’idea regolativa di Kant. Tre condizioni rendono realistiche e sensate le utopie politiche: il poter essere pensato, il poter essere soddisfatto e il poter essere conseguito. L’idea di Rawls di una pace tra (...) i popoli, o quella di Margalit su istituzioni rispettose dell’individuo sono esempi di queste utopie realistiche. Richiamando possibilità remote, esse rendono visibili nuove possibilità per il presente, che possono poi venire tradotte in istanze normative di tipo politico-sociale. Ciò vale anche per le utopie private, che allargano le possibilità per l’esistenza. Rinunciare a queste nuove possibilità comporta un doppio tradimento di noi stessi, su scala collettiva e sul piano personale.The paper propose to rehabilitate an idea of realistic and undeceived utopy as propulsive centre of politic thought. This kind of utopy is different from fantastic immaginating of unrealizable state of things, and asyntotic approssimating to something that does’nt really correspond to human desires, as it is for Kant’s regulative idea. There are three conditions for making utopias realistic and senseful: the possibility of being thought, fulfilled and reached. Rawls’ idea of peoples’ peaceful living, or Margalit’s idea of institutions’ respect of individuums, are examples of this kind of realistic utopias. Through recalling far possibilities they let appear new possibilities for the present, that can be traducted in political-social normative instances. And this method applies for private utopias, too. To renounce those new possibilities means a double traison of ourselves, in a collective and personal sense. (shrink)

... Omnistent, Arch-istent, and Prim-istent Realities l "Searching for the Ox. The beast has never gone astray, and what is the use of searching for him? ...

Two of the best currently practising scholars of Ockham, Marilyn Adams and Paul Spade, seem to have accepted a reading of Ockham's ontological program which, although it contains much that is uncontroversially correct, attributes to Ockham a reductionist view that is on my interpretation of his works far too radical to be genuinely Ockham's. Their reading runs as follows. So far as entities go, Ockham accepts only particular substances and some particular qualities. Aristotle's categories, according to Ockham, are not 10 (...) broad classes of radically different sorts of things, but rather are classes of non-complex terms arranged roughly according to the kinds of questions they can be used to answer. When we look at these terms we find that those in the category of substance and some in the category of quality are not definable by some longer expression synonymous with them but simply signify each of the members of a certain class of substances or qualities. These terms are said to be absolute. But other terms can either be replaced by a definition that is synonymous with the term defined or can be interpreted as making “exponible” the sentences in which they occur. These terms are all said to be connotative. It is in principle possible to reword all the sentences in which these connotative terms appear so that the only categorematic terms left are absolute terms from the categories of substance and quality. (shrink)

Die Reihe Beiruter Texte und Studien ist die Buchreihe des Orient-Instituts fur Grundlagenforschung des historischen und zeitgenossischen Mittleren Ostens. Sie stellt Studien bereit, die auf Primarquellen in Sprachen der Region basieren und bietet thematische sowie methodische Impulse. Dieser Band beinhaltet: "Christliche Gotteslehre im Orient seit dem Aufkommen des Islams bis zur Gegenwart".

Le déploiement exponentiel de l’usage scientifique et politique du mot « territoire » interroge. Il date du début des années 1980 et s’explique par la mondialisation, ses basculements, les luttes qu’ils génèrent, la quête d’une nouvelle intelligibilité du monde réagencé en ses différentes échelles. Mais cela n’exonère pas de la clairvoyance sur les usages politiques qui en sont faits désormais. Contre une idéologie territoriale de plus en plus « locale-populiste », l’auteur rappelle deux conditions pour construire les sociétés par les (...) territoires sans les y enfermer. (shrink)

One of the main aims of the NATO Advanced Research Workshop on autobiographical memory was to provide researchers with an opportunity to ‘stick their necks out’ and throw open for public scrutiny theoretical claims they might otherwise have kept to themselves. In the papers collected in the present volume the reader will find that this is just what occurs. Even where an author has chosen to present new empirical findings these are accompanied by the type of theoretical speculation often edited (...) out in, for example, journal submissions. Thus, the intention of the book, like the workshop, is to provide an impetus to the development of theory in autobiographical memory research. (shrink)