O tema sobre a cultura da mesa de refeição quer refletir o aspecto teológico-religioso da cultura do antigo Israel e apontar a relação entre cultura e teologia, costumes e valores espirituais, como experiências que apontam para o Transcendente e para a unidade de um grupo. Com isso, o texto quer resgatar tal reflexão para o mundo pós-moderno, no qual a cultura sustenta-se por uma dimensão que transcende a vida prática dos homens, assinala valores impregnados de religiosidade e espiritualidade e, consequentemente, (...) de crenças instaladas no mais íntimo de um corpo social. O fim último é o respeito e o reconhecimento da vida que vem de Deus. (shrink)

According to a two-level criterion for combination tests in the field of ordinary language, moral 'ought'-sentences may be taken to imply 'I intend'-sentences partly semantically and partly pragmatically. If so, a trenchant linguistic analysis of the concept of moral obligation cannot do without a non-classical logic which allows to model these important kinds of ordinary-language implications by means of purely syntactical derivations. For this purpose, an integrated logic of conviction and intention has been tentatively devised by way of a doxastically, (...) buletically, and pragmatically extended calculus of natural deduction. This system of buletic logic cannot even be launched without one or two derivation rules of deductive closedness. However, these very closedness rules appear to be responsible for buletic paradoxes which are analogous to paradoxes long since known from other, less exotic branches of logic but at first sight look much more virulent. After having scrutinized two potential strategies for coping with the paradoxes of buletic logic, finally we can convince ourselves that these paradoxes, as well as their familiar non-buletic counterparts, are but apparent paradoxes, provided we consistently lean on C-CT and do not let pragmatical considerations intrude into purely logical ones. (shrink)

Türkiye’de modernleşme süreci Avrupa’da ve dünyada yaşanan modernleşme sürecine paralel şekilde gelişmiştir. Bu sürecin anlaşılması, son dönem Osmanlı tarihinden günümüze kadar uzun soluklu bir okuma çabası ve detaylı bir bakış açısı gerektirmektedir. Bu çalışmada başlangıcından itibaren sürecin daha iyi anlaşılabilmesi için modernite kavramları, tarihsel dinamikleri ve Osmanlı modernleşmesinin tarihsel dönemleri ele alınarak modernleşmenin ve modernleşme sürecinde din anlayışlarının oluşum süreci değerlendirilmiştir. Bu doğrultuda araştırmada Osmanlı’nın küresel bir güç olmaktan uzaklaşması, yenilik girişimleri, modernleşme sürecinde öne çıkan akımlar, temsilcileri ve din anlayışları, (...) modernleşme-din ilişkisi, modernleşme sürecindeki siyasi ve ideolojik telakkiler ile dini düşüncenin seyrinde yaşanan değişim ve tüm bu sürecin toplum yapısı üzerindeki etkileri ele alınmıştır. (shrink)

After reading carefully the essay which, in his recently-published Varia Socratica, Part I., Prof. A. E. Taylor has written on the use of the words and in the Greek literature of the Socratic and Platonic periods, I find myself on the one hand in agreement with him as to the importance of such linguistic investigations for the understanding of Plato, and on the other in frequent disagreement with him as to the meaning of the words in the passages he (...) cites, and the inferences he draws from them. Thinking that Prof. Taylor's analysis of the use of the terms in Hippocrates is very far from final, I offer in this paper a further contribution to their interpretation, confining myself as far as possible to the question, What do and mean in the Hippocratean writings? (shrink)

Having read Prof. Housman's article in the Classical Quarterly of October 1907, it seemed to me worth while, when I was in Madrid last year, to examine the MS of Manilius, Matritensis 31, in those places where Prof. Housman notes that the testimony of Loewe and of Mr Ellis disagree, with the result that I have found Loewe's account of the reading, as given by Prof. Housman, to be correct in all places except the following.

Prof. Das argues that Sri Ramakrishna was an incarnation of God. He pits the Hindu doctrine of plural incarnations against the Christian doctrine of unique incarnation, but his notion of incarnation is so alien to the Christian conception that there is hardly a meeting of issues. That Prof. Das easily accepts points we would deem in greatest need of justification, e.g., the psychic ability to make oneself invisible, and argues in great detail for what we would take as (...) simple points, indicates that we have yet far to go in creating a context for significant communication between East and West. The book contains some interesting chapters on the historical background and life of Ramakrishna, and an explication of several of his major theses.--R. C. N. (shrink)

In June of 2008, the International Society for Comparative Studies of Chinese and Western Philosophy (ISCWP) convened its third Constructive Engagement conference, on the theme of “Comparative Philosophy Methodology.” During the opening speeches, Prof. Dunhua ZHAO, Chair of the Philosophy Department at Peking University, challenged the conference’s participants to put forward a minimal definition of “comparative philosophy” and a statement of its methods. Based on the papers from the conference and the extensive discussion that ensued, during my closing reflections (...) at the end of the conference I offered a tentative synthesis of the conference’s conclusions. That summary has already been published on-line as part of the bi-annual ISCWP newsletter (Angle 2008). In this brief essay, I recapitulate the themes of my earlier summary and expand, in my own voice, on some of the key points. (shrink)

Prof. Flew's main purpose in God and Philosophy is ‘to develop and to examine a case for Christian theism’ . But in next to no time he shows his reader that here, as with the New York Commissioner for Air Pollution, ‘for’ really means ‘against’. For Flew's aim is to attack Christian theism and to develop the argument against it. One of his fellow-humanists rightly reviewed this book under the title ‘A Case for Atheism’. As the case for atheism (...) is being developed one quickly loses faith in the assurance that this ‘philosopher of religion has … no business to be counsel for either the prosecution or the defence’ and aspires to resemble most of all the examining magistrate . Soon we are told that an attack should and shall be launched against the heart of the quinta via of Aquinas . This is not just a slip of the pen for indeed the book contains a number of attacks on Aquinas. Of course Aquinas is not the only Christian theist who is attacked but he is Flew's chief individual target. (shrink)

It would surely have been better to entitle this work ‘Reflexions on ethical theories’, for it cannot in any true sense of the word be called a study, a scientific study which entails detailed analysis and positive criticism. In fact Professor Mackinnon presents us with a series of considerations, highly personal and at times indeed penetrating and instructive, on the moral theories of certain British and continental philosophers—of the 19th century utilitarians ; of Kant, Hegel and their followers; of the (...) theologianphilosopher bishop of Durham, Joseph Butler; of Russell, Moore and others. The impression left on one after a careful perusal of the work is that it is no more than an agglomeration of ‘mights’ and ‘perhaps’, never a clear–cut judgment. The chief general defect of the book and the cause of much obscurity is certainly this: the absence of any welldefined distinction between exposé and critique. As often as not one does not know what the opinion of the author is as distinct from his interpretation of the authors he is studying. This defect would seem to be characteristic of a great part of the ethical writing produced by the Scottish and British schools, when they do not reduce ethical theory to anything better than semasiology, to a study of ethical language or linguistic usage. Prof. Mackinnon has certainly not freed himself from the ‘present confused state of moral philosophy in this country’, which he so rightly condemns. I had thought that all philosophers, of whatever ilk, were agreed that ethical science or moral philosophy was nothing more than the study of the human being on its way towards completeness in human being, from an initial embryonic stage, as it were, to the full flowering of human perfection, manifested in perfect human being and perfect human life—a journey or precess directed and controlled by the human subject itself, fully conscious of the end to be achieved and conscious too of the steps or means towards it. I would have thought too that if we are to set up moral science as distinct from mere semasiology, or from psychology, biology, zoology or botany, then all were agreed that we have to do with the domain of free activity, of voluntary conscious activity, which obviously brings with it the order of responsibility and willed subjection to a given objective order of things, that is, of human nature itself and human perfection. I would have taken for granted too that one could study all this field of the free development of the human being towards its ultimate perfection either with a view to the acquisition of knowledge and nothing more, or precisely with a view to being in a position to direct oneself and others towards that fullness of being. That would give us two distinct modes of moral or ethical theory, the speculative or theoretical and the practical and normative, the resolutive and the compositive. I am not so sure that Professor Mackinnon is ready to admit these presupposita. He speaks of the ‘curious and almost silly claim that we are free’, and at the same time he can write about the ‘frankly metaphysical reality of freedom’, or its ‘near–metaphysical reality’. This, in the language of the author, is just another way of proclaiming that human freedom is no more than a myth, lacking all substance and reality. Moral science as distinct from all other sciences, one would think, presupposes that the moral subject be conscious of itself and its activity, that is, that it fully and clearly know that its life and its activity is its own. It must be master of its own actions, and in that sense truly master of its own destiny. Then and only then are we in the order of moral activity. However, we are warned by Professor Mackinnon that “to know that an action is mine is a very strange sort of knowledge, quite different from knowing that an apple or a book is mine: to use the word ‘know’ in such a context is a venture fraught with intellectual peril”. I sincerely think it would have been better had the author denied straight out the possibility, not just of metaphysics, but of ethical theory tout court; for he denies often enough the existence of the moral subject, namely, man freely and deliberately ordaining himself towards human consummation. Had he done that at the outset he would have been spared the trouble of writing his book. All in all, one gets the distinct impression that the author is just not sure of his ground and has no really sound criterion whereby to judge of various ethical theories. In fact the book ends with a big question–mark: ‘If we speak and write thus, do we speak and write sound and fury signifying nothing?’. Reluctantly I am constrained to answer in the affirmative. And I should like to add, so as not to appear completely destructive, but in some way constructive: if, instead of dismissing Aristotle and his followers, ancient and modern, as mere ‘intuitionists’, Professor Mackinnon would only study them seriously he would first of all find out how unjustified is his condemnation of them and then, I venture to suggest, he would acquire a light to guide him surely through the maze of ethical theory with which he grapples aimlessly and would thus be enabled to extricate himself from ‘the present confused state of moral philosophy’ in Britain. (shrink)

At the Seventh Congress of German Historians held at Heidelberg in April, 1903, Prof. Eduard Meyer delivered an address on the subject of Augustus, in which he expressed his view that the restitution of the republic was a genuine act of renunciation. ‘Augustus desired to dwell among his fellow-citizens not as a ruler but as a citizen, of course as the first among them all, as the princeps, like Camillus and the Scipios of old.’ If with Mommsen you described (...) the dual control of Caesar and Senate as a Dyarchy you ought not to forget that’ of the two the Senate in theory held complete predominance,1 the Emperor was ‘its executive, or as Tiberius expressed it, its servant, the Senate was the master .’. (shrink)

I Propose to re-explore here some aspects of a very shop-worn question: ‘Was Hobbes in any sense an atheist?’ Three centuries ago, Hobbes's personal security in part depended on the way his contemporaries answered this question; today, the validity of several current accounts of his philosophy are similarly bound up with it. These accounts vary extraordinarily, all the way from Polin's confident assertion that ‘ pour qui sait lire entre les lignes, … c'est ľatheísme qui triomphe implicitement ’, to Taylor's (...) equally firm belief that ‘a certain kind of theism is necessary to make [Hobbes's] theory work.’ 1 And now the latest of the Taylorians, Prof. Howard Warrender, has published his book The Political Philosophy of Hobbes , in which Hobbes's statements regarding the place of God are again treated as an essential part of his theory; and the charge explicitly made, that there are no sound grounds for regarding them as ‘the product of confusion or pretence on Hobbes's part’. (shrink)

The present collection of essays was designed by translator David Lachterman to provide the reader with a better understanding of Scheler’s major work, Formalism in Ethics and Non-formal Ethics of Values, which will also be published in translation by Northwestern University Press. Lachterman provides us with an illuminating preface which sketches the general character of Scheler’s thought, particularly its relationship to Husserl and Heidegger, and which discusses each of the five selections. Four of the five essays presented here are incomplete (...) works, and three were never published in Scheler’s lifetime. The first, "The Idols of Self-Knowledge," is an attempt to differentiate psychical and physical phenomena and criticizes the way Brentano went about making this distinction. In "Ordo amoris" Scheler maintains with Augustine and Pascal, the priority of love over cognition. In "Phenomenology and the Theory Cognition," Scheler develops his own account of the phenomenological method. "The Theory of the Three Facts" represents Scheler’s views on the distinction between phenomenological, scientific and common sense "facts." The last essay is entitled "Idealism and Realism" and demonstrates "that it is a mistake to opt for either one of the parties to this conflict," and argues instead for a phenomenology of essences. The last section of this text, which was to be a confrontation of Scheler with the then recently published Being and Time, never appeared but is still awaiting publication in the critical edition of Scheler’s works. One welcomes Prof. Lachterman’s initiative in making available to the English reader these essays of one of the most significant figures in twentieth century German philosophy.—J. D. C. (shrink)