As for Avicenna the human soul is a complete substance which does not inhere in the body nor is imprinted in it, asserting its survival after the death of the body seems easy. Yet, he needs the body to explain its individuation. The paper analyzes Avicenna's arguments in the De anima sections, V, 3 & 4, of the Shifā ' in order to explore the exact causal relation there is between the human soul and its body and confronts these arguments (...) with relevant passages in the Metaphysics. It argues that the causal relation between body and soul remains obscure and that, though Avicenna claims that there is a personal immortality and that the disembodied soul remains individuated, he does not provide a satisfactory ontological account for it. (shrink)

What is the place of vulnerability in our lives? The current debate about the ethics of enhancement technologies provides a context in which to think about this question. In my view, the current debate is likely to be fruitless, largely because we bring the wrong ethical resources to bear on its questions. In this article, I recall an important, but currently neglected, role that moral concepts play in our thinking, a role they should especially play in relation to the introduction (...) of new technologies. I call this the ‘contemplative role of moral concepts’. I then contrast two approaches to the contemplative role of moral concepts which are found in the current literature, and show why it is important to keep in mind both of these approaches when thinking about human vulnerability. (shrink)

Over the past forty years, the health humanities, previously called the medical humanities, has emerged as one of the most exciting fields for interdisciplinary scholarship, advancing humanistic inquiry into bioethics, human rights, health care, and the uses of technology. It has also helped inspire medical practitioners to engage in deeper reflection about the human elements of their practice. In _Health Humanities Reader_, editors Therese Jones, Delese Wear, and Lester D. Friedman have assembled fifty-four leading scholars, educators, artists, and clinicians (...) to survey the rich body of work that has already emerged from the field—and to imagine fresh approaches to the health humanities in these original essays. The collection’s contributors reflect the extraordinary diversity of the field, including scholars from the disciplines of disability studies, history, literature, nursing, religion, narrative medicine, philosophy, bioethics, medicine, and the social sciences. With warmth and humor, critical acumen and ethical insight, _Health Humanities Reader_ truly humanizes the field of medicine. Its accessible language and broad scope offers something for everyone from the experienced medical professional to a reader interested in health and illness. (shrink)

The eleventh-century philosopher and physician Abu Ali ibn Sina (d. A.D. 1037) was known in the West by his Latinized name Avicenna. An analysis of the sources and evolution of Avicenna's metaphysics, this book focuses on the answers he and his predecessors gave to two fundamental pairs of questions: what is the soul and how does it cause the body; and what is God and how does He cause the world? To respond to these challenges, Avicenna invented new concepts and (...) distinctions and reinterpreted old ones. The author concludes that Avicenna's innovations are a turning point in the history of metaphysics. Avicenna's metaphysics is the culmination of a period of synthesis during which philosophers fused together a Neoplatonic project (reconciling Plato with Aristotle) with a Peripatetic project (reconciling Aristotle with himself). Avicenna also stands at the beginning of a period during which philosophers sought to integrate the Arabic version of the earlier synthesis with Islamic doctrinal theology (kalam). Avicenna's metaphysics significantly influenced European scholastic thought, but it had an even more profound impact on Islamic intellectual history--the philosophical problems and opportunities associated with the Avicennian synthesis continued to be debated up to the end of the nineteenth century. (shrink)

Immediately after the September 11, 2001 terrorist strikes on the World Trade Center Towers, the Pentagon, and a plane over Pennsylvania, many in the West, but particularly the United States of America, felt urgently the pain of the question ‘Why do they hate us?’ in relation both to those who directly perpetrated those dreadful events and to those who sympathised with their perpetrators. In this paper, I will offer an account of some of the conceptual issues at stake in addressing (...) seriously such a question as an opportunity for self-examination. I will argue that questions of this kind are the very warp and weft of international relations at their most serious levels and that the often glib demonisation of ‘them’ who hate us serves us badly in coming to terms with the problems the West faces in its relations with the Muslim world. I use this most pressing of international relations issues as a test of the prospects of Utilitarianism as a viable ‘ethics of international relations’ arguing that its notions of the good and its resources for criticism of desires and preferences are a cause for scandal in our inter-cultural negotiations with other traditions of civilization, particularly the Muslim civilization. In many ways, rather than being part of the solution, Utilitarianism is part of the problem. (shrink)

This essay begins with a discussion of the primacy of the nuclear family in American drama. Our best playwrights have been strikingly preoccupied with domestic life, consistently portraying the family as a dream of solidarity and a nightmare of enmeshment. Daytime serial dramas are also stories about American domestic life, privileging a conservatively defined nuclear family and imaging conflicting hopes and fears around it. In serious as well as popular drama, illness is frequently the catalyst for familial destruction and restoration. (...) The middle portion of the essay is devoted to a definition and history of American soap opera, providing readers with a knowledge base for the final portion, a descriptive survey of the representation of medical and social issues on daytime drama. (shrink)

I argue that Thomas Aquinas’s Identity Formula—the statement that the “intellect in act is the intelligible in act”—does not, as is usually supposed, express his position on how the intellect accesses extramental realities (responding to the so-called “mind-world gap”). Instead, it should be understood as a claim about the metaphysics of intellection, according to which the perfection requisite for performing the act of understanding is what could be called “intellectual-intelligible being.” In reinterpreting Aquinas’s Identity Formula, I explore the notion of (...) being “in act” as an intellect or intelligible (intelligibile actu, intellectus actu), his curious comments about an “order” or “genus” of intelligibles, and the relationship of understanding and being-understood. (shrink)

What does it mean to be an embodied thinker of abstract concepts? Does embodiment shape the character and quality of our understanding of universals such as 'dog' and 'beauty', and would a non-embodied mind understand such concepts differently? I examine these questions through the lens of Thomas Aquinas’s remarks on the differences between embodied (human) intellects and non-embodied (angelic) intellects. In Aquinas, I argue, the difference between embodied and non-embodied intellection of extramental realities is rooted in the fact that embodied (...) and non-embodied intellects grasp different kinds of universals by means of different kinds of intelligible species (intellectual likenesses), which elicit in them different “modes” of understanding. By spelling out what exactly it means to be an embodied knower, on Aquinas’s account, I argue, we can also shed new light on his mysterious claim that the embodied intellect “turns to phantasms”—the imagination’s likenesses of individuals—in its acts of understanding. (shrink)

This volume is a tribute to Fr. John F. Wippel. Following the philosophical order that Aquinas might have adopted "had he chosen to write a Summa metaphysicae"—an order that Wippel himself lays out in his Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas—these essays unfold new research on some of the most intriguing topics in Aquinas’s metaphysics, from the most recent generation of scholars formed by Wippel’s pioneering work. -/- The contributors address the discovery of being qua being via separation (Gregory T. Doolan), (...) propter quid metaphysical demonstrations (Philip Neri Reese), the origins of the controversies about the real distinction between essence and esse (Mark Gossiaux), a defense of essence-realism as a key to the real distinction (David Twetten), the relationship of likeness and agency (Therese Scarpelli Cory), created form as act and potency (Stephen Brock), the variation of accidental forms (Gloria Frost), the possibility of angelic judgment (Francis Feingold), argumentation for the existence of God (Gaven Kerr), the propriety of " Qui Est" as a Divine Name (Brian Carl), ‘Beauty’ as a Divine Name (Michael Rubin), and God’s application of creaturely powers to action (Jason Mitchell). (shrink)

"Thema der Beiträge sind intentionale Praktiken der Wissensvermittlung, die in den Medien Text und Bild in vormodernen Kulteren von der Antike bis ins Frühmittelalter erkennbar und beschreibbar sind. Untersuchungsgegenstand sind altorientalische, antike griechische, römische, syrische, klassisch-arabische und frühmittelalterliche Texte und bildliche Darstellunen, in denen die Kommunikation von Sach-/Fachwissen und religiösem, philosophischem, politischem, sozialem, paradigmatischem Wissen eine Rolle spielt. Im Fokus stehen die an diesen Prozessen beteiligten Akteure, insbesondere die Darastellung ihrer verbalen, mimischen und gestischen Kommunikation bzw. (Selbst- ) Inszenierung in (...) Text und Bild."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

"Der vorliegende Band hebt sich aus der wachsenden Zahl der Publikationen zur Spatantike und namentlich zur spatantiken Philosophie schon durch die Originalitat des behandelten Themas hervor, das eine Forschungsluecke schlieat. Die Beitrage von Wissenschaftlern verschiedener europaischer Nationen, die als Spezialisten fuer die Spatantike gelten konnen, bieten sowohl einzeln als auch in der Zusammenstellung einen echten Forschungsfortschritt." Plekos "a a valuable contribution. The volume also shows, as the product of predominantly young scholars, that the future of scholarship in the area of (...) ancient and Patristic philosophy is in good hands." Vigiliae Chritianae Inhalt: S. Follinger: Philosophische Theorien in Arnobius' apologetischer Argumentation J. Althoff: Zur Epikurrezeption bei Laktanz C. Riedweg: Philosophische Argumentationsstrukturen in Julians Contra Galilaeos D. J. O'Meara: Epicurus Neoplatonicus R. Thiel: Stoische Ethik im neuplatonischen System (Simplikios' Kommentar zu Epiktets Enchiridion) M. Erler: Hellenistische Philosophie im Platonismus der Spatantike M. Bettetini: Ai limiti della materia, tra neoplatonismo e cristianesimo K. Schlapbach: Ciceronisches und Neuplatonisches in den Proomien von Augustin, Contra Academicos 1 und 2 S. Harwardt: Die Gluecksfrage der Stoa in Augustins De beata vita C. Horn: Augustinus ueber Tugend, Moralitat und das hochste Gut T. Fuhrer: Zum wahrnehmungstheoretischen Hintergrund von Augustins Glaubensbegriff C. Oser-Grote: Virtus Romana und Virtus Christiana - ein romischer Wertbegriff bei Prudentius J. Opsomer / C. Steel: Proclus' Doctrine on the Origin of Evil K. Pollmann: Fiktionalitat in der Philosophie des Hellenismus und in der Spatantike U. Eigler: Strukturen und Voraussetzungen zum Erhalt von philosophischem Wissen in der Spatantike Stellenregister. (shrink)

Este artículo pretende dilucidar la expresión utilizada por Tomás de Aquino “vuelta al fantasma”, con la intención de esclarecer lo que entiende por “vuelta”. Se argumenta que el marco conceptual subyacente al “giro intelectual” se encuentra en dos fuentes islámicas que fueron ampliamente influyentes en la psicología filosófica latina del siglo XIII, y que presentan conceptos técnicos específicos de la “vuelta” como un tipo de dependencia. Las obras son: Liber de Causis, de autor anónimo; y Liber de anima, del filósofo (...) persa Avicena. Así, este artículo busca recuperar este marco histórico subyacente, examinando cómo estas dos fuentes clave conciben la “vuelta” y cómo Tomás de Aquino incorpora estas fuentes en su concepción de la “vuelta al fantasma”. (shrink)

The outstanding points of The Neglected Canon are that it provides a multicultural anthology of women philosophers: Chinese, European, North and Central American, that it provides a history of women philosophers through selected works from the first century to the beginning of the twentieth century, and that it provides unusual comprehensiveness in its bibliographies, biographies, and introductions to the works. In these three points it offers a more complete text than any yet on the market in this field. Designed for (...) the readership of the advanced college student, it serves as a classroom text for a course in women philosophers, as a supplementary text to introductory courses in philosophy, or in such specific courses as epistemology. It is also designed to serve as a resource for women's history and women's studies. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Metaphysical Themes in Thomas Aquinas III by John F. WippelTherese Scarpelli CoryWIPPEL, John F. Metaphysical Themes in Thomas Aquinas III. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2021. ix + 321 pp. Cloth, $65.00; eBook, $65.00This volume is the third in what can now be considered informally a series of volumes collecting some of John F. Wippel's most important writings. (Two previous volumes, Metaphysical Themes in Thomas (...) Aquinas and Metaphysical Themes in Thomas Aquinas II, were published in 1984 and 2007, respectively, by the same press.) In this volume, Wippel has collected nine of his articles or book chapters, originally published from 2002–2019, on a wide range of topics: (1) "Aquinas on Separatio and Our Discovery of Being as Being," (2) "Thomas Aquinas on Philosophy and the Preambles of Faith," (3) "Cornelio Fabro on the Distinction and Composition of Essence and Esse in the Metaphysics of Thomas Aquinas," (4) "Cornelio Fabro on Participation and Aquinas's Quarta Via," (5) "Aquinas on Creation and Preambles of Faith," (6) "Thomas Aquinas and the Unity of Substantial Form," (7) "Thomas Aquinas on the Separated Soul's Natural Knowledge," (8) "Metaphysical Themes in De Malo I," and (9) "Metaphysical Composition of Angels in Bonaventure, Aquinas, and Godfrey of Fontaines."Such collections provide a valuable opportunity for the author's retrospective on the work thus collected. In this respect, it is especially worth noting the usefulness of the introduction to this volume, in which Wippel has provided a detailed précis for each included chapter. The introduction thus serves as a helpful roadmap to orient new and returning readers of Wippel's work to some of his most important writings.In a book review of this length, it is impossible to summarize adequately the content of each essay. Indeed, it would be redundant to try, given the much more authoritative content of Wippel's own introduction to the volume. Consequently, I will limit myself to highlighting one of the notable inclusions in this collection, namely, chapter 6, "Thomas Aquinas and the Unity of Substantial Form." Despite the modest title, the piece is an extensive and wide-ranging study of the development and fate of Aquinas's controversial doctrine, the anxieties it raised among his contemporaries, and the debate that raged at Paris in the late thirteenth century, and during which the doctrine appears to have narrowly escaped inclusion on the list of condemnations of 1270. Wippel correlates some interesting historical anecdotes and documentary evidence with Aquinas's series of changing formulations in discussions of the unity of substantial form. He is thereby able to document a particularly nuanced case in which Aquinas attempts to make his own thought clearer in the face of a developing controversy, but without giving up on the essentials of his own position.Nonetheless, Wippel points out that Aquinas never fully resolved the theological criticisms lodged against his position. Within the debate over the number of substantial forms in a substance, the identity of Christ's dead body in the tomb between the crucifixion and resurrection ended up becoming a test case: What makes Christ's living body and his dead body in the tomb both be identically the same body? The problem is as follows: [End Page 371] Since substantial form is what secures the identity of a substance across time, if there is just one substantial form in a human substance, and that form (the human soul) departs Christ's body in his death on the cross, then after his death whatever is left can no longer be identified as Christ's body. It must be some new substance with its own substantial form.For opponents, this difficulty was fatal. How did Aquinas respond? Disappointingly, he only asserts that Christ's dead body is numerically identical with his living body, just not "in every way"—but without explaining why he thinks this identity is preserved. It is left to Giles of Rome to fill out a tentative solution: Although the matter of Christ's body does take on a new substantial form, it remains Christ's, because it remains united to the person of the Word.The problem is... (shrink)

In this Second Edition of her best-selling ethics paperback text, renowned paralegal educator Therese Cannon clearly addresses pertinent case law, rules changes, and other developments involving this important area of the law. Organized in 10 concise chapters, Ethics and Professional Responsibility for Legal Assistants, Second Edition, covers key concepts, including unauthorized practice of law; confidentiality; conflicts of interest; fees; trends in legal malpractice; discovery abuse and other advocacy issues; pro bono work; and more. to help your students grasp the (...) material, the pedagogy features: chapter reviews discussion questions cases for further analysis helpful appendices, including the Model Guidelines, standards, and codes for ABA, NALA, and NFPA. Ideal for use in your next ethics class, this flexible paperback can also easily be used to add an ethics component to your Introduction to Law course, student internship program, or other courses in your curriculum. This superb book is also accompanied by a valuable Instructor's Guide, which provides answers to every discussion question in the text and the specific page numbers to find answers to all review questions. It also contains sample syllabi and references to additional source materials to help you adapt this book to your course. (shrink)

There was a time in screen culture when the facial close-up was a spectacular and mysterious image... The constant bombardment of the super-enlarged, computer-enhanced faces of advertising, the endless 'talking heads' of television and the ever-changing array of film stars' faces have reduced the face to a banal image, while the dream of early film theorists that the 'giant severed heads' of the screen could reveal 'the soul of man' to the masses is long since dead. And yet the end (...) of this dream opens up the possibility for a different view of the face on the screen. The aim of the book is to seize this opportunity to rethink the facial close-up in terms other than subjectivity and identity by shifting the focus to questions of death and recognition. In doing so, the book proposes a dialectical reversal or about-face. It suggests that we focus our attention on the places in contemporary media where the face becomes unrecognisable, for it is here that the facial close-up expresses the powers of death. Using Walter Benjamin's theory of the dialectical image as a critical tool, the book provides detailed studies of a wide range of media spectacles of faces becoming unrecognisable. It shows how the mode of recognition enabled by these faces is a shock experience that can open our eyes to the underside of the mask of self - the unrecognisable mortal face of self we spend our lives trying not to see. Turning on itself, so to speak, the face exposes the fragile relationship between social recognition and facial recognizability in the images-cultures of contemporary media. (shrink)

“One of the great mysteries … is why some people stand up for what is right while others do not”. So ends Bioethics in Action. The greater mystery, called out by this book, is why many of th...

Three Canadian institutional animal care and use committees were observed over a 1-year period to investigate animal ethical evaluation. While each protocol was evaluated, the observer collected information about the final decision, the type of protocol, and the category of invasiveness. The observer also wrote down verbatim all verbal interventions, which were coded according to the following categories: scientific, technical, politics, human analog, reduction, refinement, and replacement. The data revealed that only 16% of the comments were devoted to the 3 (...) explicit ethical categories and that most of the comments were technical. However, the analysis revealed that ethical concerns were implicit in both scientific and technical comments; either ethical norms had been translated into scientific and technical language, or some of the scientific and technical comments had an impact on the ethical treatment of animals. The results are discussed in relation to previous nonobservational research that identified potential pitfalls and bias in animal ethical evaluation. (shrink)

Self-knowledge is commonly thought to have become a topic of serious philosophical inquiry during the early modern period. Already in the thirteenth century, however, the medieval thinker Thomas Aquinas developed a sophisticated theory of self-knowledge, which Therese Scarpelli Cory presents as a project of reconciling the conflicting phenomena of self-opacity and privileged self-access. Situating Aquinas's theory within the mid-thirteenth-century debate and his own maturing thought on human nature, Cory investigates the kinds of self-knowledge that Aquinas describes and the questions (...) they raise. She shows that to a degree remarkable in a medieval thinker, self-knowledge turns out to be central to Aquinas's account of cognition and personhood, and that his theory provides tools for considering intentionality, reflexivity and selfhood. Her engaging account of this neglected aspect of medieval philosophy will interest readers studying Aquinas and the history of medieval philosophy more generally. (shrink)

This paper investigates the origins of the Oral Theory as formulated by Milman Parry in Paris during the late 1920s by reexamining the scholarship on which it rests. Parry's Oral Theory compared the texts of oral performances in Yugoslavia with the Homeric texts in order to shed light on the presumed oral origins of the latter. His work integrated the work of the linguist and Indo-Europeanist Antoine Meillet, the linguist and scholar of oral poetics Matthias Murko, and the anthropologists Lucien (...) Lévy-Bruhl and Marcel Jousse. (shrink)

In this article, we argue that feminist legal scholars should engage directly and explicitly with the question of evil. Part I summarises key facts surrounding the prosecution and life-long imprisonment of Myra Hindley, one of a tiny number of women involved in multiple killings of children in recent British history. Part II reviews a range of commentaries on Hindley, noting in particular the repeated use of two narratives: the first of these insists that Hindley is an icon of female evil; (...) the second, less popular one, seeks to position her as a victim. In Part III, the article broadens out and we explain why we think feminist legal scholars should look at the question of evil. In large part, the emphasis is on anticipating the range of possible objections to this argument, and on trying to answer these objections by showing how a focus on evil might benefit feminist legal thinking – specifically in relation to the categories of perpetrator and victim and, more generally, in relation to laws motivated by a desire to secure women’s human rights. (shrink)

MEDIEVAL ARABIC PHILOSOPHICAL ETHICS is a much neglected field. Not many texts have survived. Some of them are rather popular and belie the assumption that Medieval Arabic philosophy is essentially Aristotelian. For instance, al-Kindi, Abu Bakr al-Razi, Avicenna, and Miskawayh all wrote about treating sadness. Were philosophers at the time subject to acute bouts of depression? or did they have some serious philosophical reasons to deal with this topic? How can one conciliate the popular and highly successful genre of the (...) "Spiritual Medicine," which considers passions as diseases of the soul that are badly in need of eradication, with the need for a rigorous normative ethics? As Islam and its Shari'a provide detailed ethical prescriptions and prohibitions, as well as guidance for any situation in the life of pious Muslims, how can philosophy vindicate the autonomy and importance of philosophical ethics? Can it be done on Aristotelian grounds? Why do serious philosophers devote such efforts to "Spiritual Medicine," a very un-Aristotelian enterprise? Such questions are puzzling. To even begin answering them, we need to study carefully the works of each philosopher in order to understand on their own terms what place and what role they assign to ethics, and then to analyze their ethical works to determine their purpose, audience, and philosophic worth. (shrink)

This beautifully laid out dictionary will be very useful to anyone seriously interested in Arabic philosophy. Philosophers in Islamic lands often wrote classifications of the sciences or used examples taken from various scientific disciplines, particularly mathematics, that can be somewhat puzzling for scholars in philosophy. For instance, in his autobiography, Avicenna tells us that his father sent him to a vegetable seller to study Indian calculation. I always wondered what exactly Indian calculation was and finally found the answer to this (...) puzzle in this book : it was a system of calculation on a tablet with dirt that allowed for easily deleting intermediate calculations. Besides, considering the close... (shrink)