In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Amours: L’Église, les divorcés remariés, les couples homosexuels by Adriano OlivaThomas M. Osborne Jr.Amours: L’Église, les divorcés remariés, les couples homosexuels. By Adriano Oliva, O.P. Paris: Cerf, 2015. Pp. 166. €14.00 (paper). ISBN: 978-2-204-10679-5.This book, written by a Dominican priest who is president of the Leonine Commission, has generated public controversy primarily on account of its treatment of homosexuality. For instance, the French news magazine Le Point published (...) an article on it called “How Saint Thomas Justifies Homosexuality.” This perception is bolstered by the cover artwork of Saints Sergius and Bacchus, who are considered in some circles to be patron saints of homosexual love. In fact, the book has two distinct parts. The first part is entirely on marriage between persons of the opposite sex. Oliva argues that Thomas Aquinas’s teaching on marriage was obscured in the nineteenth century, reappropriated by the Second Vatican Council, and now can be used to justify the reception of Communion and sacramental penance by Catholics who divorce and remarry while their spouse is still living and their marriage is not annulled. Only in the second part of the book does Oliva argue for the civil and ecclesiastical recognition of homosexual unions that are not marriages.The book is addressed to a general audience, although it refers to scholarship when needed. Oliva’s purpose is to use Thomas to contribute to contemporary theology and pastoral care. He does not entirely reject magisterial teaching on sexual ethics. For instance, he sympathetically discusses the treatment of heterosexual sex in Humanae vitae, and is generally opposed to simultaneous sexual relationships that are between more than two persons.In the first part of the book, Oliva notes that for Thomas marriage has a twofold perfection. The first perfection consists in the union of the spouses (which need not involve sexual acts), and the second in the generation and education of children. According to Oliva, only the first perfection is essential to marriage, which is shown by the fact that a marriage is valid even if the spouses voluntarily choose to abstain from the sexual act. Oliva eventually argues that recognition of this point should lead to the acceptance of second marriages (i.e., marriages after divorce) and the recognition that circumstances might prevent sexual acts in such marriages from being sinful.According to Oliva, Thomas’s understanding of the essence of marriage was used by the Fathers of the Council of Trent in what he describes as a decision to avoid the condemnation of divorce and remarriage for those in the Christian East. This interpretation of Trent is highly questionable and seems to rely partly on Giancarlo Pani’s recent popularization of Piet Fransen’s controversial scholarship (147 n. 41). In fact, Oliva does not show how Thomas’s understanding of marriage was supposedly used against those who wished to condemn divorce and remarriage. In general, he ignores the Council of Florence and various medieval and late Scholastic discussions of marriage, and generally passes over theologians from outside the Dominican Order. [End Page 137]Oliva correctly notes that the Catechism of the Council of Trent follows Thomas in distinguishing between three motives or ends of marriage, namely, society and mutual support, procreation, and the remedy for concupiscence. He passes over the other motives discussed in the Catechism, such as beauty, wealth, and the desire for heirs. Moreover, he does not mention the Catechism’s discussion of the three goods of marriage, namely, union, children, and fidelity, and how these might be related to marriage’s motives and essence. This oversight is odd because the Catechism’s treatment resembles Thomas’s discussion in the Summa contra Gentiles, book IV, chapter 78, in which Thomas explains how marriage is ordered to procreation. In general, Oliva neglects texts that might not fit well with his interpretation of Thomas, such as this chapter and the unedited IV Sentences, d. 33, q. 1, a. 2c.Oliva argues that Thomas’s teaching on the essence of marriage was neglected by the Magisterium and rejected by the 1917 Code, although it was revived to some extent... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Acts of Enjoyment: Rhetoric, Žižek, and the Return of the SubjectJames J. Brown Jr. and Joshua GunnActs of Enjoyment: Rhetoric, Žižek, and the Return of the Subject by Thomas Rickert. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007. Pp. x + 252. $24.95, hardcover.Thomas Rickert had a falling-out with his brother, and this distresses him so much that his disrupted relation is described as “traumatic.” Rickert reports that (...) while listening to a portable CD player during a run on an unexpectedly warm winter day, a song by the now defunct jazz/rock band Morphine reminded him of a happy time at a pool hall with his brother (24). Mediated—or better, medicated—by music, the homological happiness of running in the sun and a positive past memory also resurfaced a painful relational rupture, the reason of which Rickert omits to underscore that mysterious, “little detail or object” of the Real that marks his singular finitude as a writing subject (216 n. 11). We’ll want to come back to this curiously deliberate omission, but for the present we note Rickert is not simply an undead author but a human being with relations and feelings. He is not just a gifted scholar or a bundle of reflections, but a nexus of body and movement and words and affect. If there is anything that Rickert’s study can be said to work through with brilliance, humor, and grace, it is the reality of complex personhood.Rickert’s brotherly confession comes in Chapter 1 as a way to introduce a psychoanalytic understanding of subjectivity, and more specifically, to help illustrate how trauma works itself out as an afterwardness or “belatedness” ( Nachträglichkeit ): traumatic events from the past are not reckoned with or worked-through until some coincidence or reminder, such as a similar [End Page 183] sensory experience, reintroduces the event in doubled re-presentation (18–27). This implies the “subject” (a paradigm person) is a kind of timedelay, a self-conscious temporal moving that becomes this way through re-presentation. The rhetorical subject is analogously a retrojected reckoning with events past (not all traumatic) that Rickert identifies as a scene of writing, a locus that has important implications for rhetorical studies in general and writing pedagogy in particular. Rickert’s logic is as follows: if we agree that the subject is a belated one in the psychoanalytic sense, then how we teach rhetoric needs to change. Rickert opens the book with the observation that his students are producing excellent cultural critiques but that such critiques do not lead the students to change their actions (1–7), perhaps evidence enough that something is not quite right in a classroom grounded by “cultural studies pedagogy” and ideology critique—or at the very least, proof that something has changed. The opening gambit is simply that a “postpedagogy” premised on an understanding of rhetorical subjectivity as belatedness is better than a status quo rooted in the rational subject of the Enlightenment.Mostly through a Žižek-filtered, Lacanian lens, Acts of Enjoyment then undertakes a retake of the rhetorical field, frequently scanning from the traumatic ontology of the rhetorical subject to that domain of knowledge that we hold dear, the subject of rhetoric. In Chapter 2, the (primal) scene thus shifts from the slo-mo subject to rhetorical studies, initially through a reassessment of Kinneavy’s “communications triangle,” but ultimately in response to the shock treatment of poststructuralism. The initial theoretical traumas introduced by Victor Vitanza, Diane Davis, Sharon Crowley, and others discussed in Chapter 1 are threaded into an account of “poststructural” redress in Chapter 2: as is true of all forms of trauma, the initial poststructural jolt delivered to the concept of subjectivity was deadened; poststructural theory was eventually used to “shore up rather than challenge Kinneavy’s triangle” (37). To truly work-through our traumatized subject in both senses, we need a second trauma: Lacanian psychoanalysis. Presumably, “poststructuralist thought” is to be opposed because it has no account of the subject (21–24); “Lacan,” after all, “is not a poststructuralist” (48). The remainder of the chapter is then used to deploy Lacan’s conceptual lexicon.Just as... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Acts of Enjoyment: Rhetoric, Žižek, and the Return of the SubjectJames J. Brown Jr. and Joshua GunnActs of Enjoyment: Rhetoric, Žižek, and the Return of the Subject by Thomas Rickert. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007. Pp. x + 252. $24.95, hardcover.Thomas Rickert had a falling-out with his brother, and this distresses him so much that his disrupted relation is described as “traumatic.” Rickert reports that (...) while listening to a portable CD player during a run on an unexpectedly warm winter day, a song by the now defunct jazz/rock band Morphine reminded him of a happy time at a pool hall with his brother (24). Mediated—or better, medicated—by music, the homological happiness of running in the sun and a positive past memory also resurfaced a painful relational rupture, the reason of which Rickert omits to underscore that mysterious, “little detail or object” of the Real that marks his singular finitude as a writing subject (216 n. 11). We’ll want to come back to this curiously deliberate omission, but for the present we note Rickert is not simply an undead author but a human being with relations and feelings. He is not just a gifted scholar or a bundle of reflections, but a nexus of body and movement and words and affect. If there is anything that Rickert’s study can be said to work through with brilliance, humor, and grace, it is the reality of complex personhood.Rickert’s brotherly confession comes in Chapter 1 as a way to introduce a psychoanalytic understanding of subjectivity, and more specifically, to help illustrate how trauma works itself out as an afterwardness or “belatedness” ( Nachträglichkeit ): traumatic events from the past are not reckoned with or worked-through until some coincidence or reminder, such as a similar [End Page 183] sensory experience, reintroduces the event in doubled re-presentation (18–27). This implies the “subject” (a paradigm person) is a kind of timedelay, a self-conscious temporal moving that becomes this way through re-presentation. The rhetorical subject is analogously a retrojected reckoning with events past (not all traumatic) that Rickert identifies as a scene of writing, a locus that has important implications for rhetorical studies in general and writing pedagogy in particular. Rickert’s logic is as follows: if we agree that the subject is a belated one in the psychoanalytic sense, then how we teach rhetoric needs to change. Rickert opens the book with the observation that his students are producing excellent cultural critiques but that such critiques do not lead the students to change their actions (1–7), perhaps evidence enough that something is not quite right in a classroom grounded by “cultural studies pedagogy” and ideology critique—or at the very least, proof that something has changed. The opening gambit is simply that a “postpedagogy” premised on an understanding of rhetorical subjectivity as belatedness is better than a status quo rooted in the rational subject of the Enlightenment.Mostly through a Žižek-filtered, Lacanian lens, Acts of Enjoyment then undertakes a retake of the rhetorical field, frequently scanning from the traumatic ontology of the rhetorical subject to that domain of knowledge that we hold dear, the subject of rhetoric. In Chapter 2, the (primal) scene thus shifts from the slo-mo subject to rhetorical studies, initially through a reassessment of Kinneavy’s “communications triangle,” but ultimately in response to the shock treatment of poststructuralism. The initial theoretical traumas introduced by Victor Vitanza, Diane Davis, Sharon Crowley, and others discussed in Chapter 1 are threaded into an account of “poststructural” redress in Chapter 2: as is true of all forms of trauma, the initial poststructural jolt delivered to the concept of subjectivity was deadened; poststructural theory was eventually used to “shore up rather than challenge Kinneavy’s triangle” (37). To truly work-through our traumatized subject in both senses, we need a second trauma: Lacanian psychoanalysis. Presumably, “poststructuralist thought” is to be opposed because it has no account of the subject (21–24); “Lacan,” after all, “is not a poststructuralist” (48). The remainder of the chapter is then used to deploy Lacan’s conceptual lexicon.Just as... (shrink)

It may seem odd to review a New York social club's yearbook, with its list of members’ addresses and series of committee reports. But such books sometimes contain material of more general interest. The latest one from the Century Association, for example, devotes 250 of its 685 pages to “Century Memorials”—that is, biographical sketches of recently deceased members, written by other members. Among the well-known figures taken up in these eighty-three sketches are the artists Richard Anuszkiewicz and Robert Motherwell; the (...) architects Henry N. Cobb and Charles A. Platt; the newspaper editors Harold Evans and Whitelaw Reid; the historians Henry F. Graff and William McFeely; the translator and literary scholar Donald Keene; the collector of literary and musical manuscripts Frederick Koch; the popular writer on Russian history Robert K. Massie; the clergyman James Parks Morton; the financier Felix G. Rohatyn; the lawyers Whitney North Seymour Jr. and Isaac N. Phelps Stokes; the literary editor Elisabeth Sifton; the university president Michael Sovern; the museum director Evan H. Turner; and the broadcast journalist Sander Vanocur. The sketches are generally well written and often richly evocative: the writers include Louis Begley, Kenneth T. Jackson, D. T. Max, and Honor Moore.The long shelf of Century volumes like this one clearly constitutes a valuable contribution to prosopographical literature. And the Century is not the only institution with such a tradition (other examples are the British Academy and the American Philosophical Society); but their publications are a frequently overlooked source, one not always available in research libraries. Unfortunately, it is also a source that seems to be diminishing: the American Antiquarian Society and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation are examples of organizations, each with a history of providing biographical information, that are no longer doing so. Of course, the great previous runs of the former's Proceedings and the latter's Reports remain (one hopes) on the shelves for those who know to look for them. A step in the opposite direction has recently been taken by the Grolier Club, which has not had such a tradition (except for two biographical volumes in 1959 and 2000): its Gazette now includes a section of memorials in each issue. This is a welcome move, but one has to regret that so little scholarly use is made of this whole body of biographical detail and reminiscence. (shrink)

My subject on this occasion goes uneasily with my piety. Lordship did not as such much interest my teachers William E. Lunt and Joseph R. Strayer, who were leaders in their turn of the Medieval Academy of America. In their presidential addresses of 1954 and 1968 both scholars dealt magisterially with subjects each had studied for forty years. Lunt spoke on financial relations of the papacy with England, Strayer on the place of Normandy and Languedoc in the building of an (...) administrative monarchy in France. It is easy to see that in a considerable sense both historians were working on medieval government, and it is some measure of their achievement that even today no one wishing to be informed in this grand subject can do much better than read Lunt and Strayer. I wish I could discourse on my own years of research as did those admirable scholars. If I cannot, it is not simply because I lack the accumulated erudition to reflect summarily on my work; it is also because I lack the conceptual serenity of my teachers in our common subject matter. Like Lunt and Strayer I have worked on justice, finance, and the beginnings of parliamentary life in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; unlike those mentors I became uneasy about the paradigm in which these studies were framed. I came to wonder how Strayer could have held students, myself included, spellbound with details about the deportment of judges or sergeants while saying nothing about the adequacy of concepts like “government” or “administration” to describe such behavior. Believing there was something timeless about the action of people in power, he was gifted at evoking the ways of modern bureaucrats in those “corridors of power” he knew from his own experience in Washington. He assumed with other historians of his day and ours that all societies have governments, so that he could speak of feudalism as essentially a “method of government,” of “political organization … reduced to the simplest possible terms.”. (shrink)

It is one of the ironies of our times that, as the practise of religion wanes, a theoretical interest in it on the part of many anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists and philosophers waxes. Among these, only philosophers bring to their task a long history of theological and reli gious relations. Hence their renewed interest has been hailed as a break down of isolationism, heralding, perhaps, a new era of interdisciplinary peace. To celebrate this new ecumenism, a Chicago seminary, consis tently with (...) its purpose, sponsored a colloquium to explore the future of philosophical theology. If some of its participating professional philosophers initially felt a twinge of embarrassment over their presence at an ostensibly theological meeting, they soon were at ease. No one was called upon to define the topic, or even to suggest its relationship to a philosophy of religion. Conveniently, everyone could role up his sleeves and get to work on a job he personally felt needed doing. Can we wonder that the lay observer appeared somewhat confused? Was the purpose to analyze "God talk," or to find a place for 'God' in a metaphysical scheme? Or if not these, something else? It soon became evident that the participants in the colloquium ranged from the free swinger to the severely inhibited, depending upon the role each assigned to dogma and creed. (shrink)

Since 1998, several attempts have been made to reform the existing mental health legislation - the Mental Health Act 1983. However, all efforts thus far have been resoundingly rejected by mental health charities, psychiatrists and related professions. Following the Government's decision to abandon the draft Mental Health Bill in March 2006, plans to introduce new legislation designed to amend the existing 1983 Act have been published. This shorter bill was introduced before Parliament in November 2006. The amendments focused on six (...) key policy areas including supervised community treatment, the nearest relative, the definition of mental disorder and detention criteria. It is also intended that the Mental Capacity Act 2005 will be amended to bridge the present 'Bournewood' gap. (shrink)

To this end, I propose to follow a somewhat unusual pattern, in that there will be no point-by-point consideration of issues raised by Taylor and Kullman. Instead, I intend to outline Merleau-Ponty's position on language, speech, and meaning as presented in the Phénoménologie de la Perception, and proceed from there to a discussion of the pre-objective.

When making decisions, humans can observe many kinds of information about others' activities, but their effects on performance are not well understood. We investigated social learning strategies using a simple problem-solving task in which participants search a complex space, and each can view and imitate others' solutions. Results showed that participants combined multiple sources of information to guide learning, including payoffs of peers' solutions, popularity of solution elements among peers, similarity of peers' solutions to their own, and relative payoffs from (...) individual exploration. Furthermore, performance was positively associated with imitation rates at both the individual and group levels. When peers' payoffs were hidden, popularity and similarity biases reversed, participants searched more broadly and randomly, and both quality and equity of exploration suffered. We conclude that when peers' solutions can be effectively compared, imitation does not simply permit scrounging, but it can also facilitate propagation of good solutions for further cumulative exploration. (shrink)

The inventor of the concepts of emics and etics, linguist Kenneth Pike, uses this volume as a forum to explain their development and their usage today. He is joined in the debate by renowned anthropologist Marvin Harris. Eight other scholars add to the scholarly discourse and demonstrate applications of the concepts in a variety of disciplines. Referring to insider versus outsider, subjective versus objective views of the world, these concepts are vital for researchers dealing with cultures other than their own.

Critics of the Fine-Tuning Argument for Theism have recently argued that even if the universe is fine-tuned for life, certain features of the universe are still surprising given theism, because God should be indifferent between those features and their contraries. In the first section of this paper, I summarize this sort of Indifference Objection to the Fine-Tuning Argument. In the second section, I explain why contrary to initial appearances, these objections fail. In the third section, I present the Argument from (...) Compatibility, which attempts to turn the tables by arguing that the paradigmatic features are more surprising given atheism than they are given theism. (shrink)

Here, in our approximation of polaron theory, we examine the importance of introducing theT product, which turn out to be a very convenient theoretical approach for the calculation of thermodynamical averages.We focus attention on the investigation of the so-called linear polaron Hamiltonian and present in detail the calculation of the correlation function, spectral function, and Green function for such a linear system.It is shown that the linear polaron Hamiltonian provides an exactly solvable model of our system, and the result obtained (...) with this approach holds true for an arbitrary coupling constant which describes the strength of interaction between the electron and the lattice vibrations. Then, with the help of a variational technique, we show the possibility of reducing the real polaron Hamiltonian to a socalled trial or approximate linear model Hamiltonian.We also consider the exact calculation of free energy with a special technique that reduces calculations with the help of the T product, which, in our opinion, works much better and is easier than other analogous considerations, for example, the path-integral or Feynman-integral method.(1,2)Here we furthermore recall our own work,(4) where it was shown that the results of Refs. 7 and 8 concerning the impedance calculation in the polaron model may be obtained directly without the use of the path-integral method.The study of the polaron system's thermodynamics is carried out by us in the framework of the functional method. A calculation of the free energy and the momentum distribution function is proposed.Note also that the polaron systems with strong coupling(9) proved to be useful in different quantum field models in connection with the construction of dynamical models of composite particles. A rigorous solution of the special strong-coupling polaron problem, describing the interaction of a nonrelativistic particle with a quantum field, was given by Bogolubov.(3) The works of Tavkhelidze, Fedyanin, Khrustalev, and others(10–13) are dedicated to the further development and generalization of the Bogolubov method.Notice, too, that the electron-photon interaction effects play an important part in many problems of modern solid state theory (see, e.g., Refs. 7 and 14–19).The present paper summarizes a set of lectures delivered as a special course in the physics department of Moscow State University. (shrink)

_A history of the world’s first democracy from its beginnings in Athens circa fifth century B.C. to its downfall 200 years later_ The first democracy, established in ancient Greece more than 2,500 years ago, has served as the foundation for every democratic system of government instituted down the centuries. In this lively history, author Thomas N. Mitchell tells the full and remarkable story of how a radical new political order was born out of the revolutionary movements that swept through (...) the Greek world in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C., how it took firm hold and evolved over the next two hundred years, and how it was eventually undone by the invading Macedonian conquerors, a superior military power. Mitchell’s superb history addresses the most crucial issues surrounding this first paradigm of democratic governance, including what initially inspired the political beliefs underpinning it, the ways the system succeeded and failed, how it enabled both an empire and a cultural revolution that transformed the world of arts and philosophy, and the nature of the Achilles heel that hastened the demise of Athenian democracy. (shrink)

The first democracy, established in ancient Greece more than 2,500 years ago, has served as the foundation for every democratic system of government instituted down the centuries. In this lively history, author Thomas N. Mitchell tells the full and remarkable story of how a radical new political order was born out of the revolutionary movements that swept through the Greek world in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C., how it took firm hold and evolved over the next two hundred (...) years, and how it was eventually undone by the invading Macedonian conquerors, a superior military power. Mitchell’s superb history addresses the most crucial issues surrounding this first paradigm of democratic governance, including what initially inspired the political beliefs underpinning it, the ways the system succeeded and failed, how it enabled both an empire and a cultural revolution that transformed the world of arts and philosophy, and the nature of the Achilles heel that hastened the demise of Athenian democracy. (shrink)

What determines whether an object is an artwork? In this paper I consider what I will call ‘social’ theories of art, according to which the arthood of objects depends in some way on the art-related social practices that we have. Though such a dependence claim is plausible in principle, social theories of art tend to unpack the determining link between artworks and social practices in terms of intentional relations between the objects in question and the people involved in the relevant (...) practices. This intentionalism has unappealing upshots. Drawing on two-dimensional approaches in social ontology, I show how social theories of art can be done differently, improving their prospects. (shrink)

When some P implies some Q, this should have some impact on what attitudes we take to P and Q. In other words: logical consequence has a normative import. I use this idea, recently explored by a number of scholars, as a stepping stone to a bolder view: that relations of logical consequence can be identified with norms on our propositional attitudes, or at least that our talk of logical consequence can be explained in terms of such norms. I investigate (...) the prospects of such a cognitive norm account of logical consequence. I go over the challenges involved in finding a plausible bridge principle connecting logical consequence to cognitive norms, in particular a biconditional principle that gives us not only necessary but sufficient conditions for logical consequence in terms of norms on propositional attitudes. Then, on the assumption that an adequate norm can be found, I consider what the philosophical merits of such a cognitive norm account would be, and what theoretical commitments it would generate. (shrink)

Among the regions where history was written in the early Middle Ages Mediterranean France is hardly conspicuous. South of the Limousin we know of no Flodoard to carry on Frankish annals, no Dudo to celebrate a new people's identity, no William of Poitiers to lionize a conqueror; nor did the twelfth century nurture the likes of Orderic Vitalis or Suger. Indeed, it is difficult to think of a single historian in or of the deep South during the centuries separating the (...) Carolingian annalists of Moissac and Aniane from the singers and narrators of the Albigensian crusades. Neither Adémar de Chabannes nor Geoffroi de Vigeois can be counted as such, although it is true that these Aquitanian writers transmit important traditions on affairs of Gascony and Gothia; neither was primarily concerned with the distant South. Raimond d'Aguilers, canon of Le Puy and chaplain to Count Raimond of Saint-Gilles, for all that he usefully tells of the count's crusading expedition , says little of his homeland. Nor is it simply contemporary historians that are lacking. Auguste Molinier was thinking of records of all kinds when he wrote that in the south of the old Frankish lands “la production historique a été extrêmement peu abondante à l'époque féodale.” For our knowledge of events in the South we have sometimes to rely on northern sources: such is the case with the confraternity of Le Puy in the 1180s. Moreover, northern events as late and as great as Bouvines have no known echo in the South. (shrink)

With the Reformation, philosophers sought to establish a new way of thinking independent of religion. Borrowing principles popularized religious reformers: the right of conscience, the utter transcendence of God, the sinfulness of the world, they constructed a new metaphysics that highlighted the mystery of God and the complete intelligibility of 'rational man.' From this history an understanding of our religious situation is distilled. The chapters of this work develop for the reader the intellectual structure of religion and show how its (...) language, imagery and ritual function. They argue that if religion no longer presents a challenge, it is because we think of it in terms of the 'new metaphysics.' To recapture the reality, we must join our contemporaries who are attacking the premises of classical modern philosophy and so experience ourselves afresh. (shrink)

Selections from the writings of George Santayana.