Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464) was active during the Renaissance, developing adventurous ideas even while serving as a churchman. The religious issues with which he engaged - spiritual, apocalyptic and institutional - were to play out in the Reformation. These essays reflect the interests of Cusanus but also those of Gerald Christianson, who has studied church history, the Renaissance and the Reformation. The book places Nicholas into his times but also looks at his later reception. The first part addresses institutional (...) issues, including Schism, conciliarism, indulgences and the possibility of dialogue with Muslims. The second treats theological and philosophical themes, including nominalism, time, faith, religious metaphor, and prediction of the end times. (shrink)

Stepping-up the historiography of peripheral popularisation Content Type Journal Article DOI 10.1007/s11016-010-9454-8 Authors Aileen Fyfe, School of History, University of St Andrews, St Katharine’s Lodge, The Scores, St Andrews, Fife, KY16 9AR UK Journal Metascience Online ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796.

This first full-length study of the Arabic reception of Plato's Timaeus considers the role of Galen of Pergamum in shaping medieval perceptions of the text as transgressing disciplinary norms. It argues that Galen appealed to the entangled cosmological scheme of the dialogue, where different relations connect the body, soul, and cosmos, to expand the boundaries of medicine in his pursuit for epistemic authority – the right to define and explain natural reality. Aileen Das situates Galen's work on disciplinary boundaries (...) in the context of medicine's ancient rivalry with philosophy, whose professionals were long seen as superior knowers of the cosmos vis-à-vis doctors. Her case studies show how Galen and four of the most important Christian, Muslim, and Jewish thinkers in the Arabic Middle Ages creatively interpreted key doctrines from the Timaeus to reimagine medicine and philosophy as well as their own intellectual identities. (shrink)

This study uses accounting professionals from an international setting to test the individualism and power distance cultural dimensions developed by Hofstede [Culture's Consequences 1980]. Six countries, which appropriately represented high and low values on the Hofstede dimensions, were chosen for the survey of ethical beliefs. Respondents from the six countries were requested to supply their agreement/disagreement with eight questionable behaviors associated with the work environment. Each of these behaviors contained an individualism and/or power distance cultural component for the responding accountants (...) to consider. The results of the cultural analysis indicated significance on five of the eight survey items. Results lend support for the presence of the individualism cultural element in the ethical responses of the accountants surveyed. (shrink)

The algorithmic turn in photography raises the question of whether an algorithmically generated image is even a photograph at all. This paradox is abundant on India's urban streets, where the pedestrian or road user is met with giant photo saturated flex hoardings printed with political and community messages and photo-shopped portraits of gods, chief ministers and party workers. In this article, attention to photo-based political posters alongside art practices sharing common elements of digital capture and postproduction contextualizes a reading of (...) technologically produced visual landscapes in the South Indian city of Bangalore. Informed by Vilèm Flusser, the techno-materiality of hoardings are interpreted as visual practices whose reliance on Microsoft and Adobe softwares reveal more than the semiotic information that is ostensibly transmitted; in so doing the extent to which photography is a useful entry point for assessing the visuality in which we're currently living and how this gets locally inflected in the case of India is explored. (shrink)

Under the Human Rights Act, British courts are for the first time empowered to review primary legislation for compliance with a codified set of fundamental rights. In this book, Aileen Kavanagh argues that the HRA gives judges strong powers of constitutional review, similar to those exercised by the courts under an entrenched Bill of Rights. The aim of the book is to subject the leading case-law under the HRA to critical scrutiny, whilst remaining sensitive to the deeper constitutional, political (...) and theoretical questions which underpin it. Such questions include the idea of judicial deference, the constitutional status of the HRA, the principle of parliamentary sovereignty and the constitutional division of labour between Parliament and the courts. The book closes with a sustained defence of the legitimacy of constitutional review in a democracy, thus providing a powerful rejoinder to those who are sceptical about judicial power under the HRA. (shrink)

Paul of Aegina's (fl.c. 630)Pragmateiais the only extant Greek medical text from antiquity that discusses the extraction of arrows and small missiles. In his book on surgery, Paul details how to extract arrows according to their properties and the parts of the body which they have wounded (6.88). He prefaces his instructions by describing how arrows differ in their material, figure, size, number, mode, and power. Paul's account of arrow varieties appears to reflect the environment of his medical practice, seventh-century (...) Alexandria, for he refers to Egyptian arrow types when listing the material composition and sizes of different arrows. (shrink)

RésuméLe « Synopsis du Timée de Platon » de Galien, ouvrage clé pour l’étude du platonisme prémoderne, survit uniquement dans une édition dite « imparfaite » de 1951 qui présente pour la première fois le texte arabe survivant accompagné de sa traduction en latin. Les rédacteurs de la série « Plato Arabus » du Corpus Platonicum, à laquelle l’édition appartient, ont attribué les défauts de cette édition à la mort inopportune de Paul Kraus, qui l'a préparée, aidé par un autre (...) réfugié juif, Richard Walzer, pendant la période de la seconde guerre mondiale. Notre analyse de sources tirées d'archives démontrera que le travail sur ce volume était majoritairement celui de Kraus. Qui plus est, nous démontrons que Walzer et le rédacteur du Corpus Platonicum Raymond Klibansky ont marginalisé le travail de Kraus sur le projet dans l'optique d'avancer leurs propres carrières universitaires en tant que Juifs réfugiés en Grande-Bretagne. Nous allons également examiner la manière dont Walzer et Klibansky ont remanié le projet initial de Kraus – celui d'un corpus sémitique du platonisme – en un « Plato Arabus » plus étroit qui s'alignerait sur une étude du platonisme latin, projet qu'ils présumaient plus susceptible d'intéresser leurs mécènes britanniques. (shrink)

ABSTRACTUsing a frame analysis approach this paper examines how The Irish Times and the Irish Independent portrayed public sector workers during Ireland's economic crisis. Using a sample of coverage from 2009 and 2010 it discusses the five media frames identified in this analysis, three of which were hegemonic and two of which were counter hegemonic. In this paper, I argue that coverage of the public sector by each newspaper was imbalanced and inaccurate. This paper also finds that both newspapers were (...) strong advocates of austerity cutbacks in the public service as a solution to Ireland's financial crisis, frequently representing this idea as ‘fact’ while simultaneously delegitimising those opposing this viewpoint. (shrink)

A literate scrutiny of a popular science Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-4 DOI 10.1007/s11016-011-9584-7 Authors Aileen Fyfe, School of History, University of St Andrews, St Katharine’s Lodge, The Scores, St Andrews, Fife, KY16 9AR Scotland, UK Journal Metascience Online ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796.

This research presents findings from a study of gender-based differences in an ethical decision situation. The study focuses on gender as it relates to situational factors and accounting experience. The primary element of interest is how the gender of the actor (the person described in each vignette) influences the evaluation/assessment of the ethical/unethical decisions. While previous research has provided evidence of ethical differences relating to the gender of the responding subjects, limited evidence has been presented relating to situational issues that (...) may influence assessments of ethical decisions.This research uses four accounting environment vignettes to survey the responses of accountants and accounting students to the ethical/unethical nature of the actions that are taken. In addition, how likely the accountants believe they are to take the same actions is also surveyed. The subjects are a representative sample of practicing accountants in the U.S. and senior/graduate accounting majors at a state university in the southwestern United States. (shrink)

Bringsjord and Licato provide a general meta-argument that cyberwarfare is so different from traditional kinetic warfare that no argument from analogy can allow the just war theory of Augustine and Aquinas to be pulled over from traditional warfare to cyberwarfare. I believe that this meta-argument is sound and that it applies not just to cyberwarfare: in particular, on my reading of the meta-argument, argument from analogy has never been adequate to allow JWT to be applied to the kind of warfare (...) that we are familiar with now. (shrink)

This paper considers the development and judicial application of the Public Sector Equality Duty now found in section 149 Equality Act 2010, previously in a variety of forms in the Race Relations Act 1976, the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 and the Sex Discrimination Act 1975. It identifies a number of emerging themes in the jurisprudence concerned, in particular, with the relationship between the PSED and Wednesbury review, the extent of the information-gathering obligation it imposes, the delegability of PSED decision-making and (...) the timing of PSED challenge. It then considers the uncertainties which remain including, in particular, the application of the duty to various categories of decision-making, and concludes by assessing the impact of the PSED on challenges to ‘cuts’ cases arising from the reductions to public sector funding, and on domestic equality jurisprudence. (shrink)

This article investigates the textual strategies with which Maeve Murphy's Silent Grace addresses viewers in contemporary Northern Ireland. Borrowing Eric Santner's concept of `narrative fetishism', the analysis examines how the film's representation of the past obscures the historical realities experienced by female political prisoners in Armagh jail in the late 1970s and early 1980s. From this standpoint, its ethical relation to historical `truth' and responsibilities to its local audience are debated.

This article offers the first edition and translation of two heretofore unpublished pharmacological treatises by Abū Bakr al-Rāzī, namely Fī ittikhādh māʾ al-jubn and Fī manāfiʿ māʾ al-jubn, which seem to have formed part of a lost volume on dairy products. As it demonstrates, al-Rāzī’s examination of whey is connected to his philosophical interest in the complex nature of simple substances such as milk. The article also highlights how these two treatises built on the Greek pharmacological tradition by incorporating ingredients (...) from Persia and India. (shrink)

Mainly known for its links to the periodical market and radical politics, this article recontextualizes the editorship of William Nicholson (1753–1815) in terms of its roots in the metropolitan natural philosophical circles of the second half of the 18th century as well as its impact on experimenters and men of science after 1797. The article argues that Nicholson's editorship of the Journal of Natural Philosophy, Chemistry, and the Arts was a means to expand his philosophical significance among natural philosophers at (...) home and abroad—and was, in fact, a form of epistemological subversion that challenged the “Banksian Learned Empire.”. (shrink)

In the decades after the Second World War, learned society publishers struggled to cope with the expanding output of scientific research and the increased involvement of commercial publishers in the business of publishing research journals. Could learned society journals survive economically in the postwar world, against this competition? Or was the emergence of a sales-based commercial model of publishing – in contrast to the traditional model of subsidized journal publishing – an opportunity to transform the often-fragile finances of learned societies? (...) But there was also an existential threat: if commercial firms could successfully publish scientific journals, were learned society publishers no longer needed? This paper investigates how British learned society publishers adjusted to the new economic realities of the postwar world, through an investigation of the activities organized by the Royal Society of London and the Nuffield Foundation, culminating in the 1963 report Self-Help for Learned Journals. It reveals the postwar decades as the time when scientific research became something to be commodified and sold to libraries, rather than circulated as part of a scholarly mission. It will be essential reading for all those campaigning to transition academic publishing – including learned society publishing – away from the sales-based model once again. (shrink)

What was once the factory is now the university. As deindustrialization spreads and the working class is decentralized, new means of social resistance and political activism need to be sought in what may be the last places where they are possible: the university and the art world. Gerald Raunig's new book analyzes the potential that cognitive and creative labor has in these two arenas to resist the new regimes of domination imposed by cognitive capitalism. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze's concept of (...) "modulation" as the market-driven imperative for the constant transformation and reinvention of subjectivity, in Factories of Knowledge, Industries of Creativity, Raunig charts alternative horizons for resistance. Looking at recent social struggles including the university strikes in Europe, the Spanish ¡Democracia real YA! organization, the Arab revolts, and the Occupy movement, Raunig argues for a reassessment of the importance of cultural and knowledge production. The central role of the university, he asserts, is not as a factory of knowledge but as a place of creative disobedience. (shrink)

As his writings tend to prioritize the incorporeal over the corporeal, Plato seems an unlikely authority on medicine. He does not appear to have engaged in any systematic investigation of the body through direct examination of animal anatomy, like his pupil Aristotle. Notwithstanding Plato's apparent lack of interest in anatomical research, modern scholars view his dialogues as valuable witnesses for earlier and contemporary theories about the body. Famously, thePhaedrus(270c–e) mentions Hippocrates’ holistic approach to studying the body. Out of all his (...) dialogues, theTimaeusoffers the most extensive comments about the nature of the body and its functions. Many of its physiological ideas, however, seem to derive from earlier medical and philosophical authorities such as Alcmaeon of Croton (fifth century), Empedocles (fifth century) and Philistion of Locri (fourth century) rather than from Plato himself. (shrink)

In this "concise philosophy of the machine," Gerald Raunig provides a historical and critical backdrop to a concept proposed forty years ago by the French philosophers Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze: the machine, not as a technical device and apparatus, but as a social composition and concatenation. This conception of the machine as an arrangement of technical, bodily, intellectual, and social components subverts the opposition between man and machine, organism and mechanism, individual and community. Drawing from an unusual range of (...) films, literature, and performance--from the role of bicycles in Flann O'Brien's fiction to Vittorio de Sica's Neorealist film The Bicycle Thieves, and from Karl Marx's "Fragment on Machines" to the deus ex machina of Greek drama--Raunig arrives at an enhanced conception of the machine as a social movement, finding its most apt and concrete manifestation in the Euromayday movement, which since 2001 has become a transnational activist and discursive practice focused upon the precarious nature of labor and lives. (shrink)