"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)

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)

Aristotle claims that character friends are similar to each other. How should we understand this similarity, and what role does it play in friendship? In the paper, I argue that a broad similarity of ‘tastes’—which I understand as the appreciation of relatively good ends—is at least a facilitating condition on the formation of character friendship. This is because it (i) facilitates seeing the other as good in the first place, which is essential to character friendship; and (ii) enables the friends (...) to spend time and share in activities together, which is characteristic of character friendship. (shrink)

David Hume's writings on history, politics and philosophy have shaped thought to this day. His bold scepticism ranged from common notions of the 'self' to criticism of standard theistic proofs. He insisted on grounding understandings of popular religious beliefs in human psychology rather than divine revelation, and he aimed to disentangle philosophy from religion in order to allow the former to pursue its own ends. In this book, Professors David W Purdie and Peter S Fosl decipher some of Hume's most (...) challenging texts for the modern reader, while preserving the sharp intellect and undaunted nerve for which Hume is famous. Hume's spirit is brought alive for contemporary times and his writing is made accessible for its intended audience: the general public."-- Back cover. (shrink)

In his latest book, Jedediah Purdy takes up a question of deep and lasting importance: why is property ownership a value to society? His answer returns us to the foundations of American society and enables us to interpret the writings of the patron saint of liberal economics, Adam Smith, in a wholly new light. Unlike Milton Friedman and other free-market scholars, who consider property a key to efficient markets, Purdy draws upon Smith’s theories to argue that the virtues (...) of wealth are social rather than economic. In Purdy’s view, ownership does much more than shield one from government interference. Property shapes social life in ways that bring us closer to, or take us farther from, the ideal of a community of free and equal members. This view of property is neither libertarian nor communitarian but treats the community as the precondition of individual freedom. This view informed U.S. law in the early days of the republic, Purdy writes, and it is one that we need to restore today. Touching upon some of the most charged issues in American politics and law, including slavery, inheritance, international development, and climate change, _The Meaning of Property_ offers a compelling new view of property and freedom and enriches our understanding of democratic society. (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)

PurposeThe fitness centers are settings for health promotion, yet may serve as a stage for counterproductive figure idealization. Such idealization may take the form of a drive toward the thin, the muscular, or lean body figure ideal, which all hold the potential to impel an experience of body appearance pressure and body dissatisfaction. The aim of this study was to explore figure idealization, body dissatisfaction, and experience of BAP in fitness instructors.Materials and MethodsFitness instructors, 70 males and 236 females, were (...) recruited through their facility chief executive officer and social media for a digital survey on mental health. Results are presented for body appreciation, body dissatisfaction, drive for muscularity, drive for leanness, questions on BAP, symptoms of eating disorders, and history of weight regulation and eating disorders.ResultsAttempts to gain body weight were reported by 17% of females and 53% of males, whereas ∼76% of males and females, respectively, reported to have attempted weight reduction. Reasons for body weight manipulation were predominantly appearance related, and 10–20% reported disordered eating behavior. Mean BAS-2 and EDI-BD were acceptable, but 28% of females were above clinical cutoff in EDI-BD, and mean DLS were high in both sexes. In total, 8% of females were above clinical cutoff in EDE-q, which corresponded well with the self-reported ED. Approximately 90% of the sample perceived BAP to be a societal issue and reported predominantly customers and colleagues to be the cause of their personal experience of BAP. Fewer than 50% knew of any actions taken by their employer to reduce BAP. There were few differences according to profession or educational level.ConclusionFitness instructors report BAP to affect them negatively, which may put them at risk of impaired mental health. Educational level did not protect against figure idealization and BAP. To care for their employees and to optimize their position as a public health promoter, the fitness industry should target BAP in health promotion programs. (shrink)

Fluted logic is the restriction of pure predicate logic to formulas in which variables play no essential role. Although fluted logic is significantly weaker than pure predicate logic, it is of interest because it seems closely to parallel natural logic, the logic that is conducted in natural language. It has been known since 1969 that if conjunction in fluted formulas is restricted to subformulas of equal arity, satisfiability is decidable. However, the decidability of sublogics lying between this restricted (homogeneous) fluted (...) logic and full predicate logic remained unknown. In 1994 it was shown that the satisfiability of fluted formulas without restriction is decidable, thus reducing the unknown region significantly. This paper further reduces the unknown region. It shows that fluted logic with the logical identity is decidable. Since the reflection functor can be defined in fluted logic with identity, it follows that fluted logic with the reflection functor also lies within the region of decidability. Relevance to natural logic is increased since the identity permits definition of singular predicates, which can represent anaphoric pronouns. (shrink)

Science is revolutionizing human reproduction. New techniques are already with us, such as artificial insemination, the freezing of sperm, in vitro fertilization and the use of surrogate mothers. Artificial wombs are clearly on the horizon.

With a little effort, anything can be shown to connect to anything else: existence is infinitely cross-referenced. And everything has more than one definition. A cat is a mammal, a narcissist, a companion, a riddle.[T]here is nothing more tentative, nothing more empirical than the process of establishing an order among things.I am putting away my term. Yes, I am. A little late, but that’s the kind of term it was: things spill over, the boxes will not hold them. The course (...) files are not yet in their folders, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order. The season has turned and the objects on my worktable now stare back reproachfully like jetsam on a beach: pens, pencils, piles of books .. (shrink)

We differ mainly, I think, in that Hyman is willing to indulge his taste for subtlety more extensively than I am. He seems comfortable with post-modern paradoxes like "the tendency of a literary work to refuse to give us a moral direction is itself a value" and believes that this refusal is properly based on the writer's incapacity to "make pronouncements about [the] world." It could be I mistake him here, and he means only to reject those solutions toutes faites (...) that are part of the didactic mode, in which case I agree once more. But I feel the thrust of his argument is to deny the existence of the first of the two abysses, frivolity and propaganda, into which, according to Camus, it is the task of the writer to keep from falling. To seek a strengthening of moral commitment in a literature that operates at "a level of awareness deeper than our moral and political judgments" is certainly to avoid exposure to propaganda; but it is also something of a logical—and psychological—contradiction in terms and therefore doomed to irrelevance or, in Camus' terms, frivolity. One cannot answer for individual variations on common aesthetic experiences, of course; there exist men and women and literary characters who find strength to take a moral stand in the contemplation of a Chinese jar or in what I called harpsichord exercises—the term includes, after all, Das wohltemperiertes Klavier—but such experiences, for all their abstract beauty, lack a social basis and a social relevance. The mimetic imperative is not so easily bypassed. Strother Purdy, professor of English at Marquette University, is the author of The Hole in the Fabric: Science, Contemporary Literature, and Henry James. He has also contributed "Stalingrad and My Lai: A Literary-Political Speculation" to Critical Inquiry. (shrink)

Reproductive autonomy is central to women’s welfare both because childbearing takes place in women’s bodies and because they are generally expected to take primary responsibility for child rearing. In 2005, the factors that influence their autonomy most strongly are poverty and belief systems that devalue such autonomy. Unfortunately, such autonomy is a low priority for most societies, or is anathema to their belief systems altogether. This situation is doubly sad because women’s reproductive autonomy is intrinsically valuable for women and also (...) instrumentally valuable for the welfare of humankind. This paper takes for granted the moral and practical necessity of such autonomy and digs deeper into the question of what such a commitment might entail, focusing on the mid-level policy making that, at least in the US and Canada, plays a significant role in shaping women’s options. This paper examines a large teaching hospital’s policy on reduction of multifetal pregnancies. The policy permits reduction of triplets to twins, but not twins to a singleton. As there is no morally relevant difference between these two types of reduction, it is evident that inappropriate medicalisation can still limit women’s autonomy in undesirable ways. (shrink)

Buck, Therese This article explores some of the factors that led to Vatican II's teaching that marriage is a covenant [foedus] in Gaudium et spes when, in the 1917 Code of Canon Law marriage is referred to as a contract [contractus]. As a background to the developments in Gaudium et spes, I will first outline the teaching on marriage in the 1917 Code and in Pius XI's 1930 encyclical Casti connubii. This will be followed by the inclusion of marriage as (...) covenant in Gaudium et spes and finally, this article will consider the significance of the concept of marriage covenant in continuity with tradition and developments since Vatican II in the theology of marriage. (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)

Comment et en quoi les études sur le genre permettent de retravailler les disciplines scientifiques? Comment la pré-valence de l'androcentrisme des sciences crée des apories au sein des connaissances scientifiques? En quoi le prisme du genre peut-il requestionner les pratiques scientifiques, particulièrement au sein des sciences dites 'dures' et expérimentales? En quoi le genre permet aussi de renouveler ler l'appréhension des pratiques militantes et professionnelles? et ouvrage s'intéresse aux apports du genre, un concept u des sciences humaines et sociales qui (...) tend à s'appliqu r à la réflexion scientifique menée au sein d'autres mondes de la recherche. Cette inclusion permet de pointer les écueils, dans des domaines scientifiques longtemps restés hermétiques aux enjeux du genre. Il rend compte de travaux récents questionnant les enjeux épistémologiques de la critique féministe des sciences, mais aussi portant sur les questions d'identité de genre ainsi que de santé et de contrôle de la sexualité. II réunit des recherches inédites émanant de diverses disciplines scientifiques : pharmacologie, physiologie, biologie, toxicologie, mais aussi sociologie, anthropologie, histoire, droit et philosophie, présentées par des spécialistes des sciences sociales et des études de genre comme par des Fornnières et pionniers ayant relevé le challenge de croiser s enjeux de genre à des objets de recherche nouveaux. Son originalité tient également à l'apport de réflexions croisées sur les enjeux contemporains du genre émanant des pratiques ancrées sur les terrains militants et professionnels."--Page 4 of cover. (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)

A philosophy of nature is an urgent need if we want to avoid falling back into the Gnostic view of the world and of man’s place in it that modern science can’t help fostering. The medieval idea of the world as the creation of stable natures by a rational and benevolent God should provide us with useful guidelines. In particular, Aquinas gives us valuable hints about how our scientific knowledge of nature might help us to get a correct appreciation of (...) our own worth. (shrink)

Die Reihe Patristische Texte und Studien publiziert seit 1963 Forschungsergebnisse, die durch die Patristische Kommission, heute ein Gemeinschaftsunternehmen aller deutschen Akademien der Wissenschaften, koordiniert werden. In ihr erscheinen Editionen, Kommentare und Monographien zu den Schriften und Lehren der Kirchenväter.

This article surveys a range of recent media storiesabout human gametes, pinning them to a series of widerpreoccupations within late modern life. Threepreoccupations are singled out: first, kinship andrelational identity; secondly, Nature andglobalisation; and finally, sexual difference andequality. Each one of these preoccupations has beencharacterised as iconic; debates about them are saidto crystallise who we are, especially ouruncertainties, and what we will be in the future. Byindexing these preoccupations to the stories abouthuman gametes, the article aims to upset both theincreasing (...) attempts to present assisted reproductiontechnologies as `familiar' (as Nature's `helpinghand', for example) and the recurringassumptions about this technology's alleged`novelty' and `anomaly'. The article concludesthat treating reproduction technologies, and theirregulation, as `familiar' risks complacency:equally, assumptions about their `novelty' narrowsthe search for effective explanatory tools andregulatory mechanisms. The upshot is that it might bebest for us to view reproductive technologies as bothless `familiar' and less `novel'. (shrink)

This article is an expansion of comments I was honored to present at a celebration of the life and work of Anne Donchin at the June 2016 meeting of the International Network on Feminist Approaches to Bioethics in Edinburgh. It is obviously far from comprehensive, but I hope it gives readers a glimpse of an Anne of whose depths many of us were not fully aware. One of the most difficult parts of talking about someone who has died is highlighting (...) the positive without overdoing it to the extent that their friends and loved ones find themselves rolling their mental eyes a bit, since most of us—no matter how wonderful—are a little less than perfect. But my problem here is that the more I have found out... (shrink)