This book proposes a novel, descriptive theory that unveils the linguistic mechanisms lurking behind judicial decisions. It offers a comprehensive account of the ongoing debate, as well as a novel solution to the problem of understanding legal pragmatics. Linguistic pragmatics is based on a theory created by Paul Grice, who observed that people usually convey more than just the amalgam of the meaning of the words they use. He labeled this surplus of meaning a “conversational implicature.” This book addresses the (...) question of whether implicatures occur in the legal language, firstly illustrating why the classic Gricean theory is not applicable to the description of legal language and proposing a novel approach based on a modification of Andrei Marmor’s “strategic speech.” Subsequently, it analyzes neo-Gricean theories and their limited use for describing the mechanisms of legal interpretation, and discusses the possibility of pragmatic enrichment of legal content as well as the notion of completeness of a legal proposition. Lastly, it illustrates how the developed theory works in practice, with examples from penal and civil law cases. The book is helpful to legal practitioners, since it provides insights into the reasons for and linguistic mechanisms behind courts’ decisions, but also to philosophers of law, philosophers of language, linguists and non-experts wishing to better understand the mechanisms of legal decision making. (shrink)

I investigate: to what extent do folk ascriptions of lying differ between casual and courtroom contexts? to what extent does motive to lie influence ascriptions of trust, mental states, and lying judgments? to what extent are lying judgments consistent with previous ascriptions of communicated content? Following the Supreme Court’s Bronston judgment, I expect: averaged lying judgments to be similar in casual and courtroom contexts; motive to lie to influence levels of trust, mental states ascriptions, and patterns of lying judgments; retrospective (...) judgments of lying, after being presented with the state of the world, to be inconsistent with previous judgments of communicated content: participants hold the protagonist responsible for content she did not communicate. I performed a survey experiment on the Qualtrics platform. Participants were recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk. I employed standard Likert scales and forced-choice questions. I found that: average lying judgments are similar in casual and courtroom contexts; motive to lie decreases trust ascription and increases lying judgment; judgments of lying are inconsistent with previous judgments of communicated content: participants hold the protagonist responsible for content they did not communicate. Perjury ascriptions are inconsistent. The Supreme Court’s worries expressed in the Bronston judgment are well founded. This article helps reforming jury instructions in perjury cases. (shrink)

We take a fresh look at the logics of informational dependence and independence of Hintikka and Sandu and Väänänen, and their compositional semantics due to Hodges. We show how Hodges’ semantics can be seen as a special case of a general construction, which provides a context for a useful completeness theorem with respect to a wider class of models. We shed some new light on each aspect of the logic. We show that the natural propositional logic carried by the semantics (...) is the logic of Bunched Implications due to Pym and O’Hearn, which combines intuitionistic and multiplicative connectives. This introduces several new connectives not previously considered in logics of informational dependence, but which we show play a very natural rôle, most notably intuitionistic implication. As regards the quantifiers, we show that their interpretation in the Hodges semantics is forced, in that they are the image under the general construction of the usual Tarski semantics; this implies that they are adjoints to substitution, and hence uniquely determined. As for the dependence predicate, we show that this is definable from a simpler predicate, of constancy or dependence on nothing. This makes essential use of the intuitionistic implication. The Armstrong axioms for functional dependence are then recovered as a standard set of axioms for intuitionistic implication. We also prove a full abstraction result in the style of Hodges, in which the intuitionistic implication plays a very natural rôle. (shrink)

We present a game semantics for Linear Logic, in which formulas denote games and proofs denote winning strategies. We show that our semantics yields a categorical model of Linear Logic and prove full completeness for Multiplicative Linear Logic with the MIX rule: every winning strategy is the denotation of a unique cut-free proof net. A key role is played by the notion of history-free strategy; strong connections are made between history-free strategies and the Geometry of Interaction. Our semantics incorporates a (...) natural notion of polarity, leading to a refined treatment of the additives. We make comparisons with related work by Joyal, Blass, et al. (shrink)

In the present paper we argue that although the semantics of both legal and moral statements can be explained with the use of a unified framework called hybrid or quasi-expressivism (Finlay & Plunkett, 2018), there still is an important difference in the semantics of moral and legal terms. Namely, while the truth conditions of legal statements are widely intersubjectively shared, this is not the case with moral statements. We demonstrate this difference using the example of the ex aequo et bono (...) adjudication method. In the first background section we explain what is hybrid or quasi-expressivism as well as what is the standard account of the semantics of moral and legal statements. In the next section, we explain in detail how we aim to demonstrate that the semantics of legal terms and the semantics of some moral terms, such as ‘goodness’ or ‘fairness’, differ importantly. In order to illustrate the difference, we next explain the ex aequo et bono adjudication method and provide examples of cases in which this method has been employed. Crucially, this method is extremely rarely used, which highlights the difference between the semantics of legal and moral statements. Finally, we provide our interpretation of why ex aequo et bono adjudication is so seldom employed and what consequences this has for a theory of the semantics of legal and moral terms. (shrink)

In this paper I will tackle three issues. First, I aim to briefly outline the backbone of semantic minimalism, while focusing on the idea of ‘liberal truth conditions’ developed by Emma Borg in her book ‘Minimal Semantics’. Secondly, I will provide an account of the three principal views in legal interpretation: intentionalism, textualism and purposivism. All of them are based on a common denominator labelled by lawyers ‘literal meaning’. In the paper I suggest a novel way of viewing this common (...) denominator as almost identical to the Borgian ‘liberal truth conditions’, at least at a conceptual level. In the third section I will focus on the conceptual similarities between the two ideas. I intend to depict that, although legal theorists do not admit it explicitly, they treat literal legal meaning as minimal propositional content that can be ascribed liberal truth conditions. There are two main objections to liberal truth conditions: their under-determinacy and unintuitive character. Both objections can be applied to ‘literal meaning’. However, the idea of liberal truth conditions gives an adequate account of what lawyers call literal meaning and is helpful in explaining the mechanism of understanding of provisions and reasons leading to the necessity of statutory interpretation. (shrink)

Abramsky, S., Domain theory in logical form, Annals of Pure and Applied Logic 51 1–77. The mathematical framework of Stone duality is used to synthesise a number of hitherto separate developments in theoretical computer science.• Domain theory, the mathematical theory of computation introduced by Scott as a foundation for detonational semantics• The theory of concurrency and systems behaviour developed by Milner, Hennesy based on operational semantics.• Logics of programsStone duality provides a junction between semantics and logics . Moreover, the underlying (...) logic is geometric, which can be computationally interpreted as the logic of observable properties—i.e., properties which can be determined to hold of a process on the basis of a finite amount of information about its execution.These ideas lead to the following programme. A metalanguage is introduced, comprising• types = universes of discourse for various computational situations;• terms = PROGRAMS = syntactic intensions for models or points. A standard denotational interpretation of the metalanguage is given, assigning domains to types and domain elements to terms. The metalanguage is also given a logical interpretation, in which types are interpreted as propositional theories and terms are interpreted via a program logic, which axiomatises the properties they satisfy. The two interpretations are related by showing that they are Stone duals of each other. Hence, semantics and logic are guaranteed to be in harmony with each other, and in fact each determines the other up to isomorphism. This opens the way to a whole range of applications. Given a denotational description of a computational situation in our metalanguage, we can turn the handle to obtain a logic for that situation. (shrink)

Le Discours contre le Discours « De Domnus » rend compte d’un triple débat, dans lequel trois personnages interviennent sur la question des « incorporels », point difficile de la doctrine stoïcienne. La polémique rédigée par le stoïcien Bardesane, en réaction aux positions du platonicien Albinus, a été examinée par Éphrem le Syrien, chrétien et polémiste antibardesanite. Il est l’auteur du Discours et notre seule source d’information sur cette controverse. Or, la manière dont Éphrem aborde la question litigieuse est spontanément (...) platonicienne, parfois proche du stoïcisme, mais fondamentalement, il s’agit d’une étonnante lecture théologique d’un thème qui fait débat entre les écoles philosophiques. (shrink)

Comme l’attestent les textes relatifs à la cosmologie de Bardesane, le monde est venu à l’existence à partir des esṭuksē / ītyē, qui correspondraient aux éléments primordiaux de la tradition philosophique grecque. Bien que la cosmologie de Bardesane soit déjà étudiée, les témoignages au sujet des esṭuksē / ītyē contiennent des contradictions difficiles à expliquer. Le présent article propose une nouvelle interprétation de la doctrine de Bardesane, fondée sur la comparaison avec la cosmologie d’Aristote. L’approche aristotélicienne du mouvement des éléments, (...) de leurs qualités et leurs actions réciproques, donne une meilleure compréhension des points obscurs de la doctrine bardesanite et permet de retrouver la cohérence de celle-ci. En outre, le débat engagé par Aristote avec les théories atomistes aide à comprendre la place des perdē – atomes – dans le système de Bardesane. (shrink)

In his critic of the doctrine of Bardaisan, Ephrem the Syrian devotes a lot of space to reflection on the meaning of the terms ītutā and ītyā which, as he denounces, are used inaccurately by his opponent. These Syriac terms can be translated by “being” or “essence”, but also by “substance”. This observation leads us to propose the comparison with the Greek term οὐσία, taking into account many difficulties raised by its uses in theological discourse. The article is devoted to (...) the analysis of the uses of the terms ītutā and ītyā ‑ by Ephrem and by Bardaisan ‑ in their different ways of describing the divine essence. This comparison reveals the peculiarities of the two systems of thought and also their connections with the Greek philosophical doctrines. (shrink)

In the present study, clinically depressed and non-depressed adults described the events that happened to them each day for two weeks, and these descriptions were content analys...

Synthesizing self‐regulatory theories, we provide new insights into the antecedents of abusive supervision. We, from the perspective of supervisor's self‐regulatory resources depletion or impairment, introduce supervisor hindrance stress as an underlying mechanism of the subordinate deviance–abusive supervision relationship: this mediated relationship will be intensified at the level of high subordinate job performance. In addition, we develop a complex contingency model and propose a three‐way interaction (i.e., subordinate deviance, job performance, supervisor outcome dependence) to obtain the complete understanding of the subordinate (...) deviance–abusive supervision relationship facilitated through the supervisors’ hindrance stress. To test our moderated moderated mediation model, we gathered time‐lagged and multisource data from a large food service company located in southern China. We collected data at two different points (i.e., Time 1 and Time 2) from supervisors and their direct reports (N = 298 responses from 68 supervisors and 298 direct reports), and findings provide support for the hypothesized moderated moderated mediation model of our study. We highlight the implications of our study for theory, research, and practice. (shrink)

Bullying has damaging short-term and long-term consequences. Research suggests that perpetrators have low empathy and high moral disengagement, but relations between these variables are unclear and are rarely integrated in a single study. Thus, the objective of this study was to discover if empathy and moral disengagement mechanisms were related to bullying perpetration. This study was conducted with 904 Polish adolescents enrolled in 6 rural and urban upper secondary schools. High affective empathy predicted lower bullying perpetration. Moral-disengagement mechanisms such as (...) moral justification, euphemistic language, advanced comparison, and distorting consequences were uniquely related to increased bullying perpetration. Low affective empathy was also uniquely related to increased perpetration. These findings have important implication for school policy and practice. (shrink)

The aim of the article is to present ways in which gestures combine with the verbal layer of an utterance, thus reflecting embodied thinking and the rooting of abstract concepts in human bodily experience. The article discusses two different ways in which gestures, described in the literature as metaphoric, illustrate both linguistically expressed metaphors and abstract concepts that are not verbally expressed as metaphors. The data analyzed in this paper have been taken from speeches of politicians and other public figures.

In the present paper, I argue against the claim that ex aequo and bono adjudication cannot be epistemically objective. I start with a survey of legal rules allowing the parties to resort to ex aequo et bono adjudication. Next, I argue that decisions taken on ex aequo et bono basis are not subjective for three main reasons. First, they are analogous to decision making in hard cases. Second, theories of practical reasoning and hybrid expressivism provide a precise theoretical account of (...) the mechanisms at stake. Third, the context of adjudication provides substantial constraints on judicial tasks. (shrink)

The study tested how the use of positive- (e.g. beautiful) and negative-valenced (e.g. horrible) words in natural language and its change in time affects the severity of depression and anxiety symptoms among depressed and non-depressed individuals. This longitudinal mixed methods study (N = 40 participants, n = 1440 narratives) with three measurements within a year showed that at the between-person level the use of negative-valenced words was strongly associated with the increase in anxiety and depression symptoms over time while the (...) use of positive-valenced words was slightly associated with the decrease in anxiety and depression symptom. These effects were not supported for within-person level (i.e. changes in word usage). No significant differences were observed in the effects between depressed and non-depressed groups. Summing up, the overall use of positive- and negative-valenced words (particularly negative-valenced words) had a stronger effect on the severity of psychopathological symptoms than their change over time. The results were discussed in the context of natural language processing and its application in diagnosing depression and anxiety symptoms. (shrink)

Legal and moral luck goes against the basic principle of criminal law that responsibility ascriptions are based on the mental state of the perpetrator, rather than merely the outcome of her action. If outcome should not play a decisive role in responsibility ascriptions, the attempt versus perpetration distinction becomes more difficult to justify. One potential justification is that we never know whether the attempter would not have resigned from pursuing her criminal intent even at the last moment. However, this paper (...) argues that resigning from criminal intent and trying to stop the criminal outcome, which is called the renunciation defense, can be just as subject to outcome luck as the attempt versus perpetration distinction. And yet the availability of the renunciation defense in court is outcome dependent. I show with a series of experiments (N = 479) that outcome dependence for the renunciation defense is perceived as unjust and discuss the implications for the renunciation defense as well as attempt versus perpetration distinction. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Drama in Aesthetic Education:An Invitation to Imagine the World as if It Could Be OtherwiseFlorence Samson (bio)Maxine Greene, philosopher-in-residence for the Lincoln Center Institute (LCI), suggests that through aesthetic education "new connections are made in experience: new patterns are formed, new vistas are opened. Persons see differently, resonate differently." As Rilke wrote in one of his poems, and as quoted by Greene, "they are enabled to pay heed (...) when a work of art tells them, 'You must change your life.'"1 Greene interprets Rilke's words to mean that "a work [of art], when fully perceived and carefully attended to, makes a demand upon beholders—a demand that they change, look with new eyes, hear with new ears, become something they have not been before."2 Greene believes that "the perceiving, the noticing [about which Rilke spoke] are enhanced," for in the process of "[o]pening ourselves as perceivers to the work, entering into it kinaesthetically, we free ourselves to grasp it in its vital fullness and complexity."3This life change, to which Rilke refers, occurs as we take into our own being the experiences of others and realize that not everyone sees the world as we do. As we look critically at ourselves and our complicity in situations that position people as "other," we are moved to imagine that the world could be otherwise.Curriculum, Change, and Aesthetic EducationAesthetic education, an inquiry-driven engagement with a work of art, can be a catalyst to bringing about change. The aesthetic education experience consists of a number of components. LCI agrees upon a repertoire of "works of art" deemed likely to fulfill the requirements of engagement and inquiry. These may include, but are not limited to, music, drama, and opera performances, and mask, photo, and art exhibits. For each work of art, the LCI [End Page 70] researchers and other staff prepare a resource binder, entitled Windows on the Work. The teacher educator has several meetings with the teaching artist assigned to that work to develop the questions that will power the inquiry process, determine the structure and activities of the pre- and sometimes post-performance classes, and guide the students in their engagement with the work of art.I have included an aesthetic education experience program each term in my graduate and undergraduate elementary and early childhood education courses. My course outlines describe this component and the related student assignments. For the fall 2004 course, I chose Ping Chong's Secret History: Journeys Abroad, Journeys Within.4 This drama documentary, written and directed by Ping Chong and Leyla Mordirzadeh in collaboration with Sara Zatz, was directly related to one of my course goals—teaching for equity and social justice. This involves providing teachers with opportunities to "engage in productive dialogues about both inequities and possibilities for social reconstruction in the communities within which they and their students are developing."5Ping Chong & Company was founded thirty years ago "to create innovative works of theatre and art that explore the intersection of race, history, culture, and technology in the modern world."6Ping Chong, Insider/Outsider, and His Approach to TheatreCanadian-born and New York-reared Chong—theatre director, choreographer, and video and installation artist—is "fascinated and disturbed by the position of the outsider, the person made to feel 'other' in a society" and "probe[s] the drama of those pushed from one culture to another."7 He has done extensive research on both immigrants and refugees and recognizes that there is a psychological difference in the trauma experienced by members of both groups in the transition from one culture to the other.Chong's unique "talk, reveal, and seek to understand" approach to theatre "moves us toward unification, toward diminishing the barriers between peoples, and thus toward embracing all that is good in civilization."8 His work is grounded in his experience of sharing a common ethnicity and language with his community in Chinatown and occupying the position of "other" as the only Chinese student in his high school. Because of his experience of being "other," Chong has "a real kind of empathy and connection" with his projects.9 He considers... (shrink)

Ratio Juris, Volume 35, Issue 2, Page 191-222, June 2022.

Celem artykułu jest przedstawienie wyzwań i trudności, jakie mogą pojawić się w procesie oceny przez komisje etyczne projektów badawczych bazujących na jakościowych technikach gromadzenia danych uzyskiwanych od osób świadczących różnego rodzaju usługi seksualne. Badania te zwykle podlegają ocenie komisji etycznych ze względu na ryzyko krzywdy dla uczestników, którzy postrzegani są jako szczególnie „podatni na zranienie”. Jednocześnie ze względu na stygmatyzację społeczną, jaka wiąże się ze świadczeniem usług seksualnych, zarówno badacze, jak i osoby uczestniczące w badaniu i wchodzące w skład komisji (...) etycznych mogą mieć swoje wyobrażenia i oczekiwania co do tego, jak powinny przebiegać etyczne badania w tym obszarze. Odwołując się do doświadczeń badaczek anglosaskich, omówię, jak te oczekiwania oraz wymagania komisji etycznych zderzają się, stawiając badaczy przed koniecznością spełniania rozbieżnych czy wręcz sprzecznych oczekiwań różnych aktorów społecznych. Zaproponuję także, w jakim kierunku mógłby zmienić się sposób działania rodzimych komisji etycznych, aby proces uzyskiwania ich aprobaty był bardziej demokratyczny i otwarty na zróżnicowane potrzeby tak badaczy, jak i osób uczestniczących w badaniach. (shrink)

The essay “Practising ‘cruel optimism’: Eight Months on Ghazzah Street by Hilary Mantel” delves into Mantel’s novel through the lens of Berlant’s concept of cruel optimism. Berlant’s construct, rooted in the pursuit of conventional notions of a fulfilling existence, highlights the protagonists’ endeavors in Saudi Arabia as a postcolonial adventure bound to end in disillusionment. Mantel’s portrayal of Frances Shore and her husband Andrew illuminates the tension between their aspirations for financial security and the disconcerting realities of cultural displacement and (...) legal constraints under Sharia law. The city’s architecture mirrors Frances’s sense of unease, resembling oppressive structures associated with fascist regimes. The portrayal of Jeddah’s construction environment, echoing totalitarian aesthetic reminiscent of fascist regimes, serves as a compelling allegory for Frances’s sense of entrapment within a society where her agency is circumscribed by gendered and legal strictures. Casting Frances as a contemporary iteration of the Gothic heroine ensnared within her domicile, Mantel explores the disjuncture between the alleged benevolence of religious doctrine and the punitive nature of its legal apparatus. Frances’s interrogation of this dissonance not only underscores the pervasive nature of cruel optimism but also hints at the inherently paradoxical nature of faith systems that simultaneously offer solace and impose constraints. Through its fluid engagement with concepts of cruel optimism, urbanity, and gender dynamics, the essay invites readers to contemplate the multifaceted interplay between individual aspiration and systemic coercion within the affluent and autocratic socio-cultural landscape. (shrink)

Les écrits philosophiques en syriaque restent encore peu étudiés et leur place dans l’histoire de la philosophie est discutée. Habituellement, on parle de la philosophie « en syriaque » en mettant l’accent sur le rôle des auteurs syriaques dans la transmission de l’héritage philosophique grec – principalement aristotélicien – aux Arabes. Ainsi, les chercheurs contemporains s’intéressent avant tout à l’histoire de la réception du corpus aristotélicien. En revanche, Yury Arzhanov [= YA] a édité...

The novel On the rocks o f Calvados is the first and the greatest achievement of Antoni Sygietyński’s art. The author of this article considered the work worthy of a special attention with regard to the way of presenting the problem of adultery. The writer gives the social explanation of infidelity not concentrating on the psychological side of this phenomenon. He emphasizes the decisive role of such social factors as: the origin, the model of education and the social milieu. From (...) his point of view they exert a great influence on the main heroine’s behaviour. The subject of the novel centres around the moral dilemmas of an individual more cultured than her fellow-citizens, who is forced to live in a primitive world. Sygietyński’s heroine, Berta – educated in a monastic school in Caen – experiences a painful disappointment after coming back to her family village. Her imagination, excited by the lecture of sentimental romances, lets her dream of an ideal, romantic love. She has high expectations of life. Unfortunately, the reality by no means resembles the literary world of stormy feelings and passions. Berta feels alienated in her own society as the lifestyle of its members conflicts definitely with her beliefs. It is worth noting that the writer shows a very striking picture of Grandcamp’s community. Its primitive and monotonous existence overwhelms the novel’s heroine. The marriage with a brutal, devoid of sensibility fisherman – Gabriel Orange – deepens much her loneliness. Small wonder then that the arrival of the French engineer to the sea-town arouses hope in Berta’s heart again. Armand de Coux seems to be an embodiment of all her yearnings. Berta Boudard commits adultery trusting that the lover will soon free her from such common and boring inhabitants of the fishermen’s village. On the Rocks o f Calvados is not the only work that points out the sociological aspect of a marital betrayal. Thus, this opinion encourages the reader to make further literary research. (shrink)

The education is, no doubt, a fundamental question in Plato’s thought. The Republic, considerate by many people as his masterpiece, takes care of this aspect, not without directing it through a political obliquity. In the greek society that honoured, above all, the formation of free citizens, education and politics were necessarily together. Nevertheless, we want to punctuate how, to Plato, both of them are subordinate to the ontological question.

Deaf or hard-of-hearing children who use auditory-oral communication display considerable variability in spoken language and executive functioning outcomes. Furthermore, language and executive functioning skills are strongly associated with each other in DHH children, which may be relevant for explaining this variability in outcomes. However, longitudinal investigations of language and executive functioning during the important preschool period of development in DHH children are rare. This study examined the predictive, reciprocal associations between executive functioning and spoken language over a 1-year period in (...) samples of 53 DHH and 59 typically hearing children between ages 3–8 years at baseline. Participants were assessed on measures of receptive spoken language and caregiver-completed executive functioning child behavior checklists during two in-person home visits separated by 1 year. In the sample of DHH children, better executive functioning at baseline was associated with better performance on the higher-order language measures 1 year later. In contrast, none of the Time 1 language measures were associated with better executive functioning in Time 2 in the DHH sample. TH children showed no significant language-executive functioning correlations over the 1-year study period. In regression analyses controlling for Time 1 language scores, Time 1 executive functioning predicted Time 2 language outcomes in the combined DHH and TH samples, and for vocabulary, that association was stronger in the DHH than in the TH sample. In contrast, after controlling for Time 1 executive functioning, none of the regression analyses predicting Time 2 executive functioning from Time 1 language were statistically significant. These results are the first findings to demonstrate that everyday parent-rated executive functioning behaviors predict basic and higher-order spoken language development 1 year later in young DHH children, even after accounting for initial baseline language skills. (shrink)

Le livre d’Alexandre (Zeke) Mazur [= AZM] est une édition posthume de sa thèse de doctorat soutenue en 2010 à l’Université de Chicago. Cette publication était très attendue, car, bien avant que la soutenance ait eu lieu, les vues originales d’AZM sur la mystique plotinienne attiraient l’attention des spécialistes. Dans les années 2003-2004, le jeune chercheur a fait une entrée remarquée dans le débat universitaire, en publiant un long article en deux parties : « Unio Magica, Part 1 : On (...) the M... (shrink)

The article examines the metamorphosis of the Platonic Principle of Good in the doctrine of Basilides, the 2nd century Christian gnostic. The Basilidian doctrine represents a radical form of dualism, in which the universe ‑ physical and metaphysical ‑ is born from an encounter between Light and Darkness. In his effort to liberate the Light from all contact with Darkness, Basilide refers to several different mediators. Analysing the Basilidian myth in the light of the Platonic writings brings out the paradoxes (...) inherent in any attempts to construct a dualistic metaphysics within the Platonic context. (shrink)

The article is dedicated to the study of the origins of Christian cosmogony. Christian authors of the 2nd century are known for their enigmatic or ambiguous positions on the issue. The problem concerns mainly the apologists, but it first appears in Ignatius of Antioch and continues in Bardesanes. Although they all confess God as the Creator, their ways of presenting the act of creation are strongly marked by philosophical doctrines, primarily by Platonism, or by Stoicism in the case of Bardesanes. (...) The Christian Creator receives the characteristics of a demiurge and an artisan. This approach has implications for the notions of universe and matter. But first and foremost, the idea of God as a demiurge and an artisan determines the role assigned to the Logos in the act of creation. Those concepts are later abandoned in favour of a doctrine based more on the Bible, but they give us a better understanding of the relationship between young Christianity and Platonism. (shrink)

The expression “Gnostic Empedocles” refers to the summary of the teachings of this philosopher presented by Hippolytus of Rome in the Refutation of All Heresies. Above all, it concerns the notice devoted to Marcion and his disciples, who were accused of following the poems of Empedocles rather than the Gospel. However, Hippolytus is inspired by the readings of Empedocles provided by different groups of Gnostics. This interpretatio gnostica was also known in Christian circles. The analysis of this interpretation, based on (...) the notice about Marcion, allows us to propose a new interpretation of Bardaisan’s thought — mentioned by Hippolytus — as an unknown testimony of the reception of Empedocles. (shrink)

The existence of common points between Alexander of Aphrodise and Bardaisan the Syrian has been pointed out on various occasions. However, this question has not been explored in depth. The article proposes to analyse the cosmological ideas of Alexander and Bardaisan. Because both authors are known for their anti-determinist and anti-astrological polemics, it is preferable to place this comparison in the context of the astrological interpretation of Aristotle’s natural philosophy. The article discusses the Aristotelianism of Bardaisan, who may be the (...) first representative of the reception of this doctrine in Syriac. (shrink)