The 16th and 17th centuries witnessed a philosophical shift that would help pave the way for modern science, a shift from metaphysical theories of material objects to other views embracing only the empirically-accessible parts of material things. One much-debated topic in the course of this shift was regarding prime matter. The late scholastic Jacobus Zabarella (1533-1589) arrived upon his views about prime matter via his version of the regressus method, a program for a sort of scientific reasoning. In (...) his De rebus naturalibus, Zabarella defends the position that prime matter is extended. However, it is less clear how he accounts for its extension. There is an important text where he apparently suggests that prime matter is extended in and of itself. However, there are two other texts apparently stating that matter is extended in virtue of a distinct accident in the category of quantity. I argue that a decisive reading based solely upon any particular texts is not available. Nevertheless, examining Zabarella’s writing on the topic as a whole, the trajectory of his overall argument is remarkably sympathetic to Averroes, who famously took the accidentally quantified position. Thus, from this systematic feature, the accidentally quantified reading is more reasonable. (shrink)

Opera logica.--De doctrinae ordine apologia.

Jacopo Zabarella’s two treatises On Methods and On Regressus (1578) are among the most important Renaissance discussions of how scientific knowledge should be acquired, arranged, and transmitted. They belong to a lively debate about the order in which sciences should be taught and the method to be followed in scientific demonstration that roiled the Late Renaissance world for decades. In these famous works Zabarella rejected the views of Ramists and modern Galenists in favor of the pure doctrine of (...) Aristotle, freed from misunderstandings foisted upon it by medieval interpreters. The influence of these works on Galileo’s scientific method and Descartes’ famous Discourse on Method (1637) has long been debated. They are here translated into English for the first time, along with a new Latin text based on the corrected 1586 edition. Volume 1 contains On Methods, Books I-II. Volume 2 contains On Methods, Books III-IV, and On Regressus. (shrink)

Jacopo Zabarella’s two treatises On Methods and On Regressus (1578) are among the most important Renaissance discussions of how scientific knowledge should be acquired, arranged, and transmitted. They belong to a lively debate about the order in which sciences should be taught and the method to be followed in scientific demonstration that roiled the Late Renaissance world for decades. In these famous works Zabarella rejected the views of Ramists and modern Galenists in favor of the pure doctrine of (...) Aristotle, freed from misunderstandings foisted upon it by medieval interpreters. The influence of these works on Galileo’s scientific method and Descartes’ famous Discourse on Method (1637) has long been debated. They are here translated into English for the first time, along with a new Latin text based on the corrected 1586 edition. -/- Volume 1 contains On Methods, Books I-II. (shrink)

The first Ukrainian translation of J. Thomasius’ work “Nucleus disputationis de plagio literario maxime theoreticus, thesibus paucis & brevibus comprehensus”.

This book offers a discussion of the kalām cosmological argument, and presents a defence of a version of that argument after critically evaluating three of the most important versions of the argument. It argues that, since the versions of the kalām cosmological argument defended by Philoponus (c. 490–c. 570), al-Ghazālī (1058– 1111), and the contemporary philosopher, William Lane Craig, all deny the possibility of the existence of an actual infinite, these arguments are incompatible with Platonism and the view that God (...) foreknows an endless future. This conclusion, however, is not a problem for the proponents of the kalām cosmological argument, for the book shows how the argument can be defended without denying the possibility of the actual infinite. -/- In order to offer a comprehensive analysis of Philoponus and al-Ghazālī’s cosmological arguments, the book draws on recent English translations of some of their works. Next, the book advances a detailed argument against the popular argument based on the impossibility of an actual infinite. Finally, the book offers a unique defence of the kalām cosmological argument by defending philosophical arguments for a beginning of time that do not deny the actual infinite, evaluating which hypothesis best explains the discoveries of modern cosmology, and offering an argument in support of the premise that, if the universe came into existence, then God brought it into existence. (shrink)

In this article, it is argued that from the beginning of the Christ-following movement, the gospel message represented a challenge to a male-dominated social system. Early Christian literature shows that women, whose voices were often silenced in antiquity, are empowered. This is seen most clearly in the Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicity. There we see how the protagonists is presented as acting counter culturally, challenging the world of men and turning patriarchal values and expectations upside down. It could be argued (...) that the gospel message portrays women in the centre of missionary witness and empowers them in this manner. Furthermore, early Christian Martyrdom texts also show how the concept of suffering, honour and shame is redefined and how power and strength in weakness and oppression is reformulated. (shrink)

Volume 1, Books I-II. On methods -- Volume 2, Books III-IV. On methods-On regressus.

In a recent article, Andrew Ter Ern Loke raises several objections to Jacobus Erasmus and Anné Hendrik Verhoef’s exposition and response to the so-called ‘Infinite God Objection’ to the kalām cosmological argument. According to this objection, the argument against the possibility of an actual infinite brings into question the view that God’s knowledge is infinite. Erasmus and Verhoef’s solution to this objection, which Loke criticises, depends on an unusual account of omniscience. In this article, I respond to Loke and (...) show that his objections are unsuccessful. (shrink)

The Heythrop Journal, Volume 63, Issue 2, Page 196-209, March 2022.

Within a literary ontology, YHWH in the Hebrew Bible is technically also a fictional entity or object. In Hebrew Bible scholarship, a variety of philosophical issues surrounding fiction have received sustained and in-depth attention. However, the mainstream research on these matters tends to focus on the philosophical foundations of or backgrounds to a particular literary theory, rather than on metaphysical puzzles as encountered in the philosophy of fiction proper. To fill this gap, the present article seeks to provide a meta-theoretical (...) overview of the main contemporary philosophical perspectives on the metaphysics of fictional objects. Three views are discussed, namely possibilism, Meinongianism and creationism. Each view's theory is introduced and critically appropriated with reference to what is implied to be an answer to the question of what exactly the biblical character YHWH can meaningfully be said to be in the context of the metaphysics of fictional objects. In this way, the present study also goes beyond the traditional concern with the nature of God in Old Testament theology. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Pain in the Patient’s KneeMary Jacobus* (bio)We know very little about pain either.—Sigmund Freud, Inhibitions, Symptoms, and AnxietyPain cannot be absent from the personality.—Wilfred Bion, The Elements of Psycho-AnalysisBetween Therapy and HermeneuticsWhat is the place of a psychoanalysis that exists “between” therapy (considered both as a theory and a practice, but also as a theory of practice) and hermeneutics, or the theory of interpretation and understanding? How (...) do we understand psychoanalytic “understanding” itself, as a mental process that involves both the analyst and the analysand in the analytic encounter? I want to approach these related questions by way of the writing of the British psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion (1897–1979). Bion is best known outside the psychoanalytic profession as a pioneer of the so-called leaderless group and a theorist of group process [see Bion, Experiences in Groups]. But his collected theoretical and clinical oeuvre represents—especially in its “epistemological” period during the early 1960s, from Learning from Experience (1962) to Transformations (1965)—the most systematic, original, and philosophical revision of psychoanalytic theory since Melanie Klein’s controversial development of Freudian ideas during the middle decades of this century.1 Consequently, Bion’s influence pervades, and in some cases underpins, the rethinking of psychoanalytic theory and practice that characterizes British object relations in the wake of Klein. In particular, it gives contemporary post-Kleinian analysis its distinctive focus on (not) learning, (non)meaning, and (un)knowing, with an accompanying emphasis on the destruction of the links that make thought possible, as well as on the importance of being able to learn from experience and being able to bear not knowing. In other words, it brings to the fore difficulties associated specifically with questions involving interpretation and understanding in an analytic context.Bion’s writing is noted for its paradoxical combination of directness and difficulty, and for its emphasis on primitive emotional states and experiences, on the one hand, and epistemology and consciousness, on the other. Rigorous in its clinical focus, it also makes [End Page 99] frequent reference to philosophy, mathematics, and other branches of contemporary science. André Green, in the context of the new impetus that Bion gave to orthodox Kleinianism by linking it back to Freud, suggests that his particular contribution lay in realizing that the unconscious phantasies and archaic anxieties emphasized by Klein coincided with thought processes. Finding in Bion “an author who could measure up to Lacan,” Green saw the two as engaged in the common project of “reformulating psychoanalytic theory within a contemporary epistemological framework.” But for Green, “Lacan made the error of excessive abstraction, whereas Bion, with his constant reference to affect and the process of transformation, is the more authentically intellectual” [10–11].2 Although Bion’s writing is read wherever the theory and practice of British object relations psychoanalysis is seriously taught and studied, for the most part it remains surprisingly unknown within the academy. This is especially the case in America—even when it comes to literary critics and theorists with an interest in the “authentically intellectual,” who are often, by contrast, steeped in Lacan and well versed in recent Continental psychoanalytic writing. If only for this reason, but also because Bion’s work is particularly relevant to issues involving the relation between therapy and hermeneutics, I want to focus on the culminating book of Bion’s “epistemological” period during the early 1960s, Transformations—so called because of Bion’s analogy between the psychoanalyst’s representation of the experience of the analytic encounter and the artist’s transformation of the experience of what he sees.Bion’s writing, although terse and at times humorous, makes considerable demands on the reader, particularly on the capacity of the mind to entertain a new thought or consider it from a radically new perspective. He places pressure on thinking (including his own), as well as attempting to communicate the seeming incomprehensibility or hallucinatory dimensions of psychotic thought processes (which are often continuous with normal thought processes). In what follows, I will address both the kind of communication made by Bion himself—which is subject to its own interpretive difficulties and obscurities—and the relation between therapy... (shrink)

Moltmann’s Theology of Hope still resonates in theological discourses 60 years after the publication of his epoch-making book containing this concept. At a time of fading hope among South Africans, a revisitation of Moltmann’s pattern of reasoning holds the promise of reward. This article focuses on the quest for raising tangible hope in South Africa and the possible contribution of the Theology of Hope in this regard. The central theoretical argument here will be that the failure of hope in South (...) Africa is caused by the fact that hope continues to be viewed in terms of the event of liberation (1994), and not in terms of a liberating process as the Theology of Hope proposes. To unpack this hypothesis and provide preliminary responses to the matters raised here and others, the study revisits Moltmann’s Theology of Hope as centred on the recurrent interpretations and applications that it has received in political theologies. The aim is to translate the core idea of the Theology of Hope into tangible hope for desponding South Africans today. Contribution: This research proposes that hope founded in the sign of the reign of the moving God, such as instances of love, goodness, truth-telling, fair jurisprudence and caring for the poor, which are discernible in South Africa today, are valuable and plausible building blocks for the creation of continuous tangible hope. The hope that rests in the actions of the moving God is of greater value than that residing in a single historic event. The 1994 liberation event, lauded by many as the great cause of perennial hope, has faded away in recent years and turned into a pervasive despondency within the South African community. (shrink)

First Published in 1990. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

A politics of women's writing, then, if it is not to fall back on a biologically based theory of sexual difference, must address itself, as Luce Irigary has done in "Pouvoir du discours, subordination du feminin," to the position of mastery held not only by scientific discourse , not only by philosophy, "the discourse of discourses," but by the logic of discourse itself. Rather than attempting to identify a specific practice, in other words, such a feminist politics would attempt to (...) relocate sexual difference at the level of the text by undoing the repression of the "feminine" in all systems of representation for which the other must be reduced to the economy of the Same .Mary Jacobus is an associate professor of English and of women's studies at Cornell University. She is the author of a book on Wordsworth as well as the editor of a collection of feminist criticism, Women Writing and Writing about Women. Currently she is at work on a study of Thomas Hardy and a collection of essays on Romantic poetry and prose. (shrink)

In this article, we evaluate various responses to a noteworthy objection, namely, the infinite God objection to the kalām cosmological argument. As regards this objection, the proponents of the kalām argument face a dilemma—either an actual infinite cannot exist or God cannot be infinite. More precisely, this objection claims that God’s omniscience entails the existence of an actual infinite with God knowing an actually infinite number of future events or abstract objects, such as mathematical truths. We argue, however, that the (...) infinite God objection is based on two questionable assumptions, namely, that it is possible for an omniscient being to know an actually infinite number of things and that there exist an actually infinite number of abstract objects for God to know. (shrink)

This article critically reflected on the insights of David Tacey in which he notes that there is currently a revival in post-secular spirituality in the West, but that its deep religious roots are lacking. What would be the implication of these trends for the South African religious landscape where traditional mainstream churches such as the Dutch Reformed Church are shrinking significantly? People often say yes to God, but no to the church. Some in the church may totally renounce God. What (...) lessons could be learned by the South African mainstream churches and theology if these trends in the West were taken into account? In this article a critical literature review was done and the study was structured as follows: In the first place, the implication of superdiversity, supermobility and the reality of a post-COVID-19 consciousness was discussed. Next we engaged in research by scholars in which it was shown that our time, at least in the West, is characterised by existential anxiety and uncertainty. Thirdly, we engaged in the insights of David Tacey in which he also argued the fact that the uncertainty of the time in which we live, often causes people to return to spirituality. Finally, the implication of these trends for the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa was reflected on. CONTRIBUTION: This research makes a contribution to the nature and scope of the journal, in that it finds that the rise in secular spirituality, in the context of anxiety and uncertainty in a post-COVID-19 world, provides an opportunity for the Dutch Reformed Church to find meaning and significance. (shrink)

The Poetics of Psychoanalysis explores the literary aspects of the twentieth-century psychoanalytic tradition that has come to be known as British Object Relations psychoanalysis. It focuses on the writing of Klein, Sharpe, Riviere, Isaacs, Winnicott, Milner, and Bion. Giving a central place to literary and aesthetic concerns, it makes connections with particular works of literature and art. The Poetics of Psychoanalysis is aimed at literary readers, but will also be of interest to psychoanalytic practitioners.

In the ancient world, precious stones (valuable stones and hard substances excluding gold, silver and copper) were distinguished in terms of appearance (beauty, colour), function (durability) and cost (rarity). As a result, there is considerable difficulty in determining how to correlate the inventory of lexical terms referring to precious stones in the ancient Near East with modern mineralogical identifications. In this article, the etymology and identification of precious stones in the Bible are revisited using editorial theory and complexity thinking. The (...) starting point for lexicographical identification is the breastpiece of the high priest (Ex 28:17–20; 39:10–14) with its 12 precious stones and the translation of the Hebrew terms in the Septuagint. In the light of the considerable writings in the Hellenistic world on precious stones, especially Pliny’s Naturalis Historia and Theophrastus’ On Stones, the Septuagint provides the key for the etymology and identification of the precious stones in both the Old Testament and the New Testament. Contribution: The Septuagint translation of the precious stones in the high priest’s breastpiece is the Rosetta Stone for the identification all of the precious stones in the Hebrew Bible and New Testament. The subsequent translations of the terms indicate changes or substitutions of referents and their meanings. (shrink)

Divine determinism, though affirmed by many Calvinists, implicates God in the decisions people make that ultimately damn them to the terrible destiny of hell. In this paper, the authors argue that this scenario is a problem for divine determinism. The article contends that determinism is inconsistent with God’s love and the Scriptures that explicitly state that God does not ‘desire’ anyone to go to hell. Even human love for others strongly suggests that God, who is ‘love’, will not determine anyone (...) to hell. On the other extreme, those who argue for universalism, though appealing to Scripture, often do so with questionable exegesis. (shrink)

Pao-Shen Ho attempts to argue that the Christian doctrine of _creatio ex nihilo_ violates modal logic and is necessarily false. More precisely, Ho argues that, if God creates the universe out of nothing, then the non-existence of the universe is both possible and impossible, which is logically incoherent. I point out, however, that Ho commits the modal scope fallacy by confusing the scope of necessity in the argument and, therefore, Ho's argument is unsound.

Psychoanalysis and the Scene of Reading explores some of the ways in which we think about reading and the effects reading has on us. Whether considered as a process, a representation, or a cultural activity, reading involves the idea about inner and outer, absence and boundaries, and the transmission of thoughts and feelings between one person or historical period and another. These ideas provide the basis for much of our thinking about subjectivity and receive their fullest elaboration in the twentieth-century (...) discourse of psychoanalysis. Drawing on the rich tradition of British object relations, Psychoanalysis and the Scene of Reading is a literary critics approach to the scene of reading understood from a pyschoanalytic perspective. Linked essays on books and interiority, memory and landscape, trauma and literary transmission provide a subtle account of writing by Woolf, Austen, Rousseau, and Romantic women, as well as fictional accounts of slavery and colonialism, and Holocaust memoirs. (shrink)

In this article, James 5:13-20 is investigated. This section deals with the confession of sins in the community of faith and the subsequent healing that will result. James will be compared to Philodemus, a philosopher who comes from Galilee, just like James. It is not argued that James was influenced by Philodemus but that a comparison between the two might open up fresh perspectives for the interpretation of James 5:13-20. This will especially become clear when the themes of moral exhortation, (...) community health, communal confession and the role of the psychagogue are discussed. (shrink)

In this article we examine how Qumran Hebrew can contribute to our knowledge of historical Hebrew linguistics. The premise of this paper is that Qumran Hebrew reflects a distinct stage in the development of Hebrew which sets it apart from Biblical Hebrew. It is further assumed that these unique features are able to assist us to understand the nature of the development of Biblical Hebrew in a more precise way. Evidence from the syntax of participial negation at Qumran as opposed (...) to Biblical Hebrew provides evidence for this claim. (shrink)

Objective: To identify problem solving strategies in general practice. Basic procedures: Three styles of scientific reasoning were defined and modelled on the medical environment. These models were tested in a simulated doctor-patient encounter.

A common argument in support of a beginning of the universe used by advocates of the kalām cosmological argument (KCA) is the argument against the possibility of an actual infinite, or the “Infinity Argument”. However, it turns out that the Infinity Argument loses some of its force when compared with the achievements of set theory and it brings into question the view that God predetermined an endless future. We therefore defend a new formal argument, based on the nature of time (...) (just as geometrical reasoning is based on the nature of space), which addresses more directly the question of beginningless time. (shrink)

Friedrich Nietzsche has emerged as one of the most important and influential modern philosophers. For several decades, the book series Monographien und Texte zur Nietzsche-Forschung (MTNF) has set the agenda in a rapidly growing and changing field of Nietzsche scholarship. The scope of the series is interdisciplinary and international in orientation reflects the entire spectrum of research on Nietzsche, from philosophy to literary studies and political theory. The series publishes monographs and edited volumes that undergo a strict peer-review process. The (...) book series is led by an international team of editors, whose work represents the full range of current Nietzsche scholarship. (shrink)