Introducing formal causation / Ludger Jansen and Petter Sandstad -- Form, intention, information : from scholastic logic to artificial intelligence / Gyula Klima -- Formal causation : accidental and substantial / David S. Oderberg -- A non-hylomorphic account of formal causation / Petter Sandstad and Ludger Jansen -- Formal causes for powers theorists / Giacomo Giannini and Stephen Mumford -- Away with dispositional essences in trope theory / Jani Hakkarainen and Markku Keinänen -- Functional powers / Michele Paolini (...) Paoletti -- An Aristotelian approach to existential dependence / Benjamin Schnieder and Jonas Werner -- Finean feature dependence and the Aristotelian alternative / Wolfgang Sattler -- A problem for natural-kind essentialism and formal causes / José Tomás Alvarado and Matthew Tugby -- Form as cause and the formal cause : Aristotle's answer / James G. Lennox -- Form, cause, and explanation in biology : a neo-Aristotelian perspective / Christopher J. Austin -- Formal explanation and mechanisms of conceptual representation / Sandeep Prasada. (shrink)

Being an "untimely review", this paper reviews Aristotle's 'Categories' as if they were published today, in the era of computerised information, where categorisation becomes more and more essential for information retrieval. I suggest a systematic ordering of Aristotle's list of categories and argue that Aristotle's discussion of ontological dependency and his focus on concrete entities are still a source of new insight and can indeed be read as a contribution to the emerging field of applied ontology and ontological engineering.

Helmets from Delphi Among the votive offerings which were found in Delphi, helmets play an essential part : There are about 90 specimen kept in the museum, approximately half of which are from one of the two sanctuaries for certain, it is likely that the other helmets are from there, as well. They were made between the 8th and the second half of the 5th century. The number of helmet-consecrations, however, already decreased in the middle of the 6th century. Only (...) few helmets give us a clue on the exhibition practices: By means of the fixing holes it is to be recognized that they were once exhibited in form of a "tropaeum". Some repaired examples clearly show that used helmets were consecrated. As it also happened in other sanctuaries, a lot of examples were damaged on purpose, others were cannibalized for their material. (shrink)

Pacific Island communities are facing rapid changes to their food systems in the context of globalization, environmental degradation and climate change. While in urban areas residents face a rapid nutrition transition, in rural environments, concerns are being raised about how to best maintain traditional food systems that are nutritious and sustainable. Mangrove forests are part of biodiverse food environments that support rural communities in the Pacific, but they are often overlooked in food system research because they occur between sea and (...) land, and because gleaning mollusks and invertebrates from mangroves are considered mere subsistence practices carried out by women. In this paper, we draw from a feminist foodscape approach in feminist political ecology to discuss qualitative fieldwork from mangrove-adjacent communities in the Solomon Islands. We highlight the socio-ecological importance of mangrove foodscapes, along with the gendered and generational aspects of how environmental and food system change are experienced differently by community members in Marovo Lagoon. While conservationists are increasingly interested in the potential of mangroves for carbon sequestration, this research addresses the critical need to engage with mangroves’ social, cultural and gendered aspects– towards intertwined goals of gender equity, biodiversity and indigenous food sovereignty in the Pacific. (shrink)

_Religion, War and the Crisis of Modernity: A Special Issue Dedicated to the Philosophy of Jan Patočka_ _The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy_ provides an annual international forum for phenomenological research in the spirit of Husserl's groundbreaking work and the extension of this work by such figures as Scheler, Heidegger, Sartre, Levinas, Merleau-Ponty and Gadamer. Contributors: Ivan Chvatík, Nicolas de Warren, James Dodd, Eddo Evink, Ludger Hagedorn, Jean-Luc Marion, Claire Perryman-Holt, Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback, Michael Staudigl, Christian (...) Sternad, and Ľubica Učník. (shrink)

Kant’s published arguments for the non-spatiotemporality of things in themselves have not been well received. I argue that Kant has available to himself an argument for the non-spatiotemporality of things in themselves that is premised upon a disparity between the compositional structure of the intelligible world and the structure of space and time. I argue that Kant was unwaveringly committed to the premises of this argument throughout his career and that he was aware of their idealistic implications. I also argue (...) that this argument is consistent with Kant’s restrictive mature epistemology. If my argument is successful, then even if Kant’s published arguments for transcendental idealism fail, we need not regard his ambitious metaphysical project as a failure. (shrink)

Abstract‘Critique’ means the questioning judgement of human actions, particularly with reference to a criterion of judgement that is inseparable from the judged state of affairs but is dependent on a decision of the person judging. Informative judgements of a state of affairs contain two relevant components, one concerned with recognition of the objects of judgment, the other concerned with their evaluation. This evaluation is not directly extractable from that state of affairs, but the quality of the evaluation does depend in (...) part upon the quality of its explanation. Thus, when the content-description is flawed, the evaluation is affected by the flawed description. The phrase ‘the domestication of critique’ refers to the successful attempts that have been made to cause critics to neglect the truth claims of the judgement in favour of normative dominant interests. Domesticated critique is not concerned with the testing but rather with the justification or interpretation of a state of affairs. Domesticated critique does not depend on the quality of the argument but rather on whether the critique succeeds in legitimating dominant interests and immunising them against undomesticated critique. The educational relevance of the domestication of critique lies in the fact that a critical education which is domesticated will alleviate the need for overt repression on the part of dominant interests in favour of a particular view of the world and replace it with the semblance of a critical attitude that in fact reinforces the existing order through apparently rational means. Education based on domesticated critique can have no radical implications. (shrink)

Die Rede von Kollektiven, in der politischen Theorie, aber auch in Theorien kollektiven Handelns, unterstellt bereits den Status des Kollektivs. Das Volk der Gesetzgebung wird in seiner Existenz und Identität vorausgesetzt. Der Akt der Konstitution unterstellt ebenso ein bereits konstituiertes Volk wie auch die Regeln, nach denen sich dieses Volk eine Verfassung gibt. Was sind Vorformen des Kollektivs, was leitet die Formierung an? Mein Beitrag untersucht die ästhetischen Grundlagen der Formierung von Kollektiven und die Aspekte, die die Effektivität von Partizipationsformaten (...) betreffen. (shrink)

In recent decades, there has been a proliferation of alternative food networks which promote an agenda of reconnection, allegedly linking consumers and producers to the socio-ecological origins of food. Rarely, however, does the AFN literature address “origins” of food in terms of animals, as in the case of meat. This article takes a relational approach to the reconnection agenda between humans and animals by discussing how the phenomenon of animal welfare and “happy” meat are enacted by producers and consumers in (...) mundane, embodied, and nuanced ways. Utilizing hybrid conceptualizations of human–animal relations through “natureculture” and “being alongside”, we demonstrate that consumers and producers of AFNs perform natureculture entanglements daily, often considering humans and animals as part of one another and the ecological system. Nonetheless, we also point to how participants in AFNs set boundaries to distance themselves from moments of animal life and death, explaining away uncomfortable affective naturecultures through commodification logics. Drawing on qualitative data from consumers and producers of food networks in Austria, we introduce the concept of “human–animal magnetism” to illustrate that the draw for humans to care about other animal lives exists within a spectrum of attraction and disassociation, engendered through specific human–animal interactions. Ultimately, we offer a cautiously hopeful version of alterity in AFNs of meat in which more caring human–animal relations are possible. (shrink)

The backdrop for this thesis is provided by Troeltsch's far more detailed and extensive studies of the social doctrines of various Christian churches and groups. According to Troeltsch's interpretation, the reception of the Stoic concept of natural law is as crucial to Christian ethics as the reception of the concept of logos is to Christian dogmatics. Just as the concept of logos mediates between the truth of revelation and the truth of reason, so the concept of natural law mediates between (...) the moral demands of the gospel and the principles of a worldly ethos. Since there is a distinction between an absolute natural law, which is identical with the radical ideal of the Sermon on the Mount, and a relative natural law, substantially corresponding to the Ten Commandments and to political and social reality, such a mediation--which must be oriented on the relative natural law--must qualify the original radical Christian claim. Whereas the old church allowed both forms of the natural law to stand alongside each other without mediation and was therefore unable to overcome their estrangement within the surrounding social reality, the Christian Middle Ages succeeded in uniting both forms by replacing the distinction between the gospel and the world with a distinction between the natural and the supernatural, interpreting each as a level of a metaphysical whole. When this idea of a metaphysical hierarchy of reality, attached to the concept of natural law, became linked to the notion of society as a structured organism, as taught by Aristotle and Paul, the concept of natural law assumed a virtually fundamental status: it grounded both moral and social philosophy and enabled the rise of the "unified culture" characteristic of the Christian Middle Ages, from which the Reformation later departed in order to regain the radicalism of the gospel. By linking the concept of natural law to the organic interpretation of-the social, the Christian Middle Ages could also assign a central role to the church: just as the divine law is the bracket that binds together the levels of moral laws, so the church is the bracket that holds together the members of the social organism. Its interpretation as the "boundless, comprehensive, and guiding institution of salvation," together with the strong attachment of natural law to eternal and immutable principles, must, in the last consequence, lead to a "conservative, organically patriarchal natural law." Consequently, those elements that were already contained in the medieval form of the natural law but not in the Platonic interpretation of the social order, and which in its later secular form gave it its progressive, even revolutionary, power, remain repressed: the idea of the dignity of the person, the associated freedom and autonomy of individual reason, the-resulting responsibility of personal conscience, and the significance of one's vocation, which stems from the place of the individual within the whole. (shrink)

Max Weber· e Troeltsch perceberam a importância que o conceito de direito natural, tal como o entenderam os medievais, teve para a formação e desenvolvimento da civilização Ocidental. Não se pode negar esta importância, mas os estudos posteriores mostram claramente que a leitura feita por aqueles dois cientistas necessita de diversas correções, principalmente quando se toma como para digmática a obra de Tomás de Aquino.

In what follows, I argue that the thinkers of the twelfth to thirteenth century rediscovered and passed on the questions of metaphysics; in what I call the second beginning of metaphysics they also developed those questions in such a way that they could be received into the thinking of the modern era in the first place. It was precisely the theological context which forced this development and lead the theologians of the Latin West, inspired by their Arabic predecessors, to redesign (...) metaphysics according to the rules of Aristotle’s logic and philosophy of science. Put differently, through the challenge of theology medieval metaphysics was forced to become what it had claimed to be from the onset: first philosophy. (shrink)

BACKGROUND -/- Understanding, modelling and influencing the transition between different states of cells, be it reprogramming of somatic cells to pluripotency or trans-differentiation between cells, is a hot topic in current biomedical and cell-biological research. Nevertheless, the large body of published knowledge in this area is underused, as most results are only represented in natural language, impeding their finding, comparison, aggregation, and usage. Scientific understanding of the complex molecular mechanisms underlying cell transitions could be improved by making essential pieces of (...) knowledge available in a formal (and thus computable) manner. -/- RESULTS -/- We describe the outline of two ontologies for cell phenotypes and for cellular mechanisms which together enable the representation of data curated from the literature or obtained by bioinformatics analyses and thus for building a knowledge base on mechanisms involved in cellular reprogramming. In particular, we discuss how comprehensive ontologies of cell phenotypes and of changes in mechanisms can be designed using the entity-quality (EQ) model. -/- CONCLUSIONS -/- We show that the principles for building cellular ontologies published in this work allow deeper insights into the relations between the continuants (cell phenotypes) and the occurrents (cell mechanism changes) involved in cellular reprogramming, although implementation remains for future work. Further, our design principles lead to ontologies that allow the meaningful application of similarity searches in the spaces of cell phenotypes and of mechanisms, and, especially, of changes of mechanisms during cellular transitions. (shrink)

Historical research is always in danger of being made use of for explaining and illustrating instead of testing one’s theoretical conceptions. Since Marxist historical research has certainly not been exempt from this temptation, one has to start any debate about Marxist historiography with the demand to accord empirical research the chance to shake even the cornerstones of one’s own theoretical conceptions. In a paper that has triggered off a new discussion on ‘Political Marxism’, Samuel Knafo and Benno Teschke insist on (...) such a practice. In what follows I try to position the ongoing discussion in the wider context of theoretical concepts of Marxist historiography. (shrink)

In "On Social Facts" (1989) and subsequent works, Margaret Gilbert has suggested a plural subject account of the semantics of ‘we’ that claims that a central or standard use of ‘we’ is to refer to an existing or anticipated plural subject. This contrasts with the more general approach to treat plural pronouns as expressions referring to certain pluralities. I argue that (i) the plural subject approach cannot account for certain syntactic phenomena and that (ii) the sense of intimacy, which Gilbert (...) cites as evidence for her plural subject account, has a different source than the existence of joint commitments constituting a respective plural subject. Moreover, (iii) there is a wide varie-ty of phenomena in the linguistic record, which, while not constituting conclusive evidence against the plural subject account, nevertheless, are dealt with better by the plurality account. ‘We’ thus refers to pluralities, which may or may not be plural subjects. The precise analysis of ‘we’ thus reveals a multi-layered ontology of groups. (shrink)

Im ersten Teil des Papiers wird der Begriff des wissenschaftlichen Fortschritts definiert. Ausgangspunkt ist die kritische Darstellung des Fortschrittshegriffs von Th. S. Kuhn. Die Ambivalenz seines Begriffs veranlaßte verschiedene Wissenschaftstheoretiker, nach genauen Kriterien für das Vorliegen von wissenschaftlichem Fortschritt zu suchen. Von diesen wird hier J.D. Sneeds Begriff der Theorienreduktion vorgestellt, der ein präzises Entscheidungskriterium liefert. Im zweiten Teil wird gezeigt, daß sich die Sneedsche Reduktionsrelation unter bestimmten Bedingungen auch auf geisteswissenschaften anwenden läßt.

There are many things we cannot see but know are there: the sun at night, the flower in the seed, birds inside their eggs--and so it is with God's presence.

This book describes how medieval Jewish Bible scholars sought to answer the question of what is meant by the Angel’s message from God to Abraham: ‘Now I Know’, as written in Genesis 22 verse 12. It examines these scholars’ comments on the nineteen verses in Genesis that tell the story of Abraham’s readiness to sacrifice his own son Isaac, the Aqedat Yiṣḥaq. It explores the answers they found to the question of what, indeed, this story is trying to tell us. (...) Is it a drastic way to condemn the practice of child sacrifice? Does it call for replacing human sacrifices with animal sacrifices? Is it a trial by which the Almighty tests the fidelity of one of His followers? Or is it His way to show the world the nature of true belief? The book starts with an introduction to familiarize readers with the many and varied manifestations of the Aqedah theme in Jewish culture and with the developments of medieval Jewish Bible exegesis in general. Next, it offers translations and analyses of the classical medieval Jewish Bible commentaries that deal with the exegesis of Genesis 22, exploring the many angles from which the Aqedah story has been understood. No less than five centuries of medieval Aqedah exegesis are reviewed, from Saadya to Isaac Abrabanel. These texts from the commentaries are combined with hermeneutical key passages by Moses Maimonides, Joseph Ibn Kaspi, Ḥasdai Crescas, and others, which were familiar to the minds of the exegetes, or which, conversely, reflect the impact of biblical Aqedah exegesis on religious thought. Together, the passages discussed illustrate the growth and development of Jewish Bible exegesis in dialogue with the rabbinic sources and with the various trends of thought and theology of their times. The consistent focus on the Aqedah constitutes a unifying theme, while the insights presented here greatly advance our understanding of the various developments in medieval Jewish Bible exegesis. (shrink)

Se olharmos para Alberto Magno apartir de nossa época, provavelmente não perce-beremos sua importância como filósofo, poismuito do que ele realizou pode parecer comoalgo natural, que sempre foi assim. Entretanto,seus textos sobre a teologia como ciência, sobrea separação entre filosofia e teologia e sobre aética como ciência prática, por exemplo, sobrevi-vem até hoje.