Continuateur d’Eusèbe de Césarée (265-339), Socrate de Constantinople (380-440), un des plus grands historiens de l’Antiquité chrétienne de langue grecque, est l’auteur d’une précieuse Histoire (publiée probablement vers 439/440) dont l’intérêt réside, non seulement dans le fait qu’elle prolonge de plus d’un siècle l’Histoire ecclésiastique d’Eusèbe, mais aussi parce qu’elle nous a conservé des documents historiques de la plus haute importance, souvent cités in extenso, et dont certains sont ..

An edition of the letters of Erasmus, regarded as one of the greatest humanist writers. All 12 volumes of this work have been reissued, complete with their scholarly apparatus of commentary and notes, as well as plates.

The role of emotions in ethics is often taken by philosophers and others as antithetical to rationality. On the most basic level (in undergraduate philosophy exams and elsewhere), stating an opinion in the form "I feel that p" can be a way of sidestepping the demand for reasons. But emotions can sometimes also be seen as supplying reasons for moral judgment to the extent that they involve evaluations--and a way of communicating them across different moral perspectives.

Th e con fusion a nd b arren ness o f psycho logy is no t to be e xplain ed b y calling it a “yo ung science”; its state is not comparable with that of physics, for instance, in its beginnings. (Rather with that of certain branches of mathematics. Set theory.) For in psychology there are experimental methods and conceptual confusion. (As in the oth er case, con cep tual co nfusion and m ethod s of pro of.) (...) The existence of the experimental method makes us think we have the means of solving the problems that trouble us; though problem and method pass one another by. (PI p. 232). (shrink)

The complex of cultural, political and societal affiliations, both in a historic and a contemporary perspective, is expressed by a special term in the Nordic languages, 'faellesskab', often with the addition of 'folkelig', as 'folkeligt faellesskab', where 'folkelig' means of the people. No corresponding term exists in English. For medical ethics the concept 'faellesskab', or whatever wording is chosen to serve the semantics of this term, is vital. In research ethics and clinical decision-making complex ethical analyses and normative evaluations are (...) necessary. They cannot be based solely on moral relativism, whether being based on results of opinion polls or on a widespread 'every man minds his own business' concept. 'Faellesskab' possesses the necessary base of common values. (shrink)

Three experiments explore the role of working memory in motor skill acquisition and performance. Traditional theories postulate that skill acquisition proceeds through stages of knowing, which are initially declarative but later procedural. The reported experiments challenge that view and support an independent, parallel processing model, which predicts that procedural and declarative knowledge can be acquired separately and that the former does not depend on the availability of working memory, whereas, the latter does. The behaviour of these two processes was manipulated (...) by providing or withholding visual (and auditory) appraisal of outcome feedback. Withholding feedback was predicted to inhibit the use of working memory to appraise success and, thus, prevent the formation of declarative knowledge without affecting the accumulation of procedural knowledge. While the first experiment failed to support these predictions, the second and third experiments demonstrated that procedural and declarative knowledge can be acquired independently. It is suggested that the availability of working memory is crucial to motor performance only when the learner has come to rely on its use. (shrink)

In this paper I start discussing "originalism" as a practice of interpretation purporting the intent of the framers as "the" governing factor in interpretation. My first step is to contrast it with the approach of non-interpretivism. Then I discuss "interpretation" itself as a package to depict social practices of meaning production, focusing on three peculiar historical settings : Alexandria, Scholasticism, and the "birth" of Hermeneutics. My aim is to show the "essentialist" move of posing the concept of "meaning" as a (...) key factor in the "ideology" of interpretation. Such a discussion is introductory to a reappraisal of the current debate about criticism and of the distinction between interpretation and use-of-the-texts. I then examine archeology as a radical alternative to interpretive practices. But my final step will be to shift away from the blunt opposition between interpretivism and non interpretivism, to suggest a more complex arrangement based on an ironic misuse of interpretivism, and a framing of interpretation as an antagonistic process. (shrink)

This paper considers a possible national cultural and scientific synthesis which failed to take place: namely the integration of the Central European theoretical physicist Erwin Schrödinger into the primarily experimental orientations of the Oxford physics of the 1930s. We also consider the effect of the Oxford social and intellectual atmosphere generally, incluing the persistence of previous traditions which undervalued Science relative to the Arts, and University research relative to tutorial provision in the Colleges. The Oxford situation is then briefly contrasted (...) to that which Schrödinger later found in Dublin between 1939 and 1956, and which was to have a significantly more productive outcome. (shrink)

Mental Symbols is an essay on mind and meaning, on the biological implementation of mental symbols, on the architecture of mind, and on the correct construal of logical properties and relations of symbols, including implication and inference. The book argues against the main contemporary trends in the cognitive sciences, preferring rather the classical early-modern tradition. The author looks at some logical paradoxes in the light of that tradition, and offers a novel answer to the problem of the biological implementation of (...) the mind in the brain. (shrink)

The Limits of the Formal Treatment of Language. Within the philosophy of language, there is a distinction between the natural language philosophers and the ideal language philosophers. The distinction is drawn based on the way these philosophers reflect on language and the world. Natural language philosophers stress the context-based feature of meaning, while the ideal language philosophers emphasize the context-free feature of meaning. In my study I want to show that that even within the formal study of language, in the (...) apparent absence of any context, the notions of valuation and interpretation help us to understand the meaning of sentences. (shrink)