Cardinal Etchegaray argues here that the dialogue between church and state, with both parties rooted in sometimes conflicting absolute claims and values, has become more recently a wider-ranging dialogue between the church and a pluralist, relativist liberal society. The very definition of “liberal society” is open to argument, and the church may find elements to commend or oppose in any given definition. Since the nineteenth century the church has often found itself in opposition to various ideas of “liberty,” especially (...) those that represent an idolatry of absolute rights that push aside Christian spiritual and moral concerns. Now that liberalism has become the pervasive model for society, the church finds it may more easily express its critique, with the aim of making society more conducive to allowing people to become fully human. Indeed, the church provides a necessary check on the excesses of liberal society, particularly those of capitalism and democratic populism. Its essential point is the transcendent dimension of the human person—our connection with the divine. The pursuit of economic and political ends needs to be governed by a concern for the ethical, itself founded on the divine. Liberal society will only live up to its own highest aspirations through promoting self-mastery and an awareness that humanity’s freedom is ultimately found only in God. (shrink)

This book assesses how Vatican II opened up the Catholic Church to encounter, dialogue, and engagement with other world religions. Opening with a contribution from the President of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, it next explores the impact, relevance, and promise of the Declaration Nostra Aetate before turning to consider how Vatican II in general has influenced interfaith dialogue and the intellectual and comparative study of world religions in the postconciliar decades, as well as the (...) contribution of particular past and present thinkers to the formation of current interreligious and comparative theological methods. Additionally, chapters consider interreligious dialogue vis-à-vis theological anthropology in conciliar documents; openness to the spiritual practices of other faith traditions as a way of encouraging positive interreligious encounter; the role of lay and new ecclesial movements in interreligious dialogue; and the development of Monastic Interreligious Dialogue. Finally, it includes a range of perspectives on the fruits and future of Vatican’s II’s opening to particular faiths such as Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism. (shrink)

In theTractatus, Wittgenstein advocates two major notational innovations in logic. First, identity is to be expressed by identity of the sign only, not by a sign for identity. Secondly, only one logical operator, called “N” by Wittgenstein, should be employed in the construction of compound formulas. We show that, despite claims to the contrary in the literature, both of these proposals can be realized, severally and jointly, in expressively complete systems of first-order logic. Building on early work of Hintikka’s, we (...) identify three ways in which the first notational convention can be implemented, show that two of these are compatible with the text of theTractatus, and argue on systematic and historical grounds, adducing posthumous work of Ramsey’s, for one of these as Wittgenstein’s envisaged method. With respect to the second Tractarian proposal, we discuss how Wittgenstein distinguished between general and non-general propositions and argue that, claims to the contrary notwithstanding, an expressively adequate N-operator notation is implicit in theTractatuswhen taken in its intellectual environment. We finally introduce a variety of sound and complete tableau calculi for first-order logics formulated in a Wittgensteinian notation. The first of these is based on the contemporary notion of logical truth as truth in all structures. The others take into account the Tractarian notion of logical truth as truth in all structures over one fixed universe of objects. Here the appropriate tableau rules depend on whether this universe is infinite or finite in size, and in the latter case on its exact finite cardinality.As it is obviously easy to express how propositions can be constructed by means of this operation and how propositions are not to be constructed by means of it, this must be capable of exact expression.5.503. (shrink)

A-t-on le droit de croire en l'existence de Dieu? Non, répondent ceux qui veulent des preuves. Oui, affirme ce livre, car nous avons le droit de croire même sans justification épistémologique. Cela n'a rien d'intellectuellement honteux, contrairement à ce que disent certains philosophes, en parlant d'une éthique des croyances Une nouvelle question se pose alors : a-t-on le droit de croire avoir reçu une révélation et prétendre connaître ainsi la vérité? Non, répondent ceux pour lesquels la vérité ne peut pas (...) être donnée par Dieu dans la Bible. Oui, affirme ce livre, et, qui plus est, une épistémologie peut défendre la rationalité de notre croyance à la révélation. Dès lors, peut-on faire comme si les affirmations du Credo étaient des fictions? Est-il vrai que la religion est avant tout une affaire pratique et une forme de vie? Non, répond ce livre : les arguments en faveur d'une conception non réaliste de la religion sont faibles ; en revanche, le réalisme théologique peut être défendu. Renouvelant ainsi la traditionnelle question de la relation entre foi et raison, ce livre discute aussi bien les thèses de saint Thomas, de John Locke, du cardinal Newman et de Ludwig Wittgenstein, que celles de philosophes analytiques contemporains de la religion comme Alvin Plantinga, Richard Swinburne, Peter van Inwagen ou Linda Zagzebski. (shrink)

In this note, I point out a mathematically well-defined way of non-trivially comparing the sizes of uncountable sets of equal cardinality.

This article examines the theology of Charles Journet in light of the Second Vatican Council's teaching on sacerdotal and episcopal character. Journet's theology is placed in dialogue with the teaching of the Council and subsequent questions that have resulted from it, from three overlapping perspectives. First, Journet's theology of Orders, especially as articulated in his celebrated work The Church of the Word Incarnate, is presented. Second, in light of his theology of Orders, the content of Cardinal Journet's written submission (...) on the draft of Presbyterorum Ordinis during the final session of the Council is brought to light. Finally, Journet's own reflections on Lumen Gentium are examined for the sake of further pinpointing his own position on sacerdotal character in relation to the teaching of the Council. This article seeks to highlight the value that Journet's thought has in its own right for probing contemporary theological questions and, additionally, to draw attention to his role and presence at the final session of the Second Vatican Council. Journet's presence and role at the Council have, heretofore, been largely untreated by Anglo-American theologians. (shrink)

The Greek constructions of Zoroaster relate to the historical Zoroaster and to the Zoroaster of the Zoroastrian faith in one respect only. The Greeks knew that Zoroaster was the “prophet,” in the sense of the human founder, of the national Persian religion of their times. That, of course, is a cardinal fact, but it is one fact only. For the rest, the Greek Zoroasters — for there were many — were fantasies of their own imaginations. Since the Greeks were (...) a curious and inventive people, these multiple Zoroasters are interesting creations in their own right. Of more importance, they are elements in the “West’s” construction — or misconstruction — of a major “oriental” religion. -/- . (shrink)

The author endeavors to show how dialectical methods can reveal and clarify Ayn Rand’s philosophy from the two vital perspectives of the lives of individual human beings in relation to the world and in relation to other people and the social institutions under which they live. In so doing, he applies Chris Matthew Sciabarra’s Tri-Level Analysis model of social relations (derived from Rand’s social commentaries) and relates Rand’s metaphysical value-judgments to the cardinal values and virtues of her ethics.

St. Thomas Aquinas preaches in his sermon Puer Iesus, "Just as your father begot you bodily, your teacher begot you spiritually." St. Thomas himself has been blessed with prodigious fecundity through the centuries for his teaching in the Holy Spirit. Always, he leads us to think of the Blessed Trinity and all things from God's own view. With new insights into St. Thomas's spiritual teaching in its sources, context, breadth, wisdom, and influences, Thomas Aquinas as Spiritual Teacher presents chapters inspired (...) by an international conference cosponsored by the Aquinas Center for Theological Renewal at Ave Maria University and the Thomistic Institute of the Dominican House of Studies. The volume, like its conference, honors Archbishop J. Augustine Di Noia, OP, adjunct secretary of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, for his dedication to the spiritual teaching of St. Thomas in several decades of service to the Church and the academy. Luis F. Cardinal Ladaria, SJ, prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, contributed the volume's foreword. Contributors to this book include: Serge-Thomas Bonino, OP; Romanus Cessario, OP; Therese Scarpelli Cory; Michael A. Dauphinais; Archbishop J. Augustine Di Noia, OP; Bishop Daniel E. Flores; Wojciech Giertych, OP; Andrew Hofer, OP; Luis F. Cardinal Ladaria, SJ; Dominic Legge, OP; Steven A. Long; Roger W. Nutt; Michael Root; Daria Spezzano; Thomas Weinandy, OFM, Cap.; and Thomas Joseph White, OP-- Provided by publisher. (shrink)

There are eighteen isomorphism types of finite relation algebras with eight or fewer elements, and all of them are representable. We determine all the cardinalities of sets on which these algebras have representations.

We study the preservation under projective ccc forcing extensions of the property of L(ℝ) being a Solovay model. We prove that this property is preserved by every strongly-̰Σ₃¹ absolutely-ccc forcing extension, and that this is essentially the optimal preservation result, i.e., it does not hold for Σ₃¹ absolutely-ccc forcing notions. We extend these results to the higher projective classes of ccc posets, and to the class of all projective ccc posets, using definably-Mahlo cardinals. As a consequence we obtain an exact (...) equiconsistency result for generic absoluteness under projective absolutely-ccc forcing notions. (shrink)

We study the preservation of the property of being a Solovay model under proper projective forcing extensions. We show that every strongly-proper forcing notion preserves this property. This yields that the consistency strength of the absoluteness of under strongly-proper forcing notions is that of the existence of an inaccessible cardinal. Further, the absoluteness of under projective strongly-proper forcing notions is consistent relative to the existence of a -Mahlo cardinal. We also show that the consistency strength of the absoluteness (...) of under forcing extensions with σ-linked forcing notions is exactly that of the existence of a Mahlo cardinal, in contrast with the general ccc case, which requires a weakly-compact cardinal. (shrink)

We confirm a conjecture, about neat embeddings of cylindric algebras, made in 1969 by J. D. Monk, and a later conjecture by Maddux about relation algebras obtained from cylindric algebras. These results in algebraic logic have the following consequence for predicate logic: for every finite cardinal α ≥ 3 there is a logically valid sentence X, in a first-order language L with equality and exactly one nonlogical binary relation symbol E, such that X contains only 3 variables (each of (...) which may occur arbitrarily many times), X has a proof containing exactly α + 1 variables, but X has no proof containing only α variables. This solves a problem posed by Tarski and Givant in 1987. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Cultural Transactions: Nature, Self, SocietyRoger SeamonCultural Transactions: Nature, Self, Society, by Paul Hernadi; ix & 156 pp. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995, $27.50 paper.Thinkers have often found the world rather Gaulish—or, if you prefer, have carved it up to make it so. In Cultural Transactions Paul Hernadi starts from the premise that “We typically experience ourselves as objectively existing organisms, players of intersubjectively assigned and evaluated roles, or (...) as subjective selves” (p. 3), which correspond to the nature, society, and self of his subtitle. He then collects and creates triads which are meant to be homologous with the foundational trio. Some of these are traditional (truth, justice, beauty), others are cobbled out of folk psychology (desire with, desire that, desire for), some are taken from other thinkers (Martin Buber’s It, Thou, and I), but most are based on linguistic concepts. Thus, Hernadi sums up at one point by saying, “In the preceding sections I suggest that all discourse involves action, production, and signification, and that doing, making, and meaning tend respectively to predominate in speaking, writing, and thinking—the prime vehicles of communication, expression, and representation in our culture” (p. 28). The process culminates in the postulation of three triangles (discourse, awareness, and value) whose apices and sides constitute two triads. Each side is itself then divided into three, which makes for a total of five triads per triangle (pp. 111, 120, 130), to which we should add about twenty or so spelled out earlier. This is an argument by accumulation for a triadic human universe.Hernadi sees life (and Cultural Transactions is about nothing less) as a complex dance both within and between these cooperative triads: “Yet the natural domain of Its (to be individuated as such by one of Buber’s two Is) and the social domain of Buber’s I-Thou relations would not be what they are without self-conscious individuals who are able to pick out themselves as [George Herbert] Meadian Mes and other particulars as Its or Thous from what [End Page 535] thereby becomes someone’s natural and social environment” (p. 88). Again: “Consensus, coherence, and correspondence have sometimes been invoked as rival criteria of truth. From the present book, they should emerge rather as mutually supportive goals in our lifelong pursuit of interactive doing, self-expressive making, and world-oriented meaning” (p. 109). Sometimes the triads run parallel to each other, and at other times they are nested. Thus, the triad within beauty consists of Dionysian “world-absorbed engulfment” (nature), “ludic” imitation (the social dimension of art), and Apollonian “self-controlled detachment” (self) (pp. 130–31). In the next triad up, Beauty is parallel to self, goodness is the value analogous to society, and truth corresponds to the world.Some of the triads are indeed “quite clever” (p. 142) (Hernadi’s own phrase from a self-reflexive “Epilogue”), as when he writes, “Natural must gives way to social should only to make room, eventually, for personal may as well” (p. 99). This nicely captures our sense that freedom has degrees, but more often there are dubious appropriations and stretched similes. For example, Hernadi uses a mere pronoun to make his case for the possibility of a seamless blending of the three realms—“the ecumenical ‘we’ recombines the first-, second-, and third person perspectives of communication”—and he continues with a very unpersuasive simile—“just as a rapidly spinning top turns the three cardinal colors painted on it into the whitish hue of unrefracted light” (p. 75). This is not an argument, but the expression of a wish.Although each triad is meant to be homologous with the foundational trio, there are quite a few uncomfortable fits. For example, I don’t see how “being with” is the apex formed by truth and beauty, while “being of” comes between justice and beauty, and “being toward” belongs between beauty and truth (p. 130). There are also odd omissions. Hernadi rejects Freud’s id, ego, and superego as insufficiently fine-grained to capture our complex subjectivity (p. 90) (which they were never meant to do), but the parallel to his major triad of nature, self and society seems... (shrink)

On Roger Bacon's life and works, by A. G. Little.--Der einfluss des Robert Grosseteste auf die wissenschaftliche richtung des Roger Bacon, von Ludwig Baur.--La place de Roger Bacon parmi les philosophes du XIIIe siècle, par François Picavet.--Roger Bacon and the Latin vulgate, by Francis Aidan, cardinal Gasquet.--Roger Bacon and philology, by S. A. Hirsch.--The place of Roger Bacon in the history of mathematics, by David Eugene Smith.--Roger Bacon und seine verdienste um die (...) optik, von Eilhard Wiedemann.--Roger Bacons lehre von der sinnlichen spezies und vom seḣvorgange, von Sebastian Vogl.--Roger Bacons art des wissenschaftlichen arbeitens dargestellt nach seiner schrift De speculis, von J. Würschmidt.--Roger Bacon et l'horreur du vide, par Pierre Duhem.--Roger Bacon, his relations to alchemy and chemistry, by M. M. Pattison Muir.--Roger Bacon and gunpowder, by H. W. L. Hime.--Roger Bacon and medicine, by E. Withington. (shrink)

Let a be a Kleene's ordinal notation of a nonzero computable ordinal. We give a sufficient condition on a, so that for every \documentclass{article}\usepackage{amssymb}\begin{document}\pagestyle{empty}$\Sigma ^{-1}_a$\end{document}‐computable family of two embedded sets, i.e., two sets A, B, with A properly contained in B, the Rogers semilattice of the family is infinite. This condition is satisfied by every notation of ω; moreover every nonzero computable ordinal that is not sum of any two smaller ordinals has a notation that satisfies this condition. On the (...) other hand, we also give a sufficient condition on a, that yields that there is a \documentclass{article}\usepackage{amssymb}\begin{document}\pagestyle{empty}$\Sigma ^{-1}_a$\end{document}‐computable family of two embedded sets, whose Rogers semilattice consists of exactly one element; this condition is satisfied by all notations of every successor ordinal bigger than 1, and by all notations of the ordinal ω + ω; moreover every computable ordinal that is sum of two smaller ordinals has a notation that satisfies this condition. We also show that for every nonzero n ∈ ω, or n = ω, and every notation a of a nonzero ordinal there exists a \documentclass{article}\usepackage{amssymb}\begin{document}\pagestyle{empty}$\Sigma ^{-1}_a$\end{document}‐computable family of cardinality n, whose Rogers semilattice consists of exactly one element. (shrink)

Rewriting the Self is an exploration of ideas of the self in the western cultural tradition from the Renaissance to the present. The contributors analyze different religious, philosophical, psychological, political, psychoanalytical and literary models of personal identity from a number of viewpoints, including the history of ideas, contemporary gender politics, and post-modernist literary theory. Challenging the received version of the "ascent of western man," they assess the discursive construction of the self in the light of political, technological and social changes. (...) Contributors include: Peter Burke, Roger Cardinal, Stephen Connor, Jonathan Dollimore, Terry Eagleton, Kate Flint, E.J. Hundert, John Mullan, Linda Nead, Daniel Pick, Nikolas Rose, Jonathan Sawday, Jane Shaw, Roger Smith, Sylvana Tomaselli and Carolyn D. Williams. (shrink)

Argues that the only way to understand the Confucian vision of the consummate moral life is to take the tradition on its own terms.

the symmetry of our evidential situation. If our confidence is best modeled by a standard probability function this means that we are to distribute our subjective probability or credence sharply and evenly over possibilities among which our evidence does not discriminate. Once thought to be the central principle of probabilistic reasoning by great..

Based on ten years of research, The Touch of the Past considers how historically traumatic events uniquely summon forgetting and remembrance. Within a specific focus on events of systemic mass violence, Roger Simon examines how testimonies of historic events influence learning as communities struggle with "difficult histories." The Touch of the Past is a serious and compelling contribution to research in education, historical consciousness, and memory/trauma studies.

This good-humoured book offers an antidote to the pretentious clap-trap that is written about wine today and a profound apology for the drink on which..

The classical Greeks give us a substance ontology grounded in ‘being qua being’ or ‘being per se’ (to on he on) that guarantees a permanent and unchanging subject as the substratum for the human experience. With the combination of eidos and telos as the formal and final cause of independent things such as persons, this ‘substance’ necessarily persists through change. This substratum or essence includes its purpose for being, and is defining of the ‘what-it-means-to-be-a-thing-of-this-kind’ of any particular thing in setting (...) a closed, exclusive boundary and the strict identity necessary for it to be this, and not that.In the Yijing 易經 or Book of Changes we find a vocabulary that makes explicit cosmological assumptions that are a stark alternative to this substance ontology, and provides the interpretive context for the Confucian canons by locating them within a holistic, organic, and ecological worldview. To provide a meaningful contrast with this fundamental assumption of on or ‘being’ we might borrow the Greek notion of zoe or ‘life’ and create the neologism ‘zoe-tology’ as ‘the art of living’. This cosmology begins from ‘living’ (sheng 生) itself as the motive force behind change, and gives us a world of boundless ‘becomings’: not ‘things’ that are, but ‘events’ that are happening, a contrast between an ontological conception of the human ‘being’ and a process conception of what I will call human ‘becomings’. (shrink)

Benedict de Spinoza was at once the father of the Enlightenment and the last sad guardian of the medieval world. In his brilliant synthesis of geometrical method, religious sentiment, and secular science, he attempted to reconcile the conflicting moral and intellectual demands of his epoch, and to present a vision of humanity as simultaneously bound by necessity and eternally free. Roger Scruton presents a clear and systematic analysis of Spinoza's thought, and shows its relevance to today's intellectual preoccupations.

Embryos, cells, genes, and organisms : reflections on the history of evolutionary developmental biology / Manfred D. Laubichler and Jane Maienschein The organismic systems approach : streamlining the naturalistic agenda / Werner Callebaut, Gerd B. Müller, and Stuart A. Newman Complex traits : genetics, development, and evolution / H. Frederik Nijhout Functional and developmental constraints on life-cycle evolution : an attempt on the architecture of constraints / Gerhard Schlosser Legacies of adaptive development / Roger Sansom Evo-devo meets the mind (...) : toward a developmental evolutionary psychology / Paul E. Griffiths Reproducing entrenchments to scaffold culture : the central role of development in cultural evolution / William C. Wimsatt and James R. Griesemer. (shrink)

Following his celebrated book The Aesthetics of Music, Scruton explores the fundamental elements that constitute a great piece of music.

This collection of essays examines the philosophical and cultural aspects of technology. The issues range widely - from quantum technology to problems of technology and culture in a developing country and contributors approach the issues from a variety of perspectives. The volume includes case-studies, and also more theoretical pieces which consider the fundamental question of whether technology should be perceived as a force for liberation or enslavement. The volume aims to stimulate debate about the relation between technology and philosophy and (...) society in general, and to open a field of enquiry that has been relatively neglected. Written in an accessible style, the contributions are intended equally for philosophers exploring the novel problems arising in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, but also for technologists interested in the philosophical implications of their work. (shrink)