This volume aimed to highlight narrative identities of European cities or city neighbourhoods that have been overlooked, such as mid-sized cities. These cities are neither small towns nor metropolises, cities that are now unveiling their appeal or specificity. The present special issue thus covers a range of representations of cities. The articles investigate more systematically how different texts deal with various cities from different experiential and fictional perspectives. The issue covers the geographical scope across Europe, from east to west or (...) vice versa, as well as a range of different works of national literature(s), but with a clear emphasis on mid-sized European cities that have until now been deemed as lesser-known, secondary, peripheral, ‘other’ cities that are in the focus of the research of the COST project Writing Urban Places. New Narratives of the European City, within which this journal issue is being published. (shrink)

This book breaks new ground in the study of Judaism, in philosophy, and in comparative ethics. It demonstrates that the assumption that Judaism has no natural law theory to speak of, held by the vast majority of scholars, is simply wrong. The book shows how natural law theory, using a variety of different terms for itself throughout the ages, has been a constant element in Jewish thought. The book sorts out the varieties of Jewish natural law theory, illuminating their strengths (...) and weaknesses. It also presents a case for utilising natural law theory in order to deal with current theological and philosophical questions in Judaism's ongoing reflection on its own meaning and its meaning for the wider world. David Novak combines great erudition in the Jewish tradition, the history of philosophy and law, and the imagination to argue for Judaism in the context of current debates, both theoretical and practical. (shrink)

"What is the relation of philosophy and theology? This question has been a matter of perennial concern in the history of Western thought. Written by one of the premier philosophers in the areas of Jewish ethics and interfaith issues between Judaism and Christianity, Athens and Jerusalem contends that philosophy and theology are not mutually exclusive. Based on the Gifford Lectures David Novak delivered at the University of Aberdeen in 2017, this book explores the commonalities and common concerns that exist (...) between philosophy and theology on metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical questions. Where are they different and where are they the same? And, how can they speak to one another?"--. (shrink)

John Duns Scotus’s famous doctrine of the formal distinction has a twofold justification: a theological one, stemming from the necessity to express coherently the Christian doctrine of the Holy Trinity, and a metaphysical one, according to which formal distinction is a necessary condition of the abstraction of universal (objective) concepts from individuals. This paper is a detailed analysis of this latter argument, presented by Scotus in Questions on Metaphysics VII, q. 19. Scotus apparently demolishes the alternative theory of intentional distinction (...) proposed by Henry of Ghent, but not without first attempting to defend it in as refined and powerful form as possible. Given that Henry’s notion of intentional distinction is substantially the same as later Thomits’s “distinctio rationis ratiocinatae”, this rises questions about the validity about the latter notion, both in the context of Scotism (such as in the thought of Bartolomeo Mastri) and in genereal. (shrink)

In Defense of Religious Liberty contains David Novak’s vigorous—and paradoxical—argument that the primacy of divine law is the best foundation for a secular, multicultural democracy. Novak presents his claim, which will astound both liberal and conservative advocates of democracy, in political, philosophical, and theological terms. He shows how the universal norms of divine law are knowable as natural law, that they are the best formulations of the human rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that (...) their assertion includes an explicit recognition of God as cosmic lawgiver. Furthermore, Novak maintains that the seemingly disparate ideas of divine command, natural law, and human rights can be integrated into one overall political theory. Novak reveals this integration at work in the classical texts of his own Jewish tradition, as well as in the canonical philosophical tradition of the West, from Plato to the Stoics to Grotius to Kant. He also convincingly makes the case that those who reject any legitimate role for religion in discussions of public morality inevitably substitute arbitrary human power for divine command, arbitrary positive law for natural law, and arbitrary governmental entitlements for human rights that exist prior to the establishment of the state. Novak concludes that religious traditions like Judaism, precisely because they incorporate the doctrines of God the cosmic lawgiver, natural law, and human rights, provide the most coherent ontological foundation for democracy in today’s world. (shrink)

Leading contemporary Jewish thinker David Novak has here compiled ten of his essays on a variety of issues in Jewish ethics. Drawing constantly on classical Jewish tradition, Novak also looks at a wide range of modern critical scholarship on the ancient sources. He aims to point out certain common features of Jewish and Christian ethics and the normative implications of this overlapping of traditions; he assumes the reality of a "Judeo-Christian ethic," while refusing to minimize the doctrinal differences (...) between the two traditions. The essays address such major normative issues in social justice as ecology, war and peace, the treatment of minorities, and the approach to AIDS patients. This combination of theoretical reflection and practical application, along with careful and detailed analysis of classical Jewish texts, makes the book a welcome contribution to contemporary ethical theory and normative ethics as well as a work of original Jewish theology. (shrink)

In our everyday social interactions, we try to make sense of what people are thinking, why they act as they do, and what they are likely to do next. This process is called mindreading. Mindreading, Shannon Spaulding argues in this book, is central to our ability to understand and interact with others. Philosophers and cognitive scientists have converged on the idea that mindreading involves theorizing about and simulating others’ mental states. She argues that this view of mindreading is limiting (...) and outdated. Most contemporary views of mindreading vastly underrepresent the diversity and complexity of mindreading. She articulates a new theory of mindreading that takes into account cutting edge philosophical and empirical research on in-group/out-group dynamics, social biases, and how our goals and the situational context influence how we interpret others’ behavior. -/- Spaulding's resulting theory of mindreading provides a more accurate, comprehensive, and perhaps pessimistic view of our abilities to understand others, with important epistemological and ethical implications. Deciding who is trustworthy, knowledgeable, and competent are epistemically and ethically fraught judgments: her new theory of mindreading sheds light on how these judgments are made and the conditions under which they are unreliable. -/- This book will be of great interest to students of philosophy of psychology, philosophy of mind, applied epistemology, cognitive science and moral psychology, as well as those interested in conceptual issues in psychology. (shrink)

This paper is an attempt to explicate, using the method of conceptual reconstruction rather than historical, text-oriented analysis, the plurality of meanings of two connected terms that play an important role in scholastic thought: “confusio” and “praecisio”. These terms are used in a plurality of meanings by the scholastics, and sometimes even in one and the same context. The aim of this paper is to disentangle these various meanings from each other, offer their precise definitions and explore not only their (...) interrelations, but also their role and impact in such crucial matters as theory of abstraction, realism-nominalism dispute, theory of science, or theory of analogy. (shrink)

This paper first reviews key Buddhist concepts of time anicca , khanavada and uji and then describes the way in which a particular form of Bhuddist meditation, vipassana, may be thought to actualize them in human experience. The chief aim of the paper is to present a heuristic model of how vipassana meditation, by eroding dispositional tendencies rooted in the body-unconscious alters psychological time, transforming our felt-experience of time from a binding to a liberating force.

The Experience of Nothingness The experience of nothingness is an incomparably fruitful starting place for ethical inquiry. It is a vaccine against the lies ...

ABSTRACTJan Patočka is known as a philosophical analyst of the phenomenological concept of the live-word, which contradicts the preoccupations expressed in Sir Herbert Read’s Art of Sc...

This article originally appeared in The Commonweal (October 5, 1962): 31–3. Michael Novak, a graduate student at the time, met Marcel while he was at Harvard University to deliver the William James lectures in the fall of 1961. Those lectures were subsequently printed in the volume, The Existential Background ofHuman Dignity (1963). The article is reprinted here with the kind permission of Michael Novak and the Commonweal magazine.

Both in opera studies and in most operatic works, the singing body is taken for granted. Jelena Novak reintroduces an awareness of the physicality of the singing body to opera studies. Arguing that the body-voice relationship itself is a producer of meaning, she furthermore posits this relationship as one of the major driving forces in recent opera. She takes as her focus six contemporary operas - La Belle et la Bête, Writing to Vermeer, Three Tales, One, Homeland and La (...) Commedia and dissects the singing body as a set of rules, protocols, effects, strategies. (shrink)

This paper is an attempt to develop the many-valued first-order fuzzy logic. The set of its truth, values is supposed to be either a finite chain or the interval 0, 1 of reals. These are special cases of a residuated lattice L, , , , , 1, 0. It has been previously proved that the fuzzy propositional logic based on the same sets of truth values is semantically complete. In this paper the syntax and semantics of the first-order fuzzy logic (...) is developed. Except for the basic connectives and quantifiers, its language may contain also additional n-ary connectives and quantifiers. Many propositions analogous to those in the classical logic are proved. The notion of the fuzzy theory in the first-order fuzzy logic is introduced and its canonical model is constructed. Finally, the extensions of Gödel's completeness theorems are proved which confirm that the first-order fuzzy logic is also semantically complete. (shrink)

In the following paper I develop an account of Gilles Deleuze’s ethics through his work on Spinoza, which he contrasts with morality, to argue that an ethical response to the COVID-19 pandemic should resist the moralizing of the New Normal and instead have an immanent focus on what is happening to us. In the first part of the paper I detail the novel approach to ethics as ethology that Deleuze works out most explicitly in Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. In the second (...) part I show exactly how Deleuze contrasts ethics from morality and moral thinking before showing the relation of ethics to morality in relation to the New Normal and contrast the Deleuzian ethical perspective from other ethical philosophical accounts that I claim are indicative a moral approach to the New Normal. I conclude by arguing that the prevalence of the New Normal amidst COVID-19 represents a triumph of what Spinoza calls the sad passions and suggest Deleuze’s ethics might be a way to reject those sad passions. (shrink)

Writing as a philosopher, not as a social scientist, the author takes a radically different approach to the study of criminality, asking not 'what are the causes of crime?' but 'what are the causes of virtue?' Novak concentrates on what builds character and why there is a serious lack of character in our culture and society today.

Rosi Braidotti has recently argued that the emerging scholarship on posthumanism should employ what she calls nomadic thinking. Braidotti identifies Gilles Deleuze’s work on Spinoza as the genesis of posthumanist ontology, yet Deleuze’s claims about nomadic thinking or nomadology come from his work on Leibniz. I argue that for posthumanist thought to theorize subjectivity beyond the human, it must use nomadology to overcome ontology itself. To make my argument, I demonstrate that while Braidotti is correct about Spinoza’s influence on Deleuze, (...) his work on Leibniz is necessary to adequately conceptualize nomadology. I employ Deleuze and Guattari’s figure of the Thought-brain as a model for conceptualizing posthumanist subjectivity that they claim goes beyond the subject itself. (shrink)

The series provides a forum for the growing community of philosophers who are interested in applying insights drawn from the Aristotelian and Scholastic traditions to current philosophical debates.

This collection of original essays by prominent scholars of political philosophy analyzes Leo Strauss's thoughts concerning the relationship between revelation and reason within the context of Jewish religion and thought. Unlike other edited collections about Strauss, the contributors to Leo Strauss and Judaism: Jerusalem and Athens Critically Revisited examine their subject using a wide range of ideological and methodological approaches, arriving at a variety of conclusions, many of which are controversial. This book will be of interest to students and scholars (...) of Leo Strauss, Jewish philosophy, and political theory. (shrink)

Dr. Novak reminisces about his experience as a student of Lonergan's at Gregorian University.

Michael Novak's eyewitness report on the second and pivotal session of Vatican II in 1964 vividly inter weaves pageantry, politics, and theology. An unusually well-informed lay intellectual, who had earned a theological degree just before the Council, Novak applauded the purposes of Pope John XXIII and his successor Paul VI-"to throw open the windows of the church." In this report, he coined the classic description of the foes of the reforms at Vatican II as the party of "nonhistorical (...) orthodoxy," emphasizing the eternal and unchanging, neglecting history and contingency. The author recounts many moments of high drama-Pope Paul VI's opening speech, the vote on the collegiality of bishops, the plea of Cardinal Bea on behalf of the chapter on Jews, and Bishop De Smedt's defense of religious freedom. His colorful chapter on the American bishops in 1964 serves as a fascinating benchmark, as do his many insights into the new role of the laity. His final chapter is a moving tribute to the Open Church engaging the contemporary world, and his new introduction brings this report up to date. This work will be of compelling interest to those interested in the post-conciliar fall of Communism, under the great John Paul II-who took his name from his two predecessors at Vatican II. The winner of the million-dollar Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, Michael Novak is a theologian, author, and former U.S. ambassador. He currently holds the George Frederick Jewett Chair in Religion and Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. where he is director of social and political studies. His writings have appeared in every major Western language, and in Chinese, Bengali, Korean, and Japanese. Also available from Transaction are his Catholic Social Thought and Liberal Institutions, The Experience of Nothingness, The Guns of Lattimer, Unmeltable Ethnics, Belief and Unbelief, and Choosing Presidents. (shrink)

In his 2001 book, With the Grain of the Universe, Stanley Hauerwas has made an extended case for Karl Barth as the model for how to do Christian ethics, and for Reinhold Niebuhr as the model for how not to do it. Though Barth's closer and deeper theological connection to the Christian tradition appeals to a Jewish traditionalist by analogy, nevertheless, Niebuhr's approach to social ethics, based as it is on a version of natural law, is of greater appeal. That (...) is because it is more philosophically arguable in a secular society and culture, and because it is more politically effective there. It is what made Niebuhr a more effective opponent of Nazism than was Barth. Also, Niebuhr's version of natural law is not a christianized version of Stoic natural law teaching but, rather, a profound use of the biblical prohibition of idolatry, having heretofore unnoticed affinities with rabbinic developments of that prohibition. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Mainstream Philosophy of Mysticism Constructivism Anti‐“experientialism” Feminism Concluding Remarks Works cited.

Edmund Husserl obdržel v roce 1927 nabídku od Jamese Louise Garvina, britského editora Encyclopædia Britannica, ať napíše pro novou, tehdy čtrnáctou edici článek „Fenomenologie“. Garvin stanovil rozsah článku na 4000 slov a termín vydání na září roku 1929. Husserl pracoval na článku v časovém rozmezí mezi zářím a prosincem roku 1927, během kterého vyhotovil celkem čtyři verze. Husserl požádal o spolupráci na prvních třech verzích svého žáka Martina Heideggera, který toho času zastával profesorský stolec na univerzitě v Marburku. Heidegger strávil (...) v říjnu 1927 u Husserla několik dní, během kterých intenzivně pracovali na řečeném článku. Nicméně jejich spolupráce vedla ke vzájemnému profesnímu odcizení, protože práce na formulování článku dala vytanout nepřekonatelným obsahovým diferencím mezi oběma filosofy. Na základě Heideggerových nepřijatelných návrhů a připomínek Husserl nakonec sepsal finální, čtvrtou verzi článku již sám. Tuto poslední verzi čítající 7000 slov pak Husserl předal oxfordskému učenci Christopheru V. Salmonovi, který ji měl zkrátit a přeložit do angličtiny. Salmon sice v únoru roku 1928 opravdu dodal do redakce EB text čítající 3844 slov bez bibliografie, ovšem nejednalo se vpravdě o překlad, nýbrž dost svévolnou parafrázi. Tato podoba Husserlova článku se pak objevovala ve čtrnácté edici EB, jež se vydávala až do roku 1974, jen do roku 1956, kdy byla nahrazena článkem napsaným Johnem N. Findlayem. Původní podoba Husserlova článku byla poprvé zveřejněna až roku 1962 v rámci jeho sebraných spisů známých pod označením Husserliana, podle jejichž IX. svazku jsme vyhotovili předložený překlad z německého jazyka. Podle této edice rovněž uvádíme paginaci, která je uvedena v hranatých závorkách, přičemž stránkový přechod indikuje v textu umístěná značka |.U příležitosti 80. výročí Husserlova skonu, který připadl na rok 2018, bylo naším záměrem připomenout přínos a odkaz tohoto našeho krajana tím, že napravíme absenci překladu jeho patrně nejvíce instruktivního, přehledného a programového textu, který byť ve zkomolené podobě anglického „překladu“, po dlouhou dobu seznamoval učenou veřejnost s tím, co je to fenomenologie. (shrink)

The deepest moral justification for a capitalist system is not solely that, poor system that it is, it serves liberty better than any other known system; not even that is raises up the living standards of the poor higher than any other system has; nor that it better improves the state of human health and the balance between humans and the environment that either real existing socialism or the traditional Third World society has. All these things, however difficult for one (...) to admit, are empirically true. The true moral strength of capitalism, however, lies in its promotion of human creativity.New wealth can be created. Human beings themselves are the primary cause of the wealth of nations. Human creativity is nature''s primary resource. Removing the institutional repression that now stifles that creativity is the large task ahead of us. (shrink)

Gilbert's kisceral argumentation is, roughly speaking, about arguing based on intuitions. In the forefront of such a (rhetorical) model are arguers and audiences, who resolve disagreements using kisceral arguments. Intuitions as reasons were more important in pre-modern law, when the law was not as explicit, precise, and determinate as today. Law influenced by religion or religious law was a typical example. In our much more secular modern era, intuitions are more or less subordinated to the (legal) logical mode of arguing. (...) However, in tough legal cases, when logic "runs out," it is values that decide them. Not surprisingly, neuroscience and cognitive psychology have shown a strong connection between values and intuition. (shrink)

La controverse et le débat sur la phénoménologie transcendantale de Husserl et l’ontologie fondamentale de Heidegger sont devenus un thème central des révisions philosophiques, en grande partie et d’abord grâce aux efforts de philosophes tels que Ludwig Landgrebe, Eugen Fink et Roman Ingarden. Jan Patočka, lui aussi, a apporté une contribution importante au débat, qui n’est malheureusement pas toujours reconnue. Il présente une analyse fondamentale de la phénoménologie asubjective selon laquelle les philosophies de Husserl et de Heidegger n’ont pas entièrement (...) réussi à surmonter le cartésianisme et selon laquelle ces dernières n’ont pas donné les mêmes réponses à la question du fondement dernier de l’apparition de l’apparaissant. L’auteur de cet essai examine leurs contradictions de manière assez détaillée. Plus précisément, il vise à démontrer l’importance des critiques de Patočka pour comprendre sa doctrine non cartésienne de la phénoménologie asubjective, qui s’est en fait formée en opposition aux apparentes insuffisances tant de Husserl que de Heidegger. Le lecteur peut maintenant voir en détail comment Patočka lui-même cherche à y remédier dans sa pensée ultérieure et comment on peut échapper au péril du subjectivisme. Avec ces considérations en arrière-plan, cet exposé présente la phénoménologie asubjective comme une méthodologie philosophique viable et pertinente. (shrink)

In this article I argue that Gilles Deleuze's reading of David Hume in his early work Empiricism and Subjectivity avoids the central claim made by speculative realists that all post-Kantian philosophy suffers from what they call correlationism. My claim is not that Deleuze's reading of Hume produces a non-correlationist ontology, but that it leads him to a non-ontological constructivist philosophy. In Deleuze's terms, this produces a transcendental empiricism of "thinking with AND, instead of thinking IS, instead of thinking for IS."1I (...) begin with a recap of the argument that Immanuel Kant understood Hume as an epistemological skeptic and that Kant's use of the transcendental deduction to respond to Hume led... (shrink)

According to Shannon Sullivan, thinking about the body as being in transaction with its social, political, cultural, and physical surroundings is not a new idea.

The Metis research project aims at supporting maritime safety and security by facilitating continuous monitoring of vessels in national coastal waters and prevention of phenomena, such as vessel collisions, environmental hazard, or detection of malicious intents, such as smuggling. Surveillance systems such as Metis typically comprise a number of heterogeneous information sources and information aggregators. Among the main problems of their deployment lies their scalability with respect to a potentially large number of monitored entities. One of the solutions to the (...) problem is continuous and timely adaptation and reconfiguration of the system according to the changing environment it operates in. At any given timepoint, the system should use only a minimal set of information sources and aggregators needed to facilitate effective and early detection of indicators of interest. Here, we describe the Metis system prototype and introduce a theoretical framework for modelling scalable information-aggregation sys.. (shrink)

In 1962 Sidney Cohen presented the medical community with its first warning about the dangers of the drug LSD. LSD had arrived in the United States in 1949 and was originally perceived as a psychotomimetic capable of producing a model psychosis. But in the mid 1950s intellectuals in Southern California redefined LSD as a psychedelic capable of producing mystical enlightenment. Though LSD was an investigational drug, authorized only for experimental use, by the late 1950s psychiatrists and psychologists were administering it (...) to cure neuroses and alcoholism and to enhance creativity. Cohen's 1960 study of LSD effects concluded that the drug was safe if given in a supervised medical setting, but by 1962 his concern about popularization, nonmedical use, black market LSD, and patients harmed by the drug led him to warn that the spread of LSD was dangerous. The subsequent government crackdown and regulation of LSD preceded the 1960s drug movement and was prompted by medical, not social, concerns. -/- . (shrink)

John Punch (or Ponce; Latin Joannes Poncius, or, occasionally, Pontius, 1599/1603–1661), an Irish Franciscan in exile, unorthodox Scotist and a skilled collaborator of the famous Luke Wadding, is interesting for his fresh and open-minded approach to traditional Scotist doctrines. His take on the theory of relations, which is the topic of this paper, is no exception. As I will show, in his Integer philosophiae cursus ad mentem Scoti1 he only pretends to be defending a doctrine considered to be traditionally "Scotist," (...) his true mind being apparently quite different.In Punch's time, several competing theories of relations were in currency. The basic insight common, at least as a point of departure, to all scholastics... Read More. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to compare the Thomist and the Scotist theory of relations. The main feature of the Thomist theory is an effort to minimize the ontological import of the specific essential ratio of relation as such, called esse ad, and to reduce the ontological import of its other aspect, the esse in or inherence understood as a common feature of all accidents, to the esse in of its foundation. The Scotists, on the other hand, have no (...) tendency to deflate the esse ad of a relation. Moreover, according to Malafossa of Barge’s theory (adopted by B. Mastri and B. Belluto), a relation involves two different instances of esse in. The one, called esse in velut in subiecto, is that generic inherence common to all accidents (which, therefore, does not occur in the substantial relations of divine persons). The other, esse in velut in fundamento, belongs specifically to relation as such and reflects the fact that very relation, even a substantial one, is not only a relation towards something, but necessarily also a relation of something towards something else. In spite of the fact, therefore, that the Thomist and Scotist doctrines are usually grouped together as mere subvariants of anti-reductive realism, they must be regarded as substantially different. (shrink)

The article analyzes Anselm of Canterbury’s development of three meanings of “nothing” in the Monologion, and a fourth in three later works: De casu diaboli, one of his letters, and his Incomplete Work. By focusing exclusively on the points where the meaning of nothing is first presented and then successively redefined, we can see that Anselm rejects the idea of creation ex nihilo by arguing that the things created by God had some form of existence before they were created, and (...) that creation refers not to coming into existence but to coming into being. In the three later works Anselm extends the meaning of nothing to show that it has a surprisingly positive content, since it is a term of negation that has meaning only in terms of what it excludes or negates. Anselm’s analysis of nothing seems to presage many modern discussions this subject. (shrink)

To be human is to humanize; a radically empirical aesthetic, by J. J. McDermott.--Dream and nightmare; the future as revolution, by R. C. Pollock.--William James and metaphysical risk, by P. M. Van Buren.--Knowing as a passionate and personal quest; C. S. Peirce, by D. B. Burrell.--The fox alone is death; Whitehead and speculative philosophy, by A. J. Reck.--A man and a city; George Herbert Mead in Chicago, by R. M. Barry.--Royce; analyst of religion as community, by J. Collins.--Human experience and (...) God; Brightman's personalistic theism, by D. Callahan.--William James and the phenomenology of religious experience, by J. M. Edie.--Pragmatism, religion, and experienceable difference, by R. W. Sleeper.--How is religious talk justifiable, by J. W. McClendon, Jr. (shrink)

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, abstract art has formed a central stream of modern art. To attain purely aesthetic goals, many avant-garde artists turned painting in particular into a pursuit of breaking off the relations with natural forms. Instead of copying them, they have merely relied on their inner visions. When externalizing these visions directly on the canvas or sheets of paper, the practitioners of abstract art have inadvertently used the phenomenological method and its epoché. In this essay (...) I argue that the philosophies of Kupka and Husserl are largely compatible. This is not because the two use the same terminology, but because they virtually mean and do the same thing in their respective fields. Even where there are significant differences between them, these are not as great as it might at first seem. In the essay’s conclusion I sum up some of the most significant implications their compatible theories have for the philosophy of art and for various theories of art today. (shrink)

How philosophy is educating humanity will be explained regarding an actual example concerning the new public health paradigm or health promoting research. The central point of reference is the discussion of the decisive substantiation of the work of medical sociologist, Aaron Antonovsky; his approach to salutogenesis is opposed to the usual approach of pathogenesis. Here, emphasis is put on "Sense of Coherence". It will be shown that, in contrast to Antonovsky's original intention, the relation to the natural sciences and scientific (...) medicine is sufficient to substantiate neither his central arguments nor the relation to the continental traditions of philosophy, especially to existential philosophy and to philosophical hermeneutics mentioned in his latest works. Therefore, referring to a prominent sociological representative of modern health science, means-end rationality is no longer able to assert its dominant position in this field, but must be legitimized by value rationality. Antonovsky's concept of SoC also inevitably includes the argument that methodologically oriented explanation of health related problems can never be replaced by sense-oriented understanding. (shrink)

In Baroque scholasticism the medieval semantic theory of connotation as a property of terms, originally elaborated by Ockham and others, received an ontological application or re-interpretation in the context of the theory of relations. The main proponent of this ontologized “doctrina de connotatis” seems to have been Suárez. Subsequently, this doctrine was severely criticised by the Jesuits Pedro Hurtado de Mendoza and Rodrigo de Arriaga, but also by the “princeps Scotistarum” Bartholomeo Mastri; whereas another Scotist, John Punch, adopted a theory (...) of relations close to this doctrine. The fates of the original semantic theory of connotation, the ontologized “doctrina de connotatis” and the broader context of the relevant discussions (especially the new res–modus ontology established around 1600) document the complexity of the history of scholastic ideas, irreducible to any simple paradigm (like that of the realism–nominalism strife). (shrink)

In the Jewish tradition there are those who simply identify divine justice with the specific divine commands, which is a theological version of legal positivism. This paper argues for another view in the Jewish tradition, viz., divine justice or divine wisdom is the rationale of the specific divine commands, thus making them more than arbitrary decrees. As the rationale of the specific divine commands, divine justice functions as a criterion of judgment that prevents irrational interpretations and unjust applications of the (...) specific divine commands. This approach is a theological version of natural law. (shrink)

Biographical novels about historical women artists have been experiencing a veritable boom in recent years. Written mostly by women, they can be understood as women authors’ attempts to reach out across time to other “artistic” women whose lives “speak to us” today. It has long been a key insight of historical fiction research that a historical novel reveals more about the time in which it was written than the time in which it is set. As such, it can be assumed (...) that contemporary novels about historical women speak as much to twenty-first-century conceptions of femininity as to particular historical moments of female subjectivity. This paper will compare two novels about historical women artists: Janice Galloway’s Clara about nineteenth-century German pianist Clara Wieck-Schumann and Priya Parmar’s Exit the Actress about Restoration actress Nell Gwyn. While based on historical facts, both these novels use the greater freedom of fiction to depart from biographical conventions. It will be demonstrated that although they resemble each other on the discourse level, employing shifts in the narrative perspective, conspicuous typography, and graphic elements, they differ markedly in the biographical and fictional subgenres in which they participate and, hence, in their gender politics. (shrink)

The aim of this dissertation is to develop an account of Gilles Deleuze’s philosophical project as a departure from ontology and ontological thinking. Ontology can be broadly understood as the study of being or the study of the meaning of being. Traditional ontology examines the nature of being while more contemporary philosophy often understands being itself as becoming or a process. In this respect, Deleuze has often been interpreted as a process or differential ontologist. This project departs from that interpretation (...) by arguing for a non-ontological Deleuze. The dissertation is broken into three papers where each presents a different account of what I call the non-ontological Deleuze through his work on the major pre-Kantian modern philosophers: David Hume, Benedict Spinoza, and Gottfried Leibniz. Each paper then uses the non-ontological Deleuze to engage with a related movement in post-Deleuzian Continental Philosophy. The first paper focuses on Deleuze’s early work on Hume to argue for a re-reading of the history of modern philosophy with a basis in transcendental empiricism rather than Kantian transcendental idealism. This paper uses Deleuze’s reading of Hume to respond to and critique the Speculative Realist movement’s charge that post-Kantian philosophy suffers from what they call correlationism. The second paper uses Deleuze’s work on Spinoza to argue for what the former calls ethology as a replacement for ontology. The claim here is that we should think of things in terms of what they do rather than what they are: in terms of their motion and affects rather than their being. There I contrast my reading of Deleuze’s Spinoza with those thinkers who have recently used that work to develop what is often referred to as New Materialism. The final paper argues that understanding things in terms of what they can do requires a nomadology, which is Deleuze’s play on Leibniz’s monadology. This paper uses Deleuze’s nomadology to create a dialogue with the emerging literature on Critical Posthumanism and subjectivity that has been influenced by Deleuze to suggest that posthumanist subjectivity should be understood in non-ontological terms. (shrink)

Haec tractatio est responsio critica ad tractationem Ludovici Groarke, titulo “Orbitae ellipticae, possintne Aristotelice explicari?”, necnon ad commentationem Jacobi Franklin, cui titulus “De orbitis ellipticis ac Aristotelica revolutione scientifica”. Auctor imprimis ostendit (ultra censuram a J. Franklin factam procedens) explanationem “Aristotelicam” orbitarum ellipticarum a L. Groarke propositam non solum analysi Newtonianae repugnare, sed etiam in se esse incohaerentem. Porro auctor alia L. Groarke proposita impugnat: scil. nostri temporis physicam mathematicam esse essentialiter Platonicam, item Newtonianam orbitarum ellipticarum explicationem assymetriam prae se (...) ferre inexplicabilem (cui sententiae J. Franklin quoque assentit). Auctor e contra arguit, textibus nonnulis S. Thomae Aquinatis innixus, physicam modernam, mathematica sui methodo non exclusa, realisticae epistemologiae Aristotelicae esse congruam, immo pure Aristotelice intelligi posse (ac debere). Auctor tamen reicit quod J. Franklin insinuat, scil. physicam modernam nunc Aristotelicae philosophiae naturalis explere munia. Physica mathematica enim, methodo sua constricta, quaestiones genuine philosophicas (nempe ad essentias rerum spectantes) movere non potest, ac proinde philosophiae naturalis vice fungi nequit.This discussion article is a critical reaction to L. Groarke’s paper “Can Aristotelianism Make Sense of Perihelion–Aphelion Orbits?” and J. Franklin’s comment “Elliptical Orbits and the Aristotelian Scientific Revolution”. In the first place, the author shows (going beyond Franklin’s criticism) that Groarke’s proposed “Aristotelian” explanation of elliptical planetary orbits is inconsistent both in itself and with the Newtonian analysis. Furthermore, he challenges Groarke’s claims that modern mathematical physics is inherently Platonic and that the Newtonian explication of elliptical orbits involves unexplained assymmetries (a claim endorsed by Franklin as well). With the help of several Aquinas’s texts the author argues that modern physics, including its maths-driven methodology, is not incompatible with Aristotelian realist epistemology but can (and should) be interpreted in a purely Aristotelian vein. On the other hand, the author rejects the view implied by Franklin that modern physics is an up-to-date replacement of Aristotelian philosophy of nature. Due to its methodological limits, mathematical physics is incapable of asking genuinely philosophical questions concerning the essence of bodies, and so it cannot be expected to do the job of natural philosophy. (shrink)

This essay explores “the metaphysics of American ideas” and the strengths and weaknesses of Murray’s argument in We Hold These Truths. The philosophical principles that animate the American founding, it argues, presuppose a particular understanding of the structure of being whose roots are biblical in inspiration. Murray’s account, it continues, calls our attention to the many links between the American founding and the Catholic tradition, suggests ways in which Catholic thought can give us a deeper understanding of the “truths” informing (...) the Founding, and illuminates the gulf between contemporary America’s secular “superculture” and the many cultures of local America. Expressing some concerns about the conceptions of reason, nature, and grace that inform Murray’s thought, and of Murray’s engagement with the thought of the American founders, it concludes by attempting to extend We Hold These Truths’ argument by identifying three truths, over and above those identified by Murray, that are essential to a proper understanding of the American democratic experiment. (shrink)

This article takes the interlinkages between law and politics as its starting point. It analyzes recent changes in the legislative style of education governance in Sweden as not only a spec...

I extract several common assumptions in the Classical Theory of Mind (CTM) - mainly of Locke and Descartes - and work out a partial formalisation of the logic implicit in CTM. I then define the modal (logical) properties and relations of propositions, including the modality of conditional propositions and the validity of argument, according to the principles of CTM: that is, in terms of clear and distinct ideas, and without any reference to either possible worlds, or deducibility in an axiomatic (...) system, or linguistic convention. (shrink)