Two Short Communications:R. A. Markus, Gregory the Great and In I Regum, by Francis ClarkAquinas's Claim ‘Anima Mea Non Est Ego’, by Stephen Priest.

Recent algorithmic technologies have challenged law’s anthropocentric assumptions. In this article, we develop a set of theoretical tools drawn from new materialisms and the philosophy of information to unravel the complex intra-actions between law and computer code. Accordingly, we first propose a framework for understanding the enmeshing of law and code based on a diffractive reading of Barad’s agential realism and Simondon’s theory of information. We argue that once law and code are understood as material entities that intra-act through in-formation, (...) the concept of transduction allows us to trace how they push each other towards change. After developing the theoretical tools, we deploy them to make sense of how law and code have changed in response to increasing automation of decision-making and the appearance of unexplainable artificial intelligence (AI) code. Thus, we employ a case study to trace transformations of the right to explanation under the European data protection regulations. This provides the backdrop for our account of how law transduces into code (and vice versa) and a proving ground for our framework. (shrink)

We argue for the need for a new language for business – one that is capable of changing the current business decision-making frame of wins and losses to a frame of community and social learning. This paper outlines a classroom exercise about Nelson Mandela’s leadership, involving movies, case studies and poetry, and shows how the more holistic approach helps shift student views of the triple bottom line. Since neuroscience literature has shown that poetry can help enhance learning, students carefully study (...) “Invictus,” a poem written by Victorian-era poet Henley and revered by Mandela. As students dig deeper into the case study through classroom discussion, they begin to see Mandela’s leadership through a new frame, and in doing so broaden their own views. This more holistic approach to studying leadership may allow decision makers to adjust both their goals and the focus of their analysis to go beyond monetary outcomes to include socially and environmentally sustainable outcomes. (shrink)

As the debate about research on foetal tissue transplantation progressed, medical scientists learned more about the procedure and its potential for helping persons with degenerative brain disorders such as Parkinson's disease. Increased scientific knowledge significantly influenced the political process, yet it did not by any means resolve the debate. Rather, increased medical evidence served as a lens which focused discourse on particular issues related to foetal research, such as the details of obtaining informed consent, as well as technical matters related (...) to tissue transplantation, for example, that the creation of a tissue bank was unreasonable, and that foetuses of certain ages were required for the procedure. This increased focus changed the character of the debate on foetal tissue transplantation research, and convinced some law-makers that they should encourage financial support for the research despite their anti-abortion political views.The heart of the stalemate on transplantation research lay in rigid attachment to particular arguments, which in turn resulted in the disunity of the participants; this was compounded by the lack of persuasive scientific evidence that foetal tissue transplantation could significantly benefit those with Parkinson's disease. Privately supported clinical studies answered several important clinical questions while the ban on federal support remained in effect, however, and increased scientific knowledge was soon followed by an increasingly clear analysis of the relevant issues. By the time federal support for the research was permitted, the arguments of all of the interest groups had been altered by the findings of privately supported studies.As research continues under the auspices of a somewhat more permissive administration, these refined arguments and attitudes may continue to contribute to a stronger and more clearly defined public policy. (shrink)

ABSTRACTPrevious research has examined emotion regulation and trauma in the context of psychopathology, yet little research has examined ER in posttraumatic growth, the experience of pos...

An account of the life and works of the Danish scientist and theologian Nicolas Steno (1638-1686), who played a crucial role in the intellectual networks amongst philosophers and natural scientists in the late seventeenth century.

Perhaps, as Professor Battaglia remarks in his Introduction, the German people has the philosophical vocation: Si può persino dire, con una certa enfasi, che il popolo tedesco ha ‘la’ vocazione filosofica. Certainly it was a happy idea to invite distinguished German and Austrian philosophers to explain each his philosophical standpoint. The project was successfully carried out by the Institute of Philosophy in the University of Bologna. The list of contributors speaks for itself: Theodor W Adorno, Ernst Bloch, Leo Gabriel, Hans (...) G Gadamer, Romano Guardini, Dietrich von Hildebrand, Helmut Kuhn, Ludwig Landgrebe, Johannes Baptista Lotz, Karl Löwith, Friedrich Max Müller, Josef Pieper, Helmut Plessner, Fritz-Joachim von Rintelen, Amadeo Silva-Tarouca, Ernst Topitsch, and Carl F von Weizsäcker. The page or two of biography that precedes each essay is helpful; there are as many contrasts here as there are between the different philosophical perspectives outlined by the contributors; and there is one striking similarity in the interruption of the careers of so many of these men—all now in their sixties or older—by the Nazi period. Professor Felice Battaglia’s Introduzione deserves to stand with the other contributions; it is a summary that weaves together with considerable skill the strands of German philosophy represented by writers as various as Bloch and Guardini or Pieper and Plessner. German philosophy, he points out, has come a long way from the gnoseological problems of Kant or the absolutism of Hegel; it has unexpectedly found its way, via phenomenology and existentialism, back to a situation in which one can say: Teologia non spaventa molti pensatori tedeschi. (shrink)

Nicolas Steno’s criticism of L’Homme played a major role in the early reception of Cartesianism: from the late 1660s, the Discourse on the Anatomy of the Brain has never ceased being used in order to discredit Descartes’s philosophy. And yet, the anatomical works of Nicolas Steno are themselves informed by Cartesian method. This paradox has led to the depiction of Steno either as a repentant Cartesian or a non-Cartesian mechanist. In this paper, I clarify such problematic labels (...) by studying the different kinds of relationships between anthropology and anatomy that L’Homme may have used to justify. In particular, I show how Descartes’ clock analogy was used to defend two different conceptions of the articulation between anatomical observations and functional hypotheses respectively in La Forge and in Steno. (shrink)

El presente artículo aborda la pregunta por la filosofía, las ideas y la verdad en el pensamiento spinoziano, así como el camino para acceder a ellas. Para esto, trazamos un recorrido histórico que comprende una serie de cartas y comentarios que incluyen a Burgh, Steno y Leibniz. Esto nos permitirá, por un lado, mostrar la relevancia histórico-filosófica del debate y, por otro, sostener nuestra hipótesis, según la cual Spinoza consideraría su filosofía como verdadera porque parte de una concepción sobre (...) la naturaleza misma de las ideas que no otorga un estatuto de realidad al error en cuanto tal, dado que en la inmanencia spinoziana no hay ideas completamente inadecuadas o falsas. (shrink)

Nicolaus Steno (1638–1686) claimed that the Earth has a history that can be known by analyzing mountain strata with rules today known as Steno’s Principles of Stratigraphy. This essay argues that Steno’s research on the Earth was intrinsically related to his studies of the body. Most accounts associate Steno’s research on fossils with his dissection of a shark in the fall of 1666 in Medici Florence. Instead, the author suggests that Steno turned to the Earth (...) after reading a manuscript about fossils that contradicted his research methods. The essay shows how, exactly, Steno shifted his research and writing methods from anatomy to geology. In short, by reading Steno’s geology in light of his anatomical work, the essay presents anatomy as an influential discipline that contributed to other areas of knowledge and helped to spread the idea of laws of nature. It also problematizes the categories of seventeenth-century polymathy. (shrink)

Moving from Paris, Pisa, and Oxford to London, Amsterdam, and Cambridge, this essay documents extensive collaborations between anatomists and mathematicians. At a time when no standard way to acknowledge collaboration existed, it is remarkable that in all the cases I discuss anatomists expressed in print their debt to mathematicians. The cases I analyze document an extraordinarily fertile period in the history of anatomy and science and call into question historiographic divisions among historians of science and medicine. I focus on (...) class='Hi'>Steno's Myology, showing how his collaboration with mathematician Viviani led to a geometrical treatment of muscular contraction and to an epistemology inspired by Galileo. The collaboration between Steno and Viviani enables us to interpret a major text in the history of anatomy, one whose implications had so far eluded historians. (shrink)

The anatomist Nicolaus Steno, a key figure of the Scientific Revolution and founder of modern geology, engaged in research on human procreation and proved for the first time that women have ovaries and not so-called female testicles. Steno took the view of “simultaneous animation” of the embryo and demythologized malformations of the embryo by appealing to original sin. His sexual ethics presages the pastoral constitution Gaudium et spes. Steno, who was later ordained a priest and consecrated a (...) bishop, was a defender of human life and looked at the human body as an “interpreter” of divine love. He was beatified by Pope St. John Paul II in 1988; his tomb is in the Basilica San Lorenzo in Florence. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 15.1 : 107–126. (shrink)

The book presented here is dedicated to the scientist, anatomist, geologist, theologian and bishop, Niels Stensen. He was born in 1638 in Copenhagen into a family of Lutheran parsons and preachers. He studied first in his native town and then at the Faculty of medicine in Leiden, in the Netherlands, before embarking on several trips throughout Europe, in France and Italy in particular. On November 2, 1667, he converted to Catholicism in Florence, and from then his interests turned more and (...) more toward theology. However, he still published many scientific works before being ordained bishop in Rome in 1677. From 1678, he lived in Schwerin, the seat of his bishopric, where he died in 1686. Three centuries later, following the pressing demands of a committee of supporters led mainly by Gustav Scherz, the canonization process began, and in 1988 Stensen was finally declared Blessed of the Roman Catholic Church.The book edited by Kardel and Maquet collects for the first time the English tran .. (shrink)