The papers in this volume fall into four sections. The first part deals more generally with heresy, religious movements and the Church, while the second focuses on Wyclif, covering his path to dissent, his religious doctrines, and a doctrinal comparison with Hus. Philosophical themes come to the fore in the third section, which has papers on the decline of scholasticism in the 14th century and on the trivium, and also includes hitherto unpublished essays on the theology of Augustine's two (...) cities and on Ockham and nominalism. The final part, with another two papers published here for the first time, discusses Christian, Augustinian and Franciscan concepts of man, and the concepts of natural rights according to Ockham and the Franciscans. (shrink)

Over the past four decades, Buddhists in Burma, mainly monks, have been brought before Sangha courts charged with heresy, adhamma, and malpractice, avinaya, under the jurisdiction of the State Sanghamahanayaka Committee. This body, established under General Ne Win in 1980, oversees the regulation and conduct of the Sangha. The religious courts that try these cases have the backing of state law enforcement agencies: failure to comply with their judgements is punishable by imprisonment. A guilty verdict has been passed in (...) all seventeen cases to date. There is no opportunity of appeal. The system not only protects Burmese Buddhism against corruption, but also stifles innovation and dissent. These cases, not previously discussed in scholarship outside of Burma, are significant for understanding the power of the State over the Sangha as well as the conservatism and antisecularism of Burmese Buddhism, which have set it at odds with the relativist approaches of modern, global Buddhism. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.

Thomas Hobbes's 'Historia Ecclesiastica' presents his views on religion and aims to divert the attention of the public from charges against his being a heretic to placing heresy in pagan history, claiming that Greek philosophers were responsible for introducing heresy in the Christian Church. His book reveals his interest in religious history and the growth of hermeticism and Cabalism in England in his age.

The classical Christian creeds generally address historical and metaphysical issues, such as the Trinity and the work of Christ. These doctrines are commonly construed as definitive of Christian orthodoxy or right belief. But are there behavioral standards that are essential to Christian living? If so, are beliefs about such matters as crucial to the faith as the creedal points? I introduce the concept of “moral heresy” as an ethical-doxastic category, which may be useful as a conceptual tool in addressing (...) these questions. There are potentially serious implications here for how Christians should approach some critical issues of our time, particularly regarding sexual ethics. (shrink)

In Darwinian Heresies, which was originally published in 2004, prominent historians and philosophers of science trace the history of evolutionary thought, and challenge many of the assumptions that have built up over the years. Covering a wide range of issues starting in the eighteenth century, Darwinian Heresies brings us through the time of Charles Darwin and the Origin, and then through the twentieth century to the present. It is suggested that Darwin's true roots lie in Germany, not his native England, (...) that Russian evolutionism is more significant than many are prepared to allow, and that the true influence on twentieth-century evolution biology was not Charles Darwin at all, but his often-despised contemporary, Herbert Spencer. The collection was intended to interest, to excite, to infuriate, and to stimulate further work. (shrink)

Abstractabstract:In The Trusted Doctor: Medical Ethics and Professionalism (2020), Rosamond Rhodes presents a new theory of medical ethics based on 16 duties she considers central to medical ethics and professionalism. She asserts that her theory is "bioethical heresy," as it contradicts established "principlism" and "common morality" approaches to ethics in medicine. Rhodes advocates the development of parallelism between clinical and ethical decision-making and a systematic approach that emphasizes duties over principles and rules to facilitate the development of a "doctorly (...) character" among medical decision-makers. Rhodes further asserts that her theory and approach necessitate the cultivation of virtues contained in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. But Rhodes's insistence that "medical professionals," not just doctors, are covered by her theory is open to critique, as is her conflation of ethic and morals, especially around the question of the "doctorly character" upon which her duty-based theory hinges. This assessment argues that applicants to medical schools and allied health training programs be screened for specific virtues—honesty, diligence, curiosity, and compassion—to facilitate reinforcement of these pre-professionalized inclinations throughout the habituation processes of medical training. This would increase the probability of turning fear and hope to cure and care via reasoning and affective models performed within an ethical medical framework—even while what this ethical framework should reference remains under debate. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:September 27, 2008 (1:09 pm) G:\WPData\TYPE2801\russell 28,1 048RED.wpd Reviews 89 MODERNIST HERESIES K.yE. Garay Arts & Science/Research Collections / McMaster U. Hamilton, on, Canada l8s 4m2 [email protected] Damon Franke. Modernist Heresies: British Literary History, 1883–1924. Columbus : Ohio State U. P., 2008. Pp. xx, 258. isbn 978-0-8142-1074-1 (hb). us$47.95. The editor of the Russell journal summed up Modernist Heresies: British Literary History, 1883–1924z with his usual brevity during a (...) recent conversation : “The Wrst part is about Russell and the rest of it isn’t.” In fact the Wrst two chapters are only somewhat concerned with Russell, since he Wgures as part of the Heretical Cambridge scene with which Damon Franke opens this study, but, September 27, 2008 (1:09 pm) G:\WPData\TYPE2801\russell 28,1 048RED.wpd 90 Reviews after a Xeeting appearance of both Russells, Bertie and Dora, in the opening pages of Chapter 3, Bertie is not heard from again. Franke, who teaches English at the University of Southern Mississippi, has set himself an ambitious task, the scope of which is not fully captured in this book’s title. The selection of no fewer than ten subject headings in the cataloguing data for this studyz—zheadings ranging from “Modernism (Literature)” through “English Literature”, “Religion and Literature”, “Heresies, Christian”, and “Paganism in Literature”z—zprovides the wary reader withsome forewarning of its breadth. The author’s focus is on nothing less than the emergence and development of modernism in England, using the rise and demise of what Franke terms “heresy” as his barometer. Nor does the ascribed date range, 1883– 1924, prove much more accurate; in one of the most persuasive segments of the book, the After Words, Franke extends his examination, Wrst into the 1930s and then as far as 1949, the year that Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Fourz was published. Selecting as his starting point the 1883 blasphemy trial of G.yW. Foote, the editor of The Freethinker, at which the right to attack “even the fundamentals of religion” was enshrined in English law, providing that “the decencies of controversy” are observed (p. 10), Franke argues that this decision made possible “intellectual and literary forms of heresy which questioned the principles of religion ” (ibid.). His use of the term “heresy” for his wide ranging survey of philosophical and linguistic as well as literary opinion, provoked pause in this reader. The Oxford English Dictionary, the Wrst edition of which appeared the year after Foote’s heresy trial, provides a primary deWnition of heresy as follows: Theological or religious opinion or doctrine maintained in opposition, or held to be contrary, to the “catholic” or orthodox doctrine of the Christian Church, or, by extension, to that of any church, creed, or religious system, considered as orthodox. It is only through an extended deWnition of heresy that the door opens to allow Franke’s highly variable use of the term: “Opinion or doctrine in philosophy, politics, science, art, etc., at variance with those generally accepted as authoritative ” (OED Online, 2008). As will be demonstrated, aspects of thought which the less adventurous might prefer to call agnosticism, paganism or even atheism, are subsumed into the wide-ranging scope of this provocative study. The Cambridge Heretics, the group of which Russell was an Honorary Member, provides Franke with both his heretical cornerstone and his book’s opening chapters. In a skilfully contextualized examination, Franke documents the group’s Michaelmas 1909 genesis in the shadow, or perhaps in the intellectual light, of the Chawner ATairz—zthe Master of Emmanuel’s public expression of his personal loss of religious faith. Its Wrst chairman was C.yM. Picciotto, but it was its Wrst secretary, C.yK. Ogden, a newly arrived Magdalene College under- September 27, 2008 (1:09 pm) G:\WPData\TYPE2801\russell 28,1 048RED.wpd Reviews 91 graduate, who was to prove the group’s guiding genius. Franke argues convincingly that the group, which included Bernard Shaw, J.yM. Keynes, I.yA. Richards and G.yE. Moore, as well as Russell, in its membership roster, has suTered puzzling scholarly neglect, particularly when compared with the Apostles, its... (shrink)

This paper contends that African-centered models of psychopathology represent a heretical challenge to orthodox North American Mental Health. Heresy is the defiant rejection of ideology from a smaller community within the orthodoxy. African-centered models of psychopathology use much of the same language and ideas about the diagnostic process as Western psychiatry and clinical psychology but explicitly reject the ideological foundations of illness definition. The nature of the heretical critique is discussed, and implications for the future of this school of (...) thought are offered. (shrink)

Religious legislation against heretics was an innovation in the Late Roman Empire and its enforcement involved great difficulties. The provincial governors who, except in the period of the persecution of Christians, had tolerated religious diversity, were to implement exclusion laws against pagans and heretical groups. This paper analyzes the form of interaction between bishops, emperors and judges in the issuing and enforcement of the laws against heretics, as well as casting light on the relevance of episcopal intervention as a method (...) of informing and shaping the imperial will. (shrink)

Throughout the Confessions, Augustine repeatedly complains about heresy with a special focus on the heresy he once belonged to, Manicheanism. To those of us who live in a culture in which respectable people rarely, if ever, care about religious orthodoxy to such a degree, these complaints seem rather bizarre. Despite this initial appearance, Augustine presents in the Confessions several plausible reasons for thinking heresy is sinful and, therefore, detrimental to a person’s sanctity and ultimate salvation. In this (...) paper, I argue that Augustine considers heresy sinful because it involves as many as three kinds of idolatry: loving a lie/false conception of God instead of the true God, loving one’s own beliefs more than the Truth, which is God, and loving the worldly praise one receives from developing novel opinions more than God. (shrink)

At a moment when the requirements of belief and unbelief were being negotiated in unexpected ways, transcendentalism allowed for a more creative approach to spiritual questions. Interrogating the movement's alleged atheistic underpinnings, David Faflik contends that transcendentalism reconstituted the religious sensibilities of 1830s and 1840s New England, producing a dynamic and complex array of beliefs and behaviors that cannot be categorized as either religious or nonreligious. Rather than "the latest form of infidelity," as one contemporary described it, adherents viewed their (...) unconventional and distinct spiritual practices as a modern religion. Transcendental Heresies draws on an expansive antebellum archive of period commentary and writings by transcendentalism's practitioners, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Theodore Parker, Margaret Fuller, and the women of transcendentalism's second and third waves. From Boston to Concord to the heady environs of Harvard, the species of unbelief they practiced multiplied the religious possibilities of the era, expressing misgivings about traditional notions of divinity, flouting religion's customary forms, and ultimately encouraging spiritual questioning. (shrink)

Elaborating on views I have expressed elsewhere, I argue that the common-sense notion of linguistic competence as a kind of knowledge is both required by common-sense explanatory and justificatory practice and furthermore fully compatible with the non-intentional characterization of linguistic competence provided by current linguistic theory, which is itself non-intentional.

Now I may not be an educated man . . . But it seems to me to go against common sense to ask what the poet is ‘trying to say’. The poem isn’t a code for something easily understood. The poem is what he is trying to say.

The way in which the theory of “group selection” was treated as a heresy in evolutionary biology during the latter part of the twentieth century is considered as itself being an emergent group phenomenon, and some possible reasons why this particular theory had to be repudiated by the dominant group are explored. Then the process of “heresy-hammering” in general is examined as a behavior that can block important feedback, allowing the group to engage in a form of collective (...) selfdeception, and is therefore judged to be epistemically irresponsible and potentially maladaptive in terms of the group’s long-term survival. Some possible methods of foiling this process—which seems to operate largely below the level of full conscious awareness—are proposed. (shrink)

John Henry Newman's theory of heresiology evolved over the course of his life, accentuating certain Christological characteristics of heresy. He began with the study of the Arian heresy, progressing through the Sabellian and Apolloniarian, and ending with the Monophysite. The theory of heresy and orthodoxy finally developed in the Development of Doctrine reflects this struggle to find common features of orthodoxy corresponding to principles governing Christology in the early Church Fathers. As a consequence, Newman's heresiology, in its (...) final stage, holds that faith is inherently Christological, as it depends on the doctrine of the Incarnation to secure the authority of the divine voice of Christ to which one submits in faith. (shrink)

In this paper, Graham Priest’s understanding of dialetheism, the view that there exist true contradictions, is discussed, and various kinds of metaphysical dialetheism are distinguished between. An alternative to dialetheism is presented, namely a thesis called ‘dimathematism’. It is pointed out that dimathematism enables one to escape a slippery slope argument for dialetheism that has been put forward by Priest. Moreover, dimathematism is presented as a thesis that is helpful in rejecting the claim that logic is a normative discipline.

In this article I consider a certain characteristic of our times as a “secular age,” namely, a series of complications in our understanding of transgression. Transgression implies the presence of some rules and laws which can be violated. As long as the rules and laws are perceived as right, as a way of protecting the values which would otherwise perish, transgression appears to be a wrong thing to do, a misdeed, a criminal act. Needless to say, the very conceptual structure (...) makes sense only provided that the distinctions between right and wrong, good and evil, lawful and lawless are not arbitrary, which, in turn, depends on the presence of the concept of truth. In the secular age, though, the concept of truth becomes not only difficult to handle, since it is incompatible with the modern frame of mind, but also assumes some derogatory connotations, up to the point when to insist on the distinction between (truly) right and (truly) wrong is in itself a wrong thing to do. That is the state of contemporary societies which G. K. Chesterton examines in his work Heretics. The effect of Chesterton’s reflections is a new map of right/wrong, good/evil, lawless/lawful permutations. After Chesterton, I comment on the character of a new heretic, one for whom transgression, understood as the attack on buried-for-long orthodoxy, is too easy a thing to do. To illustrate the mentioned changes of perspective, I refer to an exemplary criminal figure of the West, that is, the biblical serpent, and its criticism. (shrink)

Just before Ernst Haeckel’s death in 1919, historians began piling on the faggots for a splendid auto-da-fé. Though more people prior to the Great War learned of Darwin’s theory through his efforts than through any other source, including Darwin himself, Haeckel has been accused of not preaching orthodox Darwinian doctrine. In 1916, E. S. Russell, judged Haeckel's principal theoretical work, Generelle Morphologie der Organismen, as "representative not so much of Darwinian as of pre-Darwinian thought."1 Both Stephen Jay Gould and Peter (...) Bowler endorse this evaluation, and see as an index of Haeckel’s heterodox deviation his use of the biogenetic law that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.2 Michael Ruse, without much analysis, simply proclaims that “Haeckel and friends were not true Darwinians.”3 These historians locate the problem in Haeckel’s inclinations toward Naturphilosophie and in his adoption of the kind of Romantic attitudes characterizing the earlier biology of Goethe. These charges of heresy assume, of course, that Darwin’s own theory harbors no taint of Romanticism and that it consequently remains innocent of the doctrine of recapitulation. I think both assumptions quite. (shrink)

Vitalism, from its early modern to its Enlightenment forms (from Glisson and Willis to La Caze and Barthez), is notoriously opposed to intervention into the living sphere. Experiment, quantification, measurement are all ‘vivisectionist’, morally suspect and worse, they alter and warp the ‘life’ of the subject. They are good for studying corpses, not living individuals. This much is well known, and it has disqualified vitalist medicine from having a place in standard histories of medicine, until recent, post-Foucauldian maneuvers have sought (...) to change the situation (but for unrelated, contextualist reasons). What is perhaps more suprising is that if we consider the emergence of medical ‘theory’ as a whole, from Harvey through to Locke and Sydenham, is the presence of a sustained anti-experimentalist line of argument, and this from the ‘empiricist’ (not Cartesian or Boerhaavian rationalist) side. It would seem then that ‘empiricks’, medical empiricists and other protagonists of an ‘embodied empiricism’ are not Boylean experimentalists who seek to map out Nature in its transparency, but deliberately archaic, Hippocratic observers of living bodies. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The following text is a large fragment of the lectures on heresy that Leszek Kołakowski (1927–2009) gave between November 1982 and February 1983 on the Polish radio station Radio Free Europe. These lectures have never been published in English. They were only published under the title ‘Herezja’ in Poland after the author’s death in 2010 by the publishing company Znak. Kołakowski raises the universal and timeless issues of tolerance, ideological struggles, protection of doctrine by religious institutions and the (...) changing attitude of the Catholic Church towards heretical challenges (tackling them and attempting to annex and colonize certain ideas). The concept of heresy is an opportunity to describe the history of ideological conflicts, show how they arise and how they can be resolved. The story of struggle between dogmatists and heretics is an endless story of changing social order and giving new shapes to the reality created by people and their ideas. Kołakowski points out that any doctrinal, political or ideological system must allow for criticism and otherness. Nearly 40 years after these lectures were given, they retain a special freshness in the context of the political, ideological and social crisis that Europe is experiencing in the early twenty-first century. (shrink)

Puritanism in modern art has resulted in a quest for meaning and reality at the expense of the spirit of creativity and spontaneity.

Major difficulties for readers of Foucault’s The Order of Things concern the historical function and the logical construction of the episteme. Our proposal is to link it with another notion, the ‘point of heresy’, less frequently addressed. This leads to asserting that irreconcilable dilemmas are in fact determined by the type of rationality governing the emergence of common objects of knowledge. It also introduces a possibility of ‘walking on two roads’: a dialogical adventure within rationality. Foucault is not content (...) with either accepting or rejecting the ‘transcendental’ question ‘What is Man?’: with the help of quasi-transcendental categories performing a ‘transdisciplinary’ function, he wants to reach the ‘heretical’ point where anthropology becomes historicity within the horizon of finitude. (shrink)

In this paper, I respond to D. Jacquette's paper, "Mally's Heresy and the Logic of Meinong's Object Theory" (History and Philosophy of Logic, 10 (1989): 1-14), in which it is claimed that Ernst Mally's distinction between two modes of predication, as it is employed in the theory of abstract objects, is reducible to, and analyzable in terms of, a single mode of predication plus the distinction between nuclear and extranuclear properties. The argument against Jacquette's claims consists of counterexamples to (...) his reductions and analyses. Reasons are offered for thinking that no such reduction/analysis of the kind Jacquette proposes could be successful. (shrink)

The past decades have seen remarkable progress in the study of substructural logics, be it mathematically or philosophically oriented. This progress has a somewhat perplexing effect: the more subst...

Resumo: Como uma heresia confucionista, Mozi inicialmente chamou a atenção do missionário inglês Joseph Edkins, em 1858. Posteriormente, o missionário holandês Johann Jakob Maria de Groot traduziu a Doutrina Funerária de Mozi, que tem fortes tonalidades religiosas. Joseph e Groot, que representavam os missionários do protestantismo, interpretaram Mozi em uma variedade de narrativas teológicas. Os dois missionários, que procuravam conexões entre Mozi e o cristianismo, consideravam Mozi um cânone teológico, contendo doutrina cristã. Eles também atacaram o confucionismo, a antítese do (...) cristianismo, apontando que Mozi era um herege, na tradição confuciana. Através dessa imaginação religiosa sobre Mozi, mais missionários e sinologistas se juntaram à tradução de Mozi, e a jornada da transmissão do cânone para o Ocidente começou. (shrink)

The situation after the 13th century, however, badly needs to be clarified by additional detailed research. Bruno Nardi and Anneliese Maier have exhibited a nice understanding of the extraordinary complexities surrounding the question of what "Averroism" might be during this later period, but they stand nearly alone in this knowledge; even Gilson is content to dismiss, with a few strokes of the pen, the entire "Averroist" tradition as authority-bound, sterile, and doomed to early extinction through sheer stagnation. But the very (...) history of philosophy attests to the vitality of the tradition, whatever it may consist of, or at least to the vitality of the designation, for Cremonini in the 17th century was still preferring the commentaries of Averroes to all others, and late in the 16th century Marcantonio Zimara was commonly known as an "Averroist"--to name but two obvious cases. From before the time of Siger of Brabant through to the 17th century Averroes was read as the Commentator on Aristotle, and every generation throughout this period reveals its quota of philosophers who are, or who could easily be, dubbed "Averroists." It is here being asked: what do all these thinkers share, if anything? A common attitude toward the nature of the intellective soul? A common sympathy toward Averroes' Neo-Platonic rendering of Aristotle? A common blind reproduction of the Commentator's interpretation of the Stagirite? An unwarranted trust in the capacities of unaided reason, as manifested in a constant opposition of the conclusions of natural reason to the doctrines of the Christian Revelation? A common tendency in the direction of doubt, insincerity, heresy, and even atheism? It is here suggested that, far from taking "Averroism" as an obsolescent and disappearing species of subversive thinkers, it would be more enlightening to consider the tradition as symptomatic of the essential inability of Christian thinkers to assimilate Greek philosophy without modifications which would profoundly alter the fundamental character of that philosophy. Or, to phrase it somewhat differently, throughout the mediaeval period, when the domain of natural reason was being radically separated from the domain of faith, the rigorous rendering of Aristotle that Averroes presented maintained a steady appeal, which waned only when new translations from the Greek pointed up the Neo-Platonic predispositions of the Commentator, and revealed that the original spirit of the Stagirite was rather different than the flavor that Averroes introduces to the texts. (shrink)

Patristics is a lively scholarly domain in which theologians and historians contribute to the study of Christian antiquity. But modern trends in patristic study (especially the application of contemporary critical theory to ancient sources) are not always conducive to theological research. This paper identifies the preoccupation in modern patristic study with heresy as a major source of problems. The modern study of Evagrius Ponticus (c. 345–99) provides an exemplary case in which some of these problems can be identified and (...) explored. The initial presentation of modern scholarship will bring into focus the way that Evagrius' relationship to the sixth-century condemnations of Origenism is interpreted by most scholars. Next, the paper identifies and evaluates recent indications that Evagrius is prized precisely because he is considered a heretic. In the final section of the paper, attention is paid to the problem of presuming that subsequent events disclose the theological meaning of earlier writings and to the problem of foreclosing independent theological assessment in order to preserve ancient condemnations. The conclusions suggest that preoccupations with alleged heresy can be every bit as detrimental to understanding of theological writings as preoccupations with orthodoxy. (shrink)

This paper concerns three heterodox views in logic and metaphysics: dialetheism, noneism, and the non-transitivity of numerical identity. It explains each of the views, some of their features and applications, and some of the relationships between them.

The book documents thirty cases in which university-trained scholars were condemned for disseminating allegedly erroneous opinions in their teaching or writing.

Medieval theologians took their concept of heresy mainly from the texts of Jerome and Augustine quoted in Gratian’s Decretum. Thomas Aquinas held that anyone w ho pertinaciously denies even a minor item of Church or Bible teaching falls into heresy. Ockham developed criteria for pertinacity and argued that a Christian, even if his or her opinions are actually in error, cannot be regarded as pertinacious simply for refusing to defer to the teaching of a pope.