Plusieurs générations chrétiennes ont été convaincues que le christianisme était la seule vraie religion du salut parce qu’il a eu l’audace de dire que Dieu est venu dans l’histoire et y a posé des actes de salut. Et cela a influencé un langage de l’exclusivité. Cependant, la proximité physique des grandes religions du monde et la connaissance que nous en avons aujourd’hui, ne nous obligent-elles pas d’abandonner ce discours exclusiviste? Et la théologie chrétienne des religions ne devrait-elle pas, à partir (...) des “relativités immanentes” au christianisme, faire place à un langage de relativité? Dans ce cas, comment alors conserver la singularité du christianisme comme religion de salut? Voilà les questions auxquelles l’auteur tente de répondre dans cet article. (shrink)

"Williams's masterful translation satisfies (at last!) a long-standing need. There are lots of good translations of Augustine's great work, but until now we have been forced to choose between those that strive to replicate in English something of the majesty and beauty of Augustine's Latin style and those that opt instead to convey the careful precision of his philosophical terminology and argumentation. Finally, Williams has succeeded in capturing both sides of Augustine's mind in a richly evocative, impeccably reliable, elegantly readable (...) presentation of one of the most impressive achievements in Western thought--Augustine's Confessions." --Scott MacDonald, Professor of Philosophy and Norma K. Regan Professor in Christian Studies, Cornell University. (shrink)

In this book, Augustine Brannigan provides a critical examination of the major theories which have been devised to account for discoveries and innovations in ...

This is a sequel to Augustine Shutte's previous book Philosophy for Africa. In that book he engages with some concepts central to traditional African thinking about human nature and society. In this book he offers a new interpretation of the chief ethical idea in African thought, Ubuntu. He argues that it complements the central European ethical notion of individual freedom, and shows how the two ideas can be combined to form an ethic based on a richer understanding of our humanity. (...) He then applies this ethic to different spheres of life: gender relations, sex and family life, education, health care, work, politics and religion. In each sphere he tries to show how an ethic of Ubuntu can provide concrete guidance for our continuing struggle to make a multi-cultural South Africa a truly humane society. (shrink)

The violation of Bell inequalities seems to establish an important fact about the world: that it is non-local. However, this result relies on the assumption of the statistical independence of the measurement settings with respect to potential past events that might have determined them. Superdeterminism refers to the view that a local, and determinist, account of Bell inequalities violations is possible, by rejecting this assumption of statistical independence. We examine and clarify various problems with superdeterminism, looking in particular at its (...) consequences on the nature of scientific laws and scientific reasoning. We argue that the view requires a neo-Humean account of at least some laws, and creates a significant problem for the use of statistical independence in other parts of physics and science more generally. (shrink)

There is little doubt that a second-order axiomatization of Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory plus the axiom of choice (ZFC) is desirable. One advantage of such an axiomatization is that it permits us to express the principles underlying the first-order schemata of separation and replacement. Another is its almost-categoricity: M is a model of second-order ZFC if and only if it is isomorphic to a model of the form Vκ, ∈ ∩ (Vκ × Vκ) , for κ a strongly inaccessible ordinal.

In this new translation the brilliant and impassioned descriptions of Augustine's colourful early life are conveyed to the English reader with accuracy and art. Augustine tells of his wrestlings to master his sexual drive, his rare ascent from a humble Algerian farm to the edge of the corridors of high power at the imperial court of Milan, and his renunciation of secular ambition and marriage as he recovered the faith that his mother had taught him. It was in a Milan (...) garden that Augustine finally achieved the act of will to Christian conversion, which he compared to a lazy man in bed finally deciding it is time to get up and face the day. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. (shrink)

Has philosophy anything of value to offer Africa? Has Africa anything of value to offer contemporary philosophy? This text answers yes to both of these questions and deals with the question of human freedom and the problem of liberation in the context of postcolonial contemporary Africa.

"Translated with an uncanny sense for the overall point of Augustine's doctrine. In short, a very good translation. The Introduction is admirably clear." --Paul Vincent Spade, Indiana University.

The De Doctrina Christiana is one of Augustine's most important works on the classical tradition. Undertaken at the same time as the Confessions, is sheds light on the development of Augustine's thought, especially in the areas of ethics, hermeneutics, and sign-theory. What is most interesting, however, is its careful attempt to indicate precisely what elements of a classical education are valuable for a Christian, and how the precepts of Ciceronian rhetoric may be used to communicate Christian truth. An up-to-date translation (...) has long been necessary, for readers of Augustine and all who study the early church, or the classical tradition, or the history of literary criticism or Biblical interpretation. This completely new translation gives a close but stylish representation of Augustine's thought and expression. A succinct introduction and select bibliography embodies the results of recent work. (shrink)

The best available introduction to the political thought of Augustine, if not to Christian political thought in general. Included are generous selections from _City of God_, as well as from many lesser-known writings of Augustine.

This article provides theoretical foundations to the widespread intuition that an individual duty to reduce one's carbon emissions should not be overly demanding, and should leave some space to personal life-projects. It does so by looking into the moral structure of aggregative problems such as climate change, and argues that contributing to climate change is less wrong than causing the same amount of harm in paradigm cases of harm-doing. It follows that strong agent-relative reasons, such as consideration of the agent's (...) most important life-projects, are likely sometimes to outweigh the reasons for refraining from contributing to climate change, especially when there is no alternative course of action. This, however, does not mean that individual carbon-emitters are off the hook, since a lot can be done to reduce carbon emissions without jeopardising one's most important life-projects. (shrink)

Geoengineering as a technological intervention to avert the dangerous climate change has been on the table at least since 2006. The global outreach of the technology exercised in a non-encapsulated system, the concerns with unprecedented levels and scales of impact and the overarching interdisciplinarity of the project make the geoengineering debate ethically quite relevant and complex. This paper explores the ethical desirability of geoengineering from an overall review of the existing literature on the ethics of geoengineering. It identifies the relevant (...) literature on the ethics of geoengineering by employing a standard methodology. Based on various framing of the major ethical arguments and their subsets, the results section presents the opportunities and challenges at stake in geoengineering from an ethical point of view. The discussion section takes a keen interest in identifying the evolving dynamics of the debate, the grey areas of the debate, with underdeveloped arguments being brought to the foreground and in highlighting the arguments that are likely to emerge in the future as key contenders. It observes the semantic diversity and ethical ambiguity, the academic lop-sidedness of the debate, missing contextual setting, need for interdisciplinary approaches, public engagement, and region-specific assessment of ethical issues. Recommendations are made to provide a useful platform for the second generation of geoengineering ethicists to help advance the debate to more decisive domains with the required clarity and caution. (shrink)

_A fresh, new translation of Augustine’s third work as a Christian convert__ "The 'Cassiciacum dialogues'... are of a high literary and intellectual quality, combining Ciceronian and neo-Platonic philosophy, Roman comedy and Vergilian poetry, and early Christian theology. They are also, arguably, Augustine’s most charming works, exhibiting his whimsical levity and ironic wryness."—_Credo__ The first four works written by St. Augustine of Hippo after his conversion to Christianity are dialogues that have influenced prominent thinkers from Boethius to Bernard Lonergan. Usually called (...) the “Cassiciacum dialogues,” these four works are of a high literary and intellectual quality, combining Ciceronian and neo-Platonic philosophy, Roman comedy and Vergilian poetry, and early Christian theology. They are also, arguably, Augustine’s most charming works, exhibiting his whimsical levity and ironic wryness. _On Order_ is the third work in this tetralogy, and it is Augustine’s only work explicitly devoted to theodicy, the reconciliation of Almighty God’s goodness with evil’s existence. In this dialogue, Augustine argues that a certain kind of self-knowledge is the key to unlocking the answers to theodicy’s vexing questions, and he devotes the latter half of the dialogue to an excursus on the liberal arts as disciplines that will help strengthen the mind to know itself and God. (shrink)

_A fresh, new translation of Augustine’s fourth work as a Christian convert_ The first four works written by St. Augustine of Hippo after his conversion to Christianity are dialogues that have influenced prominent thinkers from Boethius to Bernard Lonergan. Usually called the Cassiciacum dialogues, these four works are of a high literary and intellectual quality, combining Ciceronian and neo-Platonic philosophy, Roman comedy and Vergilian poetry, and early Christian theology. They are also, arguably, Augustine’s most charming works, exhibiting his whimsical levity (...) and ironic wryness. _Soliloquies_ is the fourth work in this tetralogy. Augustine coined the term “soliloquy” to describe this new form of dialogue. _Soliloquies__,_ a conversation between Augustine and his reason, fuses the dialogue genre and Roman theater, opening with a search for intellectual and moral self-knowledge before converging on the nature of truth and the question of the soul’s immortality. Foley’s volume also includes _On the Immortality of the Soul__,_ which consists of notes for the unfinished portion of the work. (shrink)

I argue that Neo-Fregean accounts of arithmetical language and arithmetical knowledge tacitly rely on a thesis I call [Success by Default]—the thesis that, in the absence of reasons to the contrary, we are justified in thinking that certain stipulations are successful. Since Neo-Fregeans have yet to supply an adequate defense of [Success by Default], I conclude that there is an important gap in Neo-Fregean accounts of arithmetical language and knowledge. I end the paper by offering a naturalistic remedy.

I argue for an account of vagueness according to which the root of vagueness lies not in the type of semantic-value that is best associated with an expression, but in the type of linguistic practice that renders the expression meaningful. I suggest, in particular, that conventions about how to use sentences involving attributions of vague predicates to borderline cases prevail to a lesser degree than conventions about how to use sentences involving attributions of vague predicates to clear cases.

Because every single one of us will die, most of us would like to know what—if anything—awaits us afterward, not to mention the fate of lost loved ones. Given the nearly universal vested interest we personally have in deciding this question in favor of an afterlife, it is no surprise that the vast majority of books on the topic affirm the reality of life after death without a backward glance. But the evidence of our senses and the ever-gaining strength of (...) scientific evidence strongly suggest otherwise. -/- In The Myth of an Afterlife: The Case against Life after Death, Michael Martin and Keith Augustine collect a series of contributions that redress this imbalance in the literature by providing a strong, comprehensive, and up-to-date casebook of the chief arguments against an afterlife all in one place. Divided into four separate sections, this essay collection opens the volume with a broad overview of the issues, as contributors consider the strongest available evidence as to whether or not we survive death—in particular the biological basis of all mental states and their grounding in brain activity that ceases to function at death. Next contributors consider a host of conceptual and empirical difficulties that confront the various ways of "surviving" death—from bodiless minds to bodily resurrection to any form of posthumous survival. Then essayists turn to internal inconsistencies between traditional theological conceptions of an afterlife—Heaven, Hell, karmic rebirth—and widely held ethical principles central to the belief systems undergirding those notions. In the final section, authors offer critical evaluations of the main types of evidence for an afterlife. -/- Fully interdisciplinary, The Myth of an Afterlife: The Case against Life after Death brings together a variety of fields of research to make that case, including cognitive neuroscience, philosophy of mind, personal identity, philosophy of religion, moral philosophy, psychical research, and anomalistic psychology. As the definitive casebook of arguments against life after death, this collection is required reading for any instructor, researcher, and student in philosophy, religious studies, and theology. It is sure to raise provocative issues new to readers, regardless of background, from those who believe fervently in the reality of an afterlife to those who do not or are undecided on the matter. (shrink)

Corruption is a major problem in many of the world’s developing economies today. World Bank studies put bribery at over $1 trillion per year accounting for up to 12 of the GDP of nations like Nigeria, Kenya and Venezuela. Though largely ignored for many years, interest in world wide corruption has been rekindled by recent corporate scandals in the US and Europe. Corruption in the developing nations is said to result from a number of factors. Mass poverty has been cited (...) as a facilitating condition for corruption just as an inability to manage a sudden upsurge in mineral revenues has been credited with breeding corruption and adventurous government procurement among public officials in countries like Nigeria and Venezuela. Virtually all developing nations that have serious corruption problems also have very limited economic freedom and a very weak enforcement of the rule of law. In such nations, corruption represents a regressive taxation that bears hard on the poor. It has a dampening effect on development and it could result in the production of inferior goods as companies find ways to accommodate under-the-table payments. Finally, corruption is a dangerous threat to the legitimacy of the governments of some of the developing nations themselves. It is suggested that new urgent initiatives are needed to deal with the dangers posed by corruption in the developing economies. They include making the economies of these nations more open by the withdrawal of the government from the productive sector and by the abolition of unnecessarily stringent restrictions on business conduct. The rule of law needs to be strengthened in these nations and those countries like Nigeria and Venezuela should ignore scruples over sovereignty and seek foreign assistance in the management of their oil wealth. Finally, multinationals should be made to disclose all the payments they make in developing nations to such organizations like International Chamber of Commerce or Transparency International where they can be reviewed by anyone interested. (shrink)

_A fresh, new translation of Augustine’s inaugural work as a Christian convert_ The first four works written by St. Augustine of Hippo after his conversion to Christianity have influenced prominent thinkers from Boethius to Bernard Lonergan. Usually called the Cassiciacum dialogues, these four works are a “literary triumph,” combining Ciceronian and neo-Platonic philosophy, Roman comedy and Vergilian poetry, and early Christian theology. They are also, arguably, Augustine’s most charming works, exhibiting his whimsical levity and ironic wryness. In this first dialogue, (...) Augustine and his interlocutors have retreated to a quiet country villa north of Milan to explore the history and teachings of Academic Skepticism. Augustine is both sympathetic to and critical of the Skeptics, eventually hypothesizing that they could not possibly have believed everything they taught. The dialogue serves as a fitting launch point for a knowledge of God and the soul, the overall subject of the Cassiciacum tetralogy. Michael Foley’s clear, precise and playful translations are accompanied by his brief, illuminating commentaries. (shrink)

Renaturer la culture, reculturer la nature, par l'histoire : tel est le propos de ce livre. Il commence, en première partie, par la question du sujet, en montrant que l'exaltation du sujet individuel moderne a entraîné une décosmisation qui à terme est mortelle, car aucun être ne peut vivre sans un monde commun (kosmos). Nous devons donc recosmiser notre existence. La seconde partie montre que l'arrêt sur objet propre à la modernité aboutit à dépouiller les choses de leur sens, faisant (...) notamment du langage une aporie. Nous avons à remettre les mots et les choses dans le fil de leur histoire commune (leur croître-ensemble : concrescence), c'est-à-dire à les reconcrétiser. La troisième partie montre enfin que réembrayer la nature et la culture passe nécessairement par la question du rapport entre histoire et subjectivité, ce à tous les degrés de l'être, allant, par l'évolution, de la vie la plus primitive jusqu'à la conscience la plus humaine. Recosmiser, reconcrétiser, réembrayer : devant ces trois urgences, la pensée occidentale est aujourd'hui plombée par ce qui hier a fait sa force : la structure mère sujet-verbe-complément, qui à partir de la langue a orienté notre logique (avec le modèle sujet-prédicat), notre métaphysique (avec l'identité de l'être) et de là notre science (avec l'en-soi de l'objet), toutes fondées sur le double principe d'identité et de tiers exclu, c'est-à-dire sur la forclusion du symbolique. Des exemples tels que la langue japonaise, dont la structure mère était d'un autre genre, ou que le tétralemme développé par les penseurs indiens, qui inclut systématiquement le tiers, nous montrent la voie : dépasser les apories de la modernité ne se fera pas sans l'appoint, logique et ontologique à la fois, des grandes civilisations de l'Asie. On ambitionne ainsi de faire mentir le fameux adage de Kipling, Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet. (shrink)

The present study aims to investigate the psychological mechanisms beneath the change in the facial expression of some of the beheaded characters in Caravaggio’s works, starting from The Head of Medusa, from the artist’s youth, and reaching David with the Head of Goliath, a mature workpiece, searching the continuity between them through a series of self-portraits/ self-insertions of the artist in his work. The psychodynamic analysis is limited by the constitution of its practice to the study of the process of (...) image production and the artistic imaginary, rather than to the investigation of man or the artist out of reach by means of figurative and symbolic language. This approach aims to highlight the drives of the unconscious, the structures of censorship and the technique of operating of the defensive mechanisms that ultimately could contribute to the production of such masterful images that are both seductive and confusing. The study incorporates and continues the contribution of authors such as Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit who applied Laplanche’s theory of generalized seduction theory in the analysis of Caravaggio’s works, but also the mirror stage of Lacan and the masterful study of Winnicott regarding the reflection of the baby in the mimics of his mother, an unconscious unclear image that will stand forever for the perception of the self. The change of the affective resonance, expressiveness and emotional relating to violence is natural in the course of human evolution. While not even the artist Caravaggio can elude it, his work can illustrate by deflection these transforma­tions of the dynamics of the mind, it can raise new questions and open new perspectives of understanding the artistic drive. (shrink)

These new translations of two treatises dealing with the possibility and nature of knowledge in the face of skeptical challenges are the first to be rendered from the Latin critical edition, the first to be made specifically with a philosophical audience in mind, and the first to be translated by a scholar with expertise in both modern epistemology and philosophy of language.

INTRODUCTION1 ARELY HAS A GREAT AND INFLUENTIAL THINKER taken pains to let others look at his previous literary career through his very own eyes....

_A fresh, new translation of Augustine’s inaugural work as a Christian convert_ The first four works written by St. Augustine of Hippo after his conversion to Christianity are dialogues that have influenced prominent thinkers from Boethius to Bernard Lonergan. Usually called the Cassiciacum dialogues, these four works are a “literary triumph,” combining Ciceronian and neo-Platonic philosophy, Roman comedy and Vergilian poetry, and early Christian theology. They are also, arguably, Augustine’s most charming works, exhibiting his whimsical levity and ironic wryness. In (...) this second, brief dialogue, Augustine and his mother, brother, son, and friends celebrate his thirty-second birthday by having a “feast of words” on the nature of happiness that includes a bittersweet metaphorical birthday cake. Using a process of reasoning that is philosophical as well as theological, Augustine and the group conclude that the truly happy life consists of “having God” through faith, hope, and charity. Michael Foley’s clear, precise and playful translations are accompanied by his brief, illuminating commentaries. (shrink)

Cloning, gene therapy, stem-cell harvesting—are we on the path to a Huxley-like Brave New World? Not really, argues political philosopher and Kass Commission member Peter Augustine Lawler in Stuck with Virtue: The American Individual and Our Biotechnological Future, even as he admits that we will likely become more obsessive and anxious and will be subjected to new forms of tyranny. Rather, he contends, human nature is such that the biotechnological world to come, despite the best efforts of its proponents, will (...) still fail to make it possible to feel good without being good. It will be harder, Lawler warns, to be virtuous in the future, because we will be more detached than ever from the natural sources of happiness. But we may take some solace in the fact that virtue will still be the best way to live well with what we really know. With irony and wit, Lawler delivers the good news about the future of the American individual: We’re going to remain free, because the modern effort to make increasingly individualistic human beings at home with themselves and their environments through technological progress cannot succeed. That is the truth and promise, concludes Lawler, of a genuinely postmodern conservatism. (shrink)

In the past 2 decades latent variable modeling has become a standard tool in the social sciences. In the same time period, traditional linear structural equation models have been extended to include non-linear interaction and quadratic effects (e.g., Klein and Moosbrugger, 2000 ), and multilevel modeling (Rabe-Hesketh et al., 2004 ). We present a general non-linear multilevel structural equation mixture model (GNM-SEMM) that combines recent semiparametric non-linear structural equation models (Kelava and Nagengast, 2012 ; Kelava et al., 2014 ) with (...) multilevel structural equation mixture models (Muthén and Asparouhov, 2009 ) for clustered and non-normally distributed data. The proposed approach allows for semiparametric relationships at the within and at the between levels. We present examples from the educational science to illustrate different submodels from the general framework. (shrink)