Although the basis of modern biology is Cartesian, Descartes’s theories of biology have been more often ridiculed than studied. Yet, Dennis Des Chene demonstrates, the themes, arguments, and vocabulary of his mechanistic biology pervade the writings of many seventeenth-century authors. In his illuminating account of Cartesian physiology in its historical context, Des Chene focuses on the philosopher’s innovative reworking of that field, including the nature of life, the problem of generation, and the concepts of health and illness. Des (...) Chene begins by surveying works that Descartes would likely have encountered, from late Aristotelian theories of the soul to medical literature and treatises on machines. The Cartesian theory of vital operations is examined, with particular attention to the generation of animals. Des Chene also considers the role of the machine-model in furnishing a method in physiology, the ambiguities of the notion of machine, and of Descartes’s problem of simulation. Finally, he looks at,the various kinds of unity of the body, both in itself and in its union with the soul. Spirits and Clocks continues Des Chene’s highly regarded exploration -- begun in his previous book, Life’s Form -- of the scholastic and Cartesian sciences as well as the dialogue between these two worldviews. Introduction 1 Part One - Tales of the Bête-Machine [ 1 ] - Self-Movers 13 [ 2 ] - Where Do Machines Come From? 32 [ 3 ] - The Uses of Usus 53 Part Two - Machines, Mechanisms, Bodies, Organs [ 4 ] - Tools of Knowledge 71 [ 5 ] - Jeux D’Artifice 103 [ 6 ] - Unity of the Body 116 Conclusion 153 Bibliography 159 Index 177. (shrink)

Il nous paraît assez significatif qu'au long de l'histoire de la philosophic, la quête du sens de l'existence se soit développée, quoique sous des modes différents, dans une étroite relation avec le dévoilement de la mort. Dans son effort de se donner la réalité, l'activité rationnelle effectue une séparation avec cette réalité, reproduisant ainsi la coupure originelle des êtres vécue dans l'expérience du changement; cependant, nous croyons déceler dans cette activité même une action sur cette séparation, une conquête, une maîtrise, (...) qu'elle prenne la forme du défi ou de l'assomption. L'exercice de mort caractéristique de la philosophic serait-il done le prélude d'une création? (shrink)

Physiologia provides an accessible and comprehensive guide to late Aristotelian natural philosophy; with that context in hand, it offers new interpretations of major themes in Descartes’s natural philosophy.

It is difficult now to imagine an intellectual landscape so thoroughly dominated by one figure as was that of the Schools by Aristotle. Except on certain well-known questions, the presumption was that Aristotle, suitably interpreted, was right. Nevertheless Aristotelianism was no frozen monolith. During the four centuries of its predominance, it continued to change, and admitted on all but fundamental points or those on which ecclesiastical authorities had pronounced, a great latitude—within, as in all such frameworks, the limits of its (...) thinkable. (shrink)

Finally, he looks at,the various kinds of unity of the body, both in itself and in its union with the soul.Spirits and Clocks continues Des Chene's highly ...

The science of the soul exceeds all other parts of philosophy not only in “dignity and exactness”, but also in “usefulness, necessity, charm, and, above all, in difficulty”.1 As the body is the subject of health and disease, so too the soul is the subject of virtue and vice; and just as the physician must devote great effort to knowing the body, anyone who treats morals “must take care to have a clear understanding of things pertaining to the scientia de (...) anima”.2 To be mistaken about the soul, in the way of materialists or the impious Averroes, is to leave “the good without reward, and evil without punishment”, and thus to “uproot all good morals, all laws and Republics”.3 The study of the soul is inescapably a prolegomenon to moral philosophy and to theology. But because it studies what is common to all living things, the science of the soul also prepares the way for the study of particular plants and animals, just as physics precedes the study of elements and mixtures.4 The natural philosopher deals with six kinds of bodies: the simple incorruptible bodies of the heavens, the simple but corruptible terrestrial elements, imperfect mixtures (ice, comets), perfect inanimate mixtures (metals and pre-. (shrink)

Experience makes its mark on us in many ways. It leaves traces; it instills habits. A trace, as I define it here, is a quality of the soul or mind which is distinguished by its content, its intentional object. Aristotelian species and Cartesian ideas are traces. A habit I take, following Suárez, to be a quality of the soul which assists in the acts of a power of the soul, enabling them to be performed more easily and promptly. I will (...) use the Latin word habitus for habits so understood. This paper examines, in a preliminary way, the fate of habitus in early modern philosophy. In comparing just two authors, Suárez and Descartes, it can only suggest, schematically, how that fate is to be understood. My suggestion is that the role of habitus in Suárez’s psychology is occupied in Descartes’ psychology by association, understood mechanistically, and by resolution—the mind’s act of binding itself to be guided by certain judgments. These, being acts of will directed toward ideas, are rather traces than habits. No doubt the history is not so simple as this contrast makes it appear. Already, we will see, in Suárez and Descartes, we must complicate the scheme: in Suárez’s case, by the fact that some habitus seem to be expressible as rules; in Descartes’, by phenomena resembling the Suárezian habitus. Nevertheless I think the scheme offers a useful first approximation to the early modern history of habit. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Cogito, Ergo Sum: The Life of René DescartesDennis Des CheneRichard Watson. Cogito, Ergo Sum: The Life of René Descartes. Boston: David R. Godine, 2002. pp. viii + 375. Cloth, $35.00.Somewhere between hagiography and debunking lies truth. Or so we may think: the biographer's sources are almost always tipped one way or the other, and it is his or her job to establish, or divine, the way of authentic (...) fact and, if facts fall short, then of sturdy sober hypothesis. In general the debunker has more fun, especially when the weight of tradition favors the ennobling, if not the beatification, of its subject.Descartes is a case in point. Until a few years ago, there was in English no satisfactory biography. Now there are three: an "intellectual biography" by Stephen Gaukroger, the Descartes of Geneviève Rodis-Lewis, and Watson's. Gaukroger dwells on Descartes's natural philosophy, especially in the early years. Only after 300 pages does he reach the period of the Discourse, Descartes's first published work. Rodis-Lewis offers a more even-handed treatment, the fruits of a lifetime of study. Her Descartes resembles, not the modern scientist or professional philosopher, but the ancient sage for whom metaphysics is a once-in-a-lifetime affair, and even natural philosophy subordinate to wisdom. Watson's Descartes is an altogether more worldly type, born into a family of lawyers, well-connected, touchy [End Page 113] about his place in social and scientific circles, and not all that interested in what we think of now as philosophy. Nor, for that matter, is Watson: you will look in vain for an analysis of the Meditations, a discussion of method, or a definition of générosité. (Watson does conclude, I should note, with a discussion of Descartes's doctrine on the soul, whose title might well have been "The future of an illusion" if Freud had not used it already.)If you like your philosophy uncluttered by context, if you find it worthwhile to read or write about "Cartesian skepticism" or "Cartesian dualism" without troubling yourself to understand who the historical Descartes was, or what might have moved him to confront the skeptics and save the soul, then Watson is not for you. It is emphatically a Life, not a Life and Works. It is, moreover, a life in the manner of many modern biographers, in which the biographer, rather than conceal himself behind the curtains of scholarly convention, figures into the narrative, retracing the steps of Descartes's passage to Italy, examining the baptismal certificate of Descartes's illegitimate daughter Francine, and eating lunch at the Queen Kristina restaurant "next door to the house in which Descartes died" (303). The quality of a biography thus written depends in part on the personality of its author (and in the case of Cogito Ergo Sum, the author's wife, who intervenes more than once on the side of common sense during their peregrinations). Watson is, to my mind, an agreeable companion, dedicated to the search for biographical truth, impatient with hagiographic fog and time-hallowed error, down-to-earth in his assessment of Descartes's motives and circumstances.One example to show the differences among the three biographies. In November 1618 Descartes met the future Latin schoolmaster Isaac Beeckman in Breda. Beeckman records with enthusiasm their joint endeavors in physico-mathematics over the next few months (Gaukroger has the details). It seems clear that the impetus for studying the various problems mentioned in Beeckman's Journal came from Beeckman, who had been pondering physical questions since 1613 or before. Descartes's contribution, at least at first, was his immense mathematical skill. Their interests lay largely within the "mixed mathematics" of the period, especially hydrostatics and mechanics. They also discussed music, an aspect of the "new science" now often neglected (but see H. F. Cohen, Quantifying Music [Dordrecht, 1984]). On New Year's day 1619 Descartes presented Beeckman with his Compendium musicæ (Gaukroger 74, Rodis-Lewis 51/29). A decade later, Descartes, having heard that Beeckman had appropriated the Compendium to himself, became angry and eventually, late in 1630, dismissed Beeckman with a masterpiece of de haut... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Cogito, Ergo Sum: The Life of René DescartesDennis Des CheneRichard Watson. Cogito, Ergo Sum: The Life of René Descartes. Boston: David R. Godine, 2002. pp. viii + 375. Cloth, $35.00.Somewhere between hagiography and debunking lies truth. Or so we may think: the biographer's sources are almost always tipped one way or the other, and it is his or her job to establish, or divine, the way of authentic (...) fact and, if facts fall short, then of sturdy sober hypothesis. In general the debunker has more fun, especially when the weight of tradition favors the ennobling, if not the beatification, of its subject.Descartes is a case in point. Until a few years ago, there was in English no satisfactory biography. Now there are three: an "intellectual biography" by Stephen Gaukroger, the Descartes of Geneviève Rodis-Lewis, and Watson's. Gaukroger dwells on Descartes's natural philosophy, especially in the early years. Only after 300 pages does he reach the period of the Discourse, Descartes's first published work. Rodis-Lewis offers a more even-handed treatment, the fruits of a lifetime of study. Her Descartes resembles, not the modern scientist or professional philosopher, but the ancient sage for whom metaphysics is a once-in-a-lifetime affair, and even natural philosophy subordinate to wisdom. Watson's Descartes is an altogether more worldly type, born into a family of lawyers, well-connected, touchy [End Page 113] about his place in social and scientific circles, and not all that interested in what we think of now as philosophy. Nor, for that matter, is Watson: you will look in vain for an analysis of the Meditations, a discussion of method, or a definition of générosité. (Watson does conclude, I should note, with a discussion of Descartes's doctrine on the soul, whose title might well have been "The future of an illusion" if Freud had not used it already.)If you like your philosophy uncluttered by context, if you find it worthwhile to read or write about "Cartesian skepticism" or "Cartesian dualism" without troubling yourself to understand who the historical Descartes was, or what might have moved him to confront the skeptics and save the soul, then Watson is not for you. It is emphatically a Life, not a Life and Works. It is, moreover, a life in the manner of many modern biographers, in which the biographer, rather than conceal himself behind the curtains of scholarly convention, figures into the narrative, retracing the steps of Descartes's passage to Italy, examining the baptismal certificate of Descartes's illegitimate daughter Francine, and eating lunch at the Queen Kristina restaurant "next door to the house in which Descartes died" (303). The quality of a biography thus written depends in part on the personality of its author (and in the case of Cogito Ergo Sum, the author's wife, who intervenes more than once on the side of common sense during their peregrinations). Watson is, to my mind, an agreeable companion, dedicated to the search for biographical truth, impatient with hagiographic fog and time-hallowed error, down-to-earth in his assessment of Descartes's motives and circumstances.One example to show the differences among the three biographies. In November 1618 Descartes met the future Latin schoolmaster Isaac Beeckman in Breda. Beeckman records with enthusiasm their joint endeavors in physico-mathematics over the next few months (Gaukroger has the details). It seems clear that the impetus for studying the various problems mentioned in Beeckman's Journal came from Beeckman, who had been pondering physical questions since 1613 or before. Descartes's contribution, at least at first, was his immense mathematical skill. Their interests lay largely within the "mixed mathematics" of the period, especially hydrostatics and mechanics. They also discussed music, an aspect of the "new science" now often neglected (but see H. F. Cohen, Quantifying Music [Dordrecht, 1984]). On New Year's day 1619 Descartes presented Beeckman with his Compendium musicæ (Gaukroger 74, Rodis-Lewis 51/29). A decade later, Descartes, having heard that Beeckman had appropriated the Compendium to himself, became angry and eventually, late in 1630, dismissed Beeckman with a masterpiece of de haut... (shrink)

. In aid of understanding mechanistic explanation and its limits in the 17th century, I examine the views of Pierre Sylvain Régis on generation. Régis departs from Descartes' theories on one key point. Living things, though they do not differ in nature from nonliving things, and are, as Descartes said, machines, are directly created by God, who forms the seeds of all living things at creation. Preformationism gives Régis not only a means of accounting for seeds and for specific differences (...) among living things, but also a basis for attributing purposes to them, and thus for defining health and disease in soulless creatures. (shrink)

From the topics discussed by Hattab and Menn, I examine two of special importance. The first is that of active powers: does the Cartesian natural world contain any, or is the apparent efficacy of natural agents always to be referred to God? In arguing that it is, I consider, following Hattab, Descartes' characterization of natural laws as "secondary causes." The second topic is that of ends. Menn argues, and I agree, that in late Aristotelianism Aristotle's own conception of an "art (...) in things" has been abandoned. The point is reinforced when one considers the general divine ends which must be invoked in cases of aborted action. In them no individual agent attains its end. Yet Nature as a whole continues to act toward ends. I suggest that those general ends, to which Suárez, for example, refers, may have served later philosophers, especially Malebranche, in combining the Cartesian notion of law with a teleological interpretation of nature that Descartes, for his part, rejected. (shrink)

In recent years more and more scholars of early modern philosophy have come to acknowledge that our understanding of Descartes’s thought benefits greatly from consideration of his intellectual background. Research in this direction has taken off, but much work remains to be done. Dennis Des Chene offers a major contribution to this enterprise. This erudite book is the result of a very impressive body of research into a number of late Aristotelian scholastics, some fairly well known, such as Suárez, (...) others quite obscure. Two thirds of the book is devoted to the Aristotelians, with occasional references to Descartes; the last third focuses on Descartes, although there still much Aristotelian ground is covered. Des Chene indicates three major themes for his book: natural change and agency, the structure of material substance, and finality. (shrink)

Dennis Des Chene - Descartes Reinvented - Journal of the History of Philosophy 45:3 Journal of the History of Philosophy 45.3 498-499 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents Reviewed by Dennis Des Chene Washington University in Saint Louis Tom Sorell. Descartes Reinvented. Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xxii + 204. Cloth, $75.00. The "reinvented" Descartes of the title denotes the spontaneous Cartesianism of those who, knowingly or not, presuppose or adopt positions resembling those of the historical (...) Descartes. The historical Descartes accepted many propositions Sorell thinks we must reject; what remains, he calls "innocent Cartesianism." It is to the defense of innocent Cartesianism that Sorell's work is largely devoted. The task of the book is twofold: to recover from imputed.. (shrink)

This is a dictionary of Descartes and Cartesian philosophy, primarily covering philosophy in the 17th century, with a chronology and biography of Descartes's life and times and a bibliography of primary and secondary works related to Descartes and to Cartesians.

This essay explores Suárez’s commitment to the important causal principle of propinquity or spatial contiguity. Like many, Suárez accepted the principle of no action at a distance. It is argued that this commitment can be retained even though Suárez fundamentally altered the conception of efficient causality because this principle is independent of causality’s nature. Central to understanding Suárez’s commitment to the principle of propinquity is his account of the medium. Furthermore, the contrast between Suárez’s and René Descartes’ accounts of the (...) causal medium are historically significant for understanding the rise of mechanical philosophy during the seventeenth century. (shrink)

Are the laws of nature among the eternal truths that, according to Descartes, are created by God? The basis of those laws is the immutability of the divine will, which is not an eternal truth, but a divine attribute. On the other hand, the realization of those laws, and in particular, the quantitative consequences to be drawn from them, depend upon the eternal truths insofar as those truths include the foundations of geometry and arithmetic.

A study of the problem of animal souls as treated by Pierre Bayle in his article on Rorarius in the Dictionnaire. Early modern philosophers, if they rejected dualism, tended—as Bayle shows—to be driven either to materialism or to panpsychism.

It is a commonplace that one of the primary tasks of natural science is to discover the laws of nature. Those who don’t think that nature has laws will of course disagree; but of those who do, most will be in accord with Armstrong when he writes that natural science, having discovered the kinds and properties of things, should “state the laws” which those things “obey” (Armstrong What is a law 3). No Scholastic philosopher would have included the discovery of (...) the laws of nature among the aims of natural philosophy. Regularities there may be in an Aristotelian world, but the focus of inquiry is elsewhere —on natural kinds, powers, qualities, temperaments. There must have been a change of view at some point. The obvious period in which to look for that change is that period in which the notion of law came to the fore in natural philosophy: the seventeenth century. Though there has been occasional dissension, that notion has been with us ever since. Scientists are quite happy to talk about all sorts of laws, from the basic laws of conservation to “phenomenological” and statistical laws. Philosophers, on the other hand, have found them puzzling. The character attributed to laws seems to be in need of explanation, and yet no convincing explanation is at hand; indeed, as I have mentioned, some philosophers think that natural science has no laws, or at least that it doesn’t need to appeal to them to accomplish its ends. My suggestion will be that the configuration of features characteristic.. (shrink)

Aristotle was usually thought to have given two definitions of the soul in the second book of De Anima. The second of these calls it “that by which we live, feel, and think”.1 Of the soul’s three par ts, the vegetative is that by which we live, the sensitive that by which we feel, the rational that by which we think. Human souls have all three parts; animals the vegetative and sensitive; plants only the vegetative.

The notion of an automaton, as it is employed in the natural philosophy of Descartes and his closest followers, has three main components. None of them is new; what is new in early modern philosophy is the uses to which this old notion is put, and the idiosyncrasies into which its components are combined by subsequent philosophers. The thaumaturgic element is never entirely suppressed; but the more down-to-earth usage exemplified in antiquity by Aristotle’s references predominates. The automaton is quite often (...) the opposite of wonderful: phenomena that might excited wonder are proved to be unworthy of it, just by showing that they are the productions of an automaton. The automaton is, first of all, a machine, and therefore an artifact, human or (if the metaphor becomes literal) divine. It offers a model of intelligibility—to use Peter Dear’s term—for a certain class of natural phenomena, namely those we find in living things. But Descartes wants from it something more. In Descartes’ usage, a machine is that which makes itself available not just to “mechanical” explanation, but to a complete explanation, an explanation that makes all others superfluous. Not all machines, of course, are automata. Two further components figure in the notion. One is that automata are typically imitative. From the automata thaumata of Aristotle’s De Motu animalium to the nymphs of Salomon de Caus’s fountains, many automata are likenesses, partaking both of the iconic (to use Peirce’s term) and the symbolic. Moving sculptures proceed moving pictures by over two thousand years. They succeeded if they convinced their audiences that they could do what their prototypes did—where the doing is typically restricted to some few sorts of act. The wind-up mouse skitters across the floor like a real mouse; but it does not eat, nor does it seek the.. (shrink)

Bayle's article on Rorarius, author of a work purporting to demonstrate that animals reason better than humans, describes and rejects all but one of the current opinions concerning the souls of animals. That survivor is Leibniz's theory of monads, but Bayle cannot accept pre-established harmony, and so Leibniz goes by the wayside too. Bayle exhibits clearly the consequences of Cartesianism for attempts to distinguish us from the animals. The alternatives are reduced to two: either we do not have an immortal (...) soul, or animals do. Both are untenable on moral grounds. The result for Bayle is that no opinion on animal souls can be stably maintained. (shrink)

Roger Ariew, Descartes and the Last Scholastics (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1999), pp. 256 + ills. $ 45.00. ISBN 0801436036. -/- Roger Ariew, John Cottingham, and Tom Sorrell (eds.), Descartes' "Meditations. Background Source Materials (Cambridge Philosophical Texts in Context) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. xviii +270 £45.00. ISBN 0521481260 (hardback); £ 16.95 ISBN 0521485797.

My title, of course, is an exaggeration. The world no more became mathematical in the seventeenth century than it became ironic in the nineteenth. Either it was mathematical all along, and seventeenth-century philosophers discovered it was, or, if it wasn’t, it could not have been made so by a few books. What became mathematical was physics, and whether that has any bearing on the furniture of the universe is one topic of this paper. Garber says, and I agree, that for (...) Descartes bodies are the things of geometry made real ( Ref). That is a claim about the world: what God created, and what we know in physics, is nothing other than res extensa and its modes. Others, including Marion, hold that in modern science, here represented at its origins by Descartes, representation displaces beings: the knower no longer confronts Being or beings but rather a system of signs, a “code” as Marion calls it, to which the knower stands in the relation of subject to object. The Meditations, or perhaps even the Regulæ, are the first step toward the transcendental idealism of Kant. Most of this paper will be devoted to a more concrete question. Physics in the seventeenth century increasingly became a matter of applying mathematical knowledge to the solution of physical problems. The “mixed sciences” of astronomy, optics, and music, sciences then distinct from physics, became models of understanding for all of natural philosophy. My interest here is in one aspect of that development: how particular physical situations are transformed into mathematical. I will look at the work of Descartes and Isaac Beeckman, contrasting their visions of “physico-mathematics”. (shrink)

In the history of philosophy, Jacques Rohault and Pierre-Sylvain Régis bear a twofold burden. They are professed followers, epigones. Worse yet, the natural philosophy they teach has been consigned to the Tartarus of fable: not a theory that failed, but something that failed even to be a theory. In the years in which they were turning Cartesianism into a system, Newton and Huygens were preparing its demise. Its empirical claims were refuted, its mathematics was rendered obsolete by the calculus, its (...) vortices and channelled magnetic particles met with the same rough justice Descartes meted out to Scholastic forms and qualities. Canonical history has little use for such figures. It prefers originals. Yet if ideas and arguments are not to seem to pass magically from one great mind to the next, we must have some account of the channels through which what was once novel and unique sediments into cliché and common ground. Those channels are not without bias and noise. Inevitably, currents from different streams meet and mix more or less coherently in the works of secondary figures, especially in the competitive intellectual world of the later seventeenth century, with its sometimes ferocious polemics fuelled by religious and political opposition. Cartesianism became a movement and—to use Leibniz’s word—a sect, divided within by disputes over the legacy of its founder, and facing opposition without from steadfast Aristotelians, pious theologians, and the avant garde of the new science. In Régis and Rohault Descartes’ legacy took the outward form of “system”. They present themselves as reworking Cartesian concepts and arguments into something coherent and comprehensive. Rohault, the more modest of the two, aims to reform the teaching of physics, still weighed down by the dead hand of Aristotle. He retains for the old philosophy only what is true and conjoin it with the new physics of Descartes, in whom France is no less fortunate than Greece once was in Aristotle (Rohault 1718, “Præfatio”).. (shrink)

There is disagreement in the literature about the exact nature of the phenomenon of empathy. There are emotional, cognitive, and conditioning views, applying in varying degrees across species. An adequate description of the ultimate and proximate mechanism can integrate these views. Proximately, the perception of an object's state activates the subject's corresponding representations, which in turn activate somatic and autonomic responses. This mechanism supports basic behaviors that are crucial for the reproductive success of animals living in groups. The Perception-Action Model, (...) together with an understanding of how representations change with experience, can explain the major empirical effects in the literature. It can also predict a variety of empathy disorders. The interaction between the PAM and prefrontal functioning can also explain different levels of empathy across species and age groups. This view can advance our evolutionary understanding of empathy beyond inclusive fitness and reciprocal altruism and can explain different levels of empathy across individuals, species, stages of development, and situations. Key Words: altruism; cognitive empathy ; comparative; emotion; emotional contagion; empathy ; evolution; human; perception-action; perspective taking. (shrink)

Somewhere between hagiography and debunking lies truth. Or so we may think: the biographer’s sources are almost always tipped one way or the other, and it is his or her job to establish, or divine, the way of authentic fact and, if facts fall short, then of sturdy sober hypothesis. In general the debunker has more fun, especially when the weight of tradition favors the ennobling, if not the beatification, of its subject.

Relatively subtle forms of exploitation of human subjects may arise from the inefficiency or incompetence of a researcher, from the existence of a power imbalance between principal and subject, or from the uneven distribution of research risks among various segments of the population. A powerful and knowledgeable person (or institution) may perpetrate the exploitation of an unempowered and ignorant individual even without intending to. There is an ethical burden on the former to protect the interests of the vulnerable. Excessive or (...) insufficient compensation may be exploitative. However, genuine economic imperatives motivating needy volunteers have to be considered. These forms of exploitation should be appreciated in the context of social and cultural factors suggesting that the relationship between researcher and subject cannot properly be appraised as a contractual undertaking. While compliance with pertinent codes and regulations minimises the exploitative potential, they cannot be enforced in a way that does not recognise a society's peculiar characteristics. The experience with some Filipino cultural traits illustrates this point. (shrink)

We argue in this paper that so-called new wave reductionism fails to capture the nature of the interlevel relations between psychology and neuroscience. Bickle (1995, Psychoneural reduction of the genuinely cognitive: some accomplished facts, Philosophical Psychology, 8, 265-285; 1998, Psychoneural reduction: the new wave, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press) has claimed that a (bottom-up) reduction of the psychological concepts of learning and memory to the concepts of neuroscience has in fact already been accomplished. An investigation of current research on the phenomenon (...) of long-term potentiation reveals that this claim overstates the facts. Both the psychological and the neural concepts involved have not yet stabilized and face further correction under the influence of both bottom-up and top-down selection pressures. In addition, psychological concepts often refer to functions, and functions are indispensable and irreducible. Function ascriptions pick out objective patterns involving historical factors and distal goals. This view of functions implies that psychological facts cannot be simply read off from the neurophysiological facts. Although psychological theorizing is constrained by neurophysiology (and vice versa), psychology remains distinct at least to some degree. (shrink)

This study examined the ethical issues experienced by nurses working in a small group of elderly persons’ care settings in the UK, using a survey questionnaire previously used in other countries for examining the cultural aspects of ethical issues. However ‘culture’ relates not only to ethnicity but also the organizational culture in which care is delivered. Nurses working in elderly persons’ care settings described a range of issues faced when caring for elderly terminally ill people, which illustrated the different needs (...) of patients, relatives, professionals and society. These issues related to the unique needs of elderly people (such as dementia sufferers) and could have an impact on patients’ quality of death. (shrink)

In this article, the authors bring two personal journeys together: one author’s liberationist journey, sparked by a search for justice and liberation in the slums of Guatemala City, and the other’s lifelong commitment to practical theology and spatial justice in South Africa. A practical theology of liberation is the result of life experiences in countries of the Global South amidst the search for justice and liberation. The worlds that come together in this article are René Girard’s mimetic theory, liberation theology (...) and practical theology. This article raises the question of the cross-contextuality of practical theology and the theological application of mimetic theory to develop innovative theological methodologies that respond to the collective woundedness of the urban context in the Global South.Contribution: The main contribution of this article is the use of three seemingly different theological approaches in conjunction. This article opens the door to inform practical theology with René Girard’s mimetic theory and liberation theology. (shrink)