For the scholastic philosopher William Ockham (c. 1285-1347), there are three kinds of heresy. The first, and most unmistakable, is an outright denial of the truths of faith. Another is so obvious that a very simple person, even if illiterate, can see how it contradicts Divine Scripture. The third kind of heresy is less clear cut. It is perceptible only after long deliberation and only to individuals who are learned, and well versed in Scripture. It is this third variety of (...) heresy that J.M.M.H. Thijssen addresses in Censure and Heresy at the University of Paris, 1200-1400. The book documents 30 cases in which university trained scholars were condemned for disseminating allegedly erroneous opinions in their teaching or writing, and focuses particularly on four academic censures that have occupied prominent positions in the historiography of medieval philosophy. Thijssen grants central importance to a number of questions so far neglected by historians regarding judicial procedures, the authorities supervising the orthodoxy of teaching, and the effects of condemnations on the careers of the accused. He also places still current questions regarding academic freedom and the nature of doctrinal authority into their medieval contexts. (shrink)

By way of conclusion we may add the following three items to A. Maier's and G. Federici-Vescovini's investigations: 1. The Questiones super libris Physicorum in the ms. Cesena, B. Malatestiana S.VIII.5 have been incorrectly attributed to John Buridan. Their real author is Albert of Saxony. 2. The ms. Cesena, B. Malatestiana S.VIII.5 ff. 4ra-4vb contains the Prologue and the tabula questionum of the Questions on De gen. et corr., whereas the ms. Vat. lat. 3097 ff. 103ra-146rb has the complete text. (...) This Prologue and the questions 1 and 3 can also be found in Vat. lat. 2185 ff. 50ra-50vb. This text certainly cannot be considered as another copy of Buridan's well known Questions on De gen. et corr. Neither is it certain that Nicole Oresme is their author, as A. Maier seems to believe. There are indications pointing in the direction of a redaction other than the one known, of Buridan's Questions. In any case this possibility cannot be ruled out by the material that has been presented here. 3. The ms. Cesena, B. Malatestiana S.VIII.5 has at one time had the same owner as the codices Vat. lat. 2159, 2160, 2185 and 3066, and the codices Cesena, B. Malatestiana S.VII.5 and S.VIII.2. This owner was in all probability Bernardus a Campanea of Verona, a physician. (shrink)

This book is a collection of papers on the metaphysics and natural philosophy of John Buridan (ca. 1295-1361), one of the most innovative and influential ...

J. M. M. H. Thijssen - Nicolas d'Autrécourt et la Faculté des Arts de Paris - Journal of the History of Philosophy 46:1 Journal of the History of Philosophy 46.1 172-173 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents Reviewed by Johannes M. M. H. Thijssen Radboud University Nijmegen Stefano Caroti and Christophe Grellard, editors. Nicolas d'Autrécourt et la Faculté des Arts de Paris . Quaderni di Paideia, 4. Cesena: Stilgraf Editrice, 2006. Pp. 329. e32.00. This book is a coherent set of (...) papers resulting from a conference organized by its editors, Stefano Caroti and Christophe Grellard. In the opening paper, William Courtenay rightly observes that the 1330s are an understudied period in the intellectual history of the University of Paris, especially with respect to its.. (shrink)

In this book, a dozen distinguished scholars in the field of the history of philosophy and science investigate aspects of the commentary tradition on Aristotle's De generatione et corruptione, one of the least studied among Aristotle's treatises in natural philosophy. Many famous thinkers such as Johannes Philoponus, Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, John Buridan, Nicole Oresme, Francesco Piccolomini, Jacopo Zabarella, and Galileo Galilei wrote commentaries on it. The distinctive feature of the present book is that it approaches this commentary tradition (...) as a coherent whole, thereby ignoring the usual historiographical distinctions between the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the seventeenth century. Frans de Haas and Henk Kubbinga address the Greek commentary tradition on De generatione et corruptione. Simone van Riet's essay is devoted to the Latin version of Avicenna's third treatise of his Kitab al Shifa, which discusses Aristotle's De generatione et corruptione. James Otte traces the intricate history of the identification of the Latin translator of Aristotle's treatise as Burgundio of Pisa. The essay by John Murdoch explores the fortuna of atomistic arguments in the Latin commentary tradition. Jurgen Sarnowsky, Henk Braakhuis, and Stefano Caroti examine various themes in the commentaries that were produced by the so-called Buridan School, that is, John Buridan, Albert of Saxony, Nicholas Oresme, and Marsilius of Inghen. The article by Silvia Donati focuses on the influential commentary by the Expositor, Giles of Rome. The final essay, written by Anita Guerrini, tackles Robert Boyle's attitude in the Origin of Forms and Qualities toward such Aristotelian key concepts as forms, matter, qualities, and mixture. These essays are prefaced by a preliminary survey by Hans Thijssen of Aristotle's text, its Latin translations and its Greek, Arabic and Latin commentaries. (shrink)

In this survey, I should like to present an overview of the scholarly literature that appeared during the last decade or so in the field of fourteenth-century natural philosophy. This survey is partial in both senses of the term: it is fragmentary, and occasionally, it records my disagreements with some of the scholarly literature. Before narrowing down its scope it might be well to raise two methodological problems which one encounters when attempting to deal with the history of late-medieval natural (...) philosophy of the sort with which this survey is concerned. First, the terminology of «natural philosophy», and second, the relation between natural philosophy and theology in the late Middle Ages. (shrink)

This book explores the dynamics of the commentary and textbook traditions in Aristotelian natural philosophy under the headings of doctrine, method, and scientific and social status. It enquires what the evolution of the Aristotelian commentary tradition can tell us about the character of natural philosophy as a pedagogical tool, as a scientific enterprise, and as a background to modern scientific thought. In a unique attempt to cut old-fashioned historiographic divisions, it brings together scholars of ancient, medieval, Renaissance and seventeenth-century philosophy. (...) The book covers a remarkably broad range of topics: it starts with the first Greek commentators and ends with Leibniz. (shrink)

This book traces the historical roots of the cognitive sciences and examines pre-modern conceptualizations of the mind as presented and discussed in the tradition of commentaries on Aristotle's De anima from 1200 until 1650. It explores medieval and Renai.

Information can be public among a group. Whether or not information is public matters, for example, for accounts of interdependent rational choice, of communication, and of joint intention. A standard analysis of public information identifies it with (some variant of) common belief. The latter notion is stipulatively defined as an infinite conjunction: for p to be commonly believed is for it to believed by all members of a group, for all members to believe that all members believe it, and so (...) forth. This analysis is often presupposed without much argument in philosophy. Theoretical entrenchment or intuitions about cases might give some traction on the question, but give little insight about why the identification holds, if it does. The strategy of this paper is to characterize a practical-normative role for information being public, and show that the only things that play that role are (variants of) common belief as stipulatively characterized. In more detail: a functional role for “taking a proposition for granted” in non-isolated decision making is characterized. I then present some minimal conditions under which such an attitude is correctly held. The key assumption links this attitude to beliefs about what is public. From minimal a priori principles, we can argue that a proposition being public among a group entails common commitment to believe among that group. Later sections explore partial converses to this result, the factivity of publicity and publicity from the perspective of outsiders to the group, and objections to the aprioricity of the result deriving from a posteriori existential presuppositions. (shrink)

Should we regard Jennifer Lackey’s ‘Creationist Teacher’ as understanding evolution, even though she does not, given her religious convictions, believe its central claims? We think this question raises a range of important and unexplored questions about the relationship between understanding, factivity and belief. Our aim will be to diagnose this case in a principled way, and in doing so, to make some progress toward appreciating what objectual understanding—i.e., understanding a subject matter or body of information—demands of us. Here is the (...) plan. After some ground clearing in §1, §2 outlines and motivates a plausible working model—moderate factivity—for characterising the sense in which objectual understanding should be regarded as factive. §3 shows how the datum that we can understand false theories can, despite initial suggestions to the contrary, be assimilated straightforwardly within the moderate factivity model. §4 highlights how the inverse kind of case to that explored in §3—viz., a variant of Lackey’s creationist teacher case—poses special problems for moderate factivity. With reference to recent work on moral understanding by Hills, §5 proposes a solution to the problem, and §6 attempts to diagnose why it is that we might originally have been led to draw the wrong conclusion. (shrink)

This article focuses on the theory of solidarity presented by Émile Durkheim in The Division of Labour in Society ([1893] 1969). Despite its popularity, the distinction between mechanical and organic solidarity has received a lot of criticism. Durkheim allegedly was unable to demonstrate the superior integrating force of modern organic solidarity, while this was his central thesis at the time. A second critique challenges his macrostructural point of view. However, by confronting Durkheim’s classical theory with contemporary work, notably Honneth’s theory (...) of recognition, we can deduce a reformulated framework that is less vulnerable to the afore-mentioned critiques. On the one hand, we specify mechanical and organic solidarity as a dialectical synthesis of both internalized universalistic principles and particularistic emotional orientations. On the other, we incorporate the foregoing typology in a cyclical model that implies interacting processes of inclusion and individualization. (shrink)

The Vlaams Blok has been among the more successful of Europe’s far-right parties. But there is still a good deal of statistical analysis which might be done to help identify the factors in their success.This study looks at the best available data from electoral returns in the nine districts of Antwerp, which has been the locus of the Vlaams Blok’s support.A statistical comparison is made between various social and economic factors, and the level of support for Vlaams Blok in an (...) attempt to identify significant correlations. (shrink)

Following the distinctions proposed by Gamson and Easton the complex phenomenon of political alienation among the young was empirically subdivided in several dimensions. Within the 'input'dimension of political alienation we distinguished between the ability to process information and the ability to participate. Within the 'output'dimension we distinguished between two referents of distrust, political actors and authorities on the one hand, and the political system on the other. We succeeded in constructing reliable scales for each of these dimensions which were then (...) used as dependent variables in regression models. When turning to the explanation of the phenomenon our attention was focused first and foremost on the cultural factors. This was amply rewarded. Some of the normative aspects of culture, namely 'presenteism' and 'dionysianism', have a significant influence on various dimensions of political alienation. The impact of cognitive aspects appears to be even more significant. This means that an effective policy to counter the rise of political alienation wilt have to cope with a phenomenon solidly embedded in contemporary culture. (shrink)

Protagoras, of all the ancient philosophers, has perhaps attracted the most interest in modern times. His saying ‘Man is the measure of all things’ caused Schiller to adopt him as the patron of the Oxford pragmatists, and has generally earned him the title of the first humanist. Yet the exact delineation of his philosophcal position remains a baffling task. Neumann, writing on Die Problematik des ‘Homo-mensura’ Satzes in 1938,2 concludes that no certainty whatever can be reached on the meaning of (...) the dictum, since ‘man’, ‘measure’, and ‘things’ are all ambiguous, nor can we tell which of the three is the predicate. The time is past when it was believed that a man's philosophy could be understood apart from the events of his life and the circumstances of his age: yet in the case of Protagoras the historical method of approach has hardly been attempted, although the impact of environment was perhaps more decisive in the formation of philosophical concepts in the Greek world than anywhere else. The reality about which the Greek philosopher spoke had three aspects: it was either the one universe of physics, or the political unity, or God. For example, the book of Heracleitus Περ φσεως was divided into three chapters or logoi, About the Whole, a political, and a theological. Neither physics nor theology supplies from its own subject-matter the form in which this reality was described. (shrink)

The aim of this study is to analyse how secondary stakeholders influence managerial decision-making on Corporate Social Responsibility disclosure. Based on stakeholder salience theory, we empirically investigate whether differences in environmental disclosure among companies are systematically related to differences in the level of power, urgency and legitimacy of the environmental non-governmental organisations with which these companies are confronted. Using proprietary archival data for an international sample of 199 large companies, our results suggest that differences in environmental disclosures between companies are (...) mainly associated with differences between their environmental stakeholders’ legitimacy. The effects of power and urgency are of an indirect nature, as they are mediated by legitimacy. This study improves our understanding of CSR disclosure by demonstrating that, next to the well-documented effect of company characteristics, stakeholder characteristics are also important. Besides, it provides scarce empirical evidence that not only primary stakeholders, but also secondary stakeholders are influential with regards to management decision-making. And more specifically, it offers insight into why some stakeholder groups are better able to influence disclosure decisions than other. The results also have important practical implications for managers of both environmental NGOs and large companies. For managers of environmental NGOs the results provide evidence of the most successful tactics for having their environmental information demands satisfied by companies. For company management the results provide insights into the most important stakeholder characteristics, on the basis of which they may develop strategies for proactively disclosing environmental information. (shrink)

This article discusses interactive minimum cost spanning tree problems and argues that the standard approach of using a transferable utility game to come up with a fair allocation of the total costs has some flaws. A new model of spillover games is presented, in which each player’s decision whether or not to cooperate is properly taken into account.