This extended, provocative, and extensively documented meditation addresses Vitruvius’ intention in producing the first treatise on architecture, the only one surviving from antiquity, which was dedicated to Caesar Augustus. McEwen argues that in assembling various preexisting fragments into a coherent whole and putting that whole into words to produce “the whole body of architecture,” Vitruvius is producing the counterpart to Augustus’ program, that of making a coherent unity from the spatial fragments of the world under Roman rule and from their (...) scattered peoples. Vitruvius explains how this architecture would serve, embody, and make visible the imperial program in the new and renewed cities and the fora, temples, and theaters prominent in them. (shrink)

In this paper William Carroll argues that the alleged conflict between creation and science has its origin in a mistaken comprehension of the meaning of “creation”and the extent of explication that natural sciences can offer. Carroll explains that creation, a metaphysical and theological notion, affirms that everything which exists depends on one single cause which is God. But, on the other side, the object of study of natural sciences is the realm of changing things. Whereas creation speaks (...) to the cause of existence itself, evolutionary biology, cosmology and other natural sciences focus on phenomena subject to change.In contrast, creation should not be understood as the change from nothingness to something, but as a theological and metaphysical dependence in the order of being. This does not mean, however, that the theological and metaphysical approaches are incompatible with those of natural sciences. (shrink)

Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa, has established a new interdisciplinary program in science and religion. One of the features of this program is an undergraduate major in science and religion that requires substantial course work in at least one of the natural sciences as well as course work in philosophy, religion, and history. As a result of a grant from the John Templeton Foundation, Cornell College will offer a special course, God and Physics: From Aquinas to Quantum Mechanics (April (...) 1998), and will sponsor an international symposium on creation and contemporary cosmology (April 1999). Opportunities exist for interested scholars to come to Cornell as Templeton Visiting Fellows in order to participate in these activities. (shrink)

Social justice struggles are often framed around competing hegemonic and counter-hegemonic projects. This article compares several organizations of global civil society that have helped shape or have emerged within the changing political-economic landscape of neoliberal globalization, either as purveyors of ruling perspectives or as anti-systemic popular forums and activist groups. It interprets the dialectical relation between the two sides as a complex war of position to win new political space by assembling transnational historic blocs around divergent social visions – the (...) one centered on a logic of replication and passive revolution, the other centred on a logic of prefiguration and transformation. It presents a sociological analysis of the organizational forms and practical challenges that their respective hegemonic and counter-hegemonic projects entail. (shrink)

Given the renewed interest in Dionysian scholarship in the last decade, one wonders what new things can be said of the enigmatic figure known as "Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite." Rorem's book has much to add to the present state of scholarship. The author intends to present the treatises of the Areopagite--The Divine Names, The Mystical Theology, The Celestial Hierarchy, The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, and The Epistles--as a coherent whole. He rightfully maintains that medieval readers often "ripped" their favorite material from the Dionysian (...) garment resulting in a patchwork unreflective of the whole. Accordingly, traditional interpretations of the corpus areopagiticum, to switch metaphors, often lost the forest for the trees. Rorem contends that the treatises' material unity results from Dionysius' pervasive concern for the symbols of the liturgy and of the Bible, whether in its names for God or in its descriptions of the angels. These symbols, as outlined in the Mystical Theology, are painted on the backdrop of the Neoplatonic notions of "Procession" and "Return." Hence: "Christian symbolism, whether ritual acts or scriptural language in general, is a divine self-revelation which proceeds 'down' into the human categories of thought and sense perception." This procession allows for a return which uplifts the faithful: initially, to a higher conceptual realm, through the negation and interpretation of all perceptual symbols; then, to the very Godhead, through the negation of all interpretations, all language, and even all thought. (shrink)

This book reflects the commitment of an academic lifetime to the study of infinity. Most of the essays gathered here have been published before, and, in keeping with the breadth and depth of Sweeney's erudition on the subject, they contain a wealth of information on primary and secondary sources in the history of infinity.

The 1970s were marked by a resurgence of interest in the enigmatic figure known as Pseudo-Dionysius the Aeropagite. Yet the accessibility of his works, in readable and accurate translations, continues to be a problem. Jones's translation is therefore welcome.

Artworks are attentional engines, or artifacts intentionally designed to direct attention to formal features that are diagnostic for their artistically salient aesthetic, expressive, and semantic content. This is nowhere more true than the movies. Moving pictures are constructed from a suite of formal and narrative devices carefully developed to capture, hold, and direct our attention. These devices are tools for developing content by controlling the way information is presented throughout the duration of our engagement with a movie. In this respect (...) moving pictures are analogous to visual routines used to direct and bias attention in natural behavior - they are artifacts used to deliver information on the fly as it is needed for the development of the narrative. This article reviews some of the fundamental devices movie makers use to discharge this function - such as variable framing and criterial prefocusing – and discusses their relation to our underlying cognitive, affective, and neurological architecture. These formal devices are designed to guide and control salient aspects of viewers behavioral responses to mass market movies. Therefore, we argue that it is no surprise to discover that that they are fine tuned to the architecture of emotion, perception, and cognition. (shrink)

It has been argued that motion picture theory, or as we prefer to call it theory of the moving image, is too abstract, generalized , or theoretical to be of use for movie makers and critics interested in the production and analysis of particular films. We apply the framework and resources of Cognitivist Film Theory to explain some of the particular ways that Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window works to engage audiences with an eye to allaying the skeptics doubts.

The appendages of the adult fruit fly and other insects and Arthropods develop from secondary embryonic fields that form after the primary anterior/posterior and dorsal/ventral axes of the embryo have been determined. In Drosophila, the position and fate of the different fields formed within each segment are determined by genes acting along both embryonic axes, within individual segments, and within specific fields. Since the major architectural differences between most Arthropod classes and orders involve variations in the number, type and morphology (...) of body appendages, the elucidation of the embryology and molecular genetics of the origin and patterning of insect limb fields may help to facilitate an understanding of both the mechanism of appendage formation and some of the major steps in the morphological evolution of the Arthropods. In this review, we will discuss recent studies that have advanced our understanding of both the origin and patterning of Drosophila leg and wing secondary fields. These results provide fresh insights into potentially general mechanisms of how body parts develop and evolve. (shrink)

In his book Objects and Persons, Trenton Merricks has reoriented and fine-tuned an argument from the philosophy of mind to support a selective eliminativism about macroscopic objects.1 The argument turns on a rejection of systematic causal overdetermination and the conviction that microscopic things do the causal work that is attributed to a great many (though not all) macroscopic things. We will argue that Merricks’ argument fails to establish his selective eliminativism.

Objective: There are benefits and risks of giving patients more granular control of their personal health information in electronic health record (EHR) systems. When designing EHR systems and policies, informaticists and system developers must balance these benefits and risks. Ethical considerations should be an explicit part of this balancing. Our objective was to develop a structured ethics framework to accomplish this. -/- Methods: We reviewed existing literature on the ethical and policy issues, developed an ethics framework called a “Points to (...) Consider” (P2C) document, and convened a national expert panel to review and critique the P2C. -/- Results: We developed the P2C to aid informaticists designing an advanced query tool for an electronic health record (EHR) system in Indianapolis. The P2C consists of six questions (“Points”) that frame important ethical issues, apply accepted principles of bioethics and Fair Information Practices, comment on how questions might be answered, and address implications for patient care. -/- Discussion: The P2C is intended to clarify whatis at stake when designers try to accommodate potentially competing ethical commitments and logistical realities. The P2C was developed to guide informaticists who were designing a query tool in an existing EHR that would permit patient granular control. While consideration of ethical issues is coming to the forefront of medical informatics design and development practices, more reflection is needed to facilitate optimal collaboration between designers and ethicists. This report contributes to that discussion. (shrink)

To me the decisive reason in favor of our minds meeting in some common objects at least is that, unless I make that supposition, I have no motive for assuming that your mind exists at all.

I attempt a thorough delineation of hocking's multiangular argument, and historically trace its genis to sources in james and royce. i argue that royce's logic of triadic relations shows the james-hocking to be untenable, and that hocking's version of intersubjectivity must be taken as an expression of tacit or autobiographical knowledge.

I agree with Williams that evolutionary theory provides the best account of the pain expression. We may disagree as to whether pain has an emotional dimension or includes discrete basic emotions as integral components. I interpret basic emotion expressions that occur contemporaneously with pain expression as representing separate but highly interactive systems, each with distinct adaptive functions.

(Citation/Reference) Williams, S. H. Lewis Carroll handbook.

This article discusses the common ground between William James and the tradition of philosophical anthropology. Recent commentators on this overlap have characterised philosophical anthropology as combining science and Kantian teleology, for instance in Kant’s seminal definition of anthropology as being concerned with what the human being makes of itself, as distinct from what attributes it is given by nature. This article registers the tension between Kantian thinking, which reckons to ground experience in a priori categories, and William James’s (...) psychology, which begins and ends with experience. It explores overlap between James’s approach and the characteristic holism of 18th-century philosophical anthropology, which centres on the idea of understanding and analysing the human as a whole, and presents the main anthropological elements of James’s position, namely his antipathy to separation, his concerns about the binomial terms of traditional philosophy, his preference for experience over substances, his sense that this holist doctrine of experience shows a way out of sterile impasses, a preference for description over causation, and scepticism. It then goes on to register the common ground with key ideas in the work of anthropologists from around 1800, along with some references to anthropologists who come in James’s wake, in particular Max Scheler and Arnold Gehlen, in order to reconceptualise the connection between James’s ideas and the tradition of anthropological thinking in German letters since the late 18th-century, beyond its characterisation as a combination of scientific positivism and teleology. (shrink)

In the period between the mid-12th and mid-13th centuries, the notion of 'science' replaced that of 'art' as the category against which all areas of academic inquiry including theology were measured. This dissertation selectively traces one aspect of this change as it is understood by Thomas Aquinas: the understanding of the relationship of sacred and secular study given these two different models of learning, art and science. ;Hugh of St. Victor's Didascalicon is discussed as it represents the acceptance and assimilation (...) of the 'arts' into a program of Christian education in the 12th century. The author reinterprets two Augustinian themes--the epistemological theory of divine illumination and the notion that theology is 'faith seeking understanding'--and uses them to explain and parallel the methods and order of learning for secular and sacred study. ;Next some of the thinkers and texts which introduce and try to interpret the notion of science, its requirements, and its application to the various disciplines are covered. Chapter two is dedicated to two didascalic works which use the Aristotelian concept of science and Aristotle's classification of sciences to divide and define the secular sciences, and chapter three deals with the understanding of the nature of science and its relationship to theology in William of Auvergne, Robert Grosseteste, and the Summa Fratris Alexandri. These thinkers both introduce the notion of science with which St. Thomas works and form the background against which Aquinas articulates his interpretation of science and the sciences. ;In conclusion, I turn to Aquinas' view of the subjects and methods of theology and the theoretical sciences, which he explains using the language of Aristotelian science rather than that of the arts. St. Thomas reinterprets the requirements for science given in the Posterior Analytics in a way that makes them applicable to theology, and in the process changes their application to the secular sciences, resulting in an understanding of the learning process that is symmetrical to the one found in the Didascalicon. The sciences are formed and defined not in terms of their objects, but in terms of their rationes or formal perspective, and the method of the sciences and sacred theology Aquinas articulates is, as it is for Hugh of St. Victor, circular or dialectical. ;As with Hugh of St. Victor, the standard for secular study, in Aquinas' case 'science' not 'art', redefines sacred study or theology, and at the same time, secular study is shown to share certain properties of sacred study, namely the circular or dialectical structure implied by 'faith seeking understanding'. (shrink)

Arguments between those who hold religious beliefs and those who do not have been at fever pitch. They have also reached an impasse, with equally entrenched views held by believer and atheist - and even agnostic - alike. This collection is one of the first books to move beyond this deadlock. Specially commissioned chapters address major areas that cut across the debate between the two sides: the origin of knowledge, objectivity and meaning; moral values and the nature of the human (...) person and the good life; and the challenge of how to promote honest and fruitful dialogue in the light of the wide diversity of beliefs, religious and otherwise. Under these broad headings leading figures in the field examine and reflect upon: Secular and religious humanism The idea of the sacred The vexed issue of science in both religious and secular accounts of knowledge Spirituality for the godless Non-western perspectives on the atheism/theism debate. A key feature of the collection is a dialogue between Raymond Tallis and Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury. _Religion and Atheism: Beyond the Divide _will interest anyone who is concerned about the clash between the religious and the secular and how to move beyond it, as well as students of ethics, philosophy of religion and religious studies. (shrink)

Throughout the Old Testament, the stories, laws, and songs not only teach a way of life that requires individuals to be moral, but they demonstrate how. In biblical studies, character ethics has been one of the fastest-growing areas of interest. Whereas ethics usually studies rules of behavior, character ethics focuses on how people are formed to be moral agents in the world. This book presents the most up-to-date academic work in Old Testament character ethics, covering topics throughout the Torah, the (...) Prophets, and the Writings, in addition to the use of the Bible in the modern world. In addition to Carroll and Lapsley, contributors are Denise M. Ackermann, Cheryl B. Anderson, Samuel E. Balentine, William P. Brown, Walter Brueggemann, Thomas B. Dozeman, Bob Ekblad, Jose Rafael Escobar R., Theodore Hiebert, Kathleen O'Connor, Dennis T. Olson, J. David Pleins, Luis R. Rivera Rodriguez, J. J. M. Roberts, and Daniel L. Smith-Christopher. (shrink)

Arguments between those who hold religious beliefs and those who do not have been at fever pitch. They have also reached an impasse, with equally entrenched views held by believer and atheist - and even agnostic - alike. This collection is one of the first books to move beyond this deadlock. Specially commissioned chapters address major areas that cut across the debate between the two sides: the origin of knowledge, objectivity and meaning; moral values and the nature of the human (...) person and the good life; and the challenge of how to promote honest and fruitful dialogue in the light of the wide diversity of beliefs, religious and otherwise. Under these broad headings leading figures in the field examine and reflect upon: Secular and religious humanism The idea of the sacred The vexed issue of science in both religious and secular accounts of knowledge Spirituality for the godless Non-western perspectives on the atheism/theism debate. A key feature of the collection is a dialogue between Raymond Tallis and Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury. _Religion and Atheism: Beyond the Divide _will interest anyone who is concerned about the clash between the religious and the secular and how to move beyond it, as well as students of ethics, philosophy of religion and religious studies. (shrink)

Emily Carroll and Parker Crutchfield propose a new inconsistency argument against abortion restrictivism. In response, I raised several objections to their argument. Recently Carroll and Crutchfield have replied and seem to be under the impression that I’m a restrictivist. This is puzzling, since my criticism of their view included a very thinly veiled, but purposely more charitable, anti-restrictivist inconsistency argument. In this response, I explain how Carroll and Crutchfield mischaracterize my position and that of the restrictivist.