The Community of the Polish Brethren operated in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1563–1658. Over this period the condition of toleration worsened from acceptance to the decree of banishment. The author analyzes the dynamics of the religious movement: its objectives, achievements and the conflicts with the society they were part of. The evolution, both within the community and in external relations, required the inclusion of the elements of Social Psychology into historical narration.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Gambling with God: The Use of the Lot by the Moravian Brethren in the Eighteenth CenturyElisabeth SommerThe use of the lot in decision-making marks the Moravian Brethren as peculiar in eighteenth-century Europe. Their belief that the lot represented the true will of Christ stands at odds with a century which had inherited a changing world view in which a strong confidence in the power of human reason (...) gradually replaced the assumption of God’s providential power. 1 Historian Andrew Fix has traced this intellectual shift as it affected the seventeenth-century Dutch Collegiants, who moved from a spiritualist to a rationalist approach to religious questions. The Moravian Brethren, known in Europe as the Renewed Unity of the Brethren, resisted the triumph of reason over revelation into the late eighteenth century. In this they reflected the general hostility toward the emphasis on science and reason to which George Becker has pointed as a hallmark of the Halle Pietists. 2 This similarity is not surprising given the fact that the Brethren were very much a part of the later Pietist movement and had strong ties with Halle during the formative years of the Unity. Count Nicholas Ludwig von Zinzendorf, the dominant influence in the development of the new Unity, attended the Pädegogium at Halle from 1710 to 1716 and modeled his initial projects on his estate after similar ones in Halle. 3Halle preceded the Brethren in a struggle over the role of reason in spiritual life. In the 1740s the philosophy of Christian Wolff (and hence also of Leibniz) [End Page 267] became popular among many at Halle, despite his having been removed from the faculty in 1722. Although the Halle Pietists did not reject science and reason out of hand, some among the faculty had perceived a distinct threat to faith from Wolff’s particular focus. 4 Through his view of reason as the divine source of human knowledge, Wolff shifted the ultimate test of religious insight from revelation to reason. 5 This same decade saw the Brethren’s piety reach a height of intensely emotional, even sensual, expression. This may have prevented Wolffian ideas from extending their influence into the Unity at that time. By the 1790s, however, it became clear that, at least among many of the lay members of the Unity, the Enlightenment stress on the primacy of reason was winning. Just as the Collegiants had come to view “free prophecy” as a function of human reason, several of the Brethren ultimately saw the lot as something open to human manipulation and objected to its use, arguing that decisions were best left simply to “brotherly reason.” 6Although the emphasis on reason invaded the Unity later than it entered Halle, they shared traits that made them vulnerable. In both cases piety was linked to behavior and a certain level of indoctrination. The tendency to drill young people in proper belief and conduct created a climate in which rival ideas could prove quite seductive. 7 A study of the Unity’s use of the lot and its place within their spiritual life over the course of the century reveals this process. It also reveals something of the nature of authority within the Unity since the change was driven by the laity, while the leadership struggled, largely in vain, to maintain the old order. Most importantly, the debate over the use of the lot shows the dynamics of changing ideas outside of the realm of the university and seminary. This allows a view of the impact of practical concerns and individual desires on intellectual change and illuminates the relationship between abstract ideas and social reality.The Unity of the Brethren began as a gathering of Protestant exiles who settled on the Saxon estate of Count von Zinzendorf in 1722. There they founded the village of Herrnhut, and in 1727, under Zinzendorf’s watchful eye, they drew up a set of village statutes in which they sought to preserve its character as a community “built by the living God and a work of his almighty hand.” 8 Their vision of a godly community resulted in a fusion of spiritual authority with economic and domestic authority... (shrink)

The Community of the Polish Brethren operated in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1563–1658. Over this period the condition of toleration worsened from acceptance to the decree of banishment. The author analyzes the dynamics of the religious movement: its objectives, achievements and the conflicts with the society they were part of. The evolution, both within the community and in external relations, required the inclusion of the elements of Social Psychology into historical narration.

This article offers insight into the image of women in German conservative congregations, especially in the Brethren movement. It also describes the author’s personal journey to a position of strongly supporting female preaching and female leadership in churches. The article combines empirical facts and personal insights. It gives examples of androcentrism in German academic theology. The case study is on the Brethren movement in Germany and their teaching on women, which was very much influenced by certain (...) Pauline texts from the New Testament. Unfortunately, ‘women’s role in the church’ became the shibboleth for biblical correctness. While living and working in this context, the author discovered inconsistencies in practice, which finally led to this paradigm shift. Contribution: It is argued that if women are not allowed to participate publicly in the church services, it is like driving a car with four cylinders but turning off two cylinders. (shrink)

In this paper I offer critical attention to the notion of atmosphere in relation to music. By exploring the concept through the case study of the Closed Brethren worship services, I argue that atmosphere may provide analytical tools to explore the ineffable in ecclesial practices. Music, just as atmosphere, commonly occupies a realm of ineffability and undermines notions such as inside and outside, subject and object. For this reason I present music as a means of knowing the atmosphere. The (...) first part of this paper points to the limits of an understanding of atmosphere as a constellation of things, as proposed by Gernot Böhme. In contrast to this, Hermann Schmitz conceptualises atmosphere as half-thing which suggests movement. Drawing on this, I propose to methodologically approach atmospheres as movements. Consequently, in the second part of this paper I closely analyse two motions as they cohere in Closed Brethren worship services: first, becoming (Deleuze and Guattari), a movement on the level of the individual worshiper; secondly, territorialisation (Deleuze and Guattari), a movement of the atmosphere towards its solidification. Here music as atmosphere is not a system of moral signification but a generative power affording intimate processes of divine encounter, whilst producing affective denominational difference. (shrink)

The main purpose of this article is to provide some new texts for studying the history of Catholic Church in XIX century. It is a small contribution to the history of Jesuits, but also the history of Poland, Greece and Turkey. The study concerns a very turbulent period in the history of the Society of Jesus, namely the rebirth of the Society in Europe and in the World. It was a very challenging time in the European history as Greece was (...) slowly regaining its independence, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was under the oppression of its occupying powers and was suffering the aftermath of its unsuccessful insurrections, and Turkey was trying to suppress the independence movements. Expelled from Russia and Prussia, the Jesuits arrived to the islands of the Aegean Sea, where they undertook the pastoral work of their fellow brethren from the times before the suppression of the Society in 1773. The research presented in this article was carried out in the Jesuit’s archive in Athens and deals primarily with “Polonica”. It is the first attempt to overview the archive under such aspect. During my research trip to Athens in 2018, Father Gabryel Marangos, the Director of Jesuit Archive in Athens, granted me the access to the collection of letters of the Polish Jesuits, which are preserved in the Athenian Archive of SJ. The method of this research was to check the files which directly regard the letters of Father Tadeusz Kuczyński. According to the Director of Athenian Archive there are more documents related to the subject, but they are dispersed among other files. The first part of the article is a brief overview of the history of Jesuits in Greece, whereas the second one is a presentation of some new sources, such as the letters of Father Tadeusz Kuczyński SJ. It is not the whole Polonica from the Athenian Archive and the remaining letters, the fragments of personal diaries, the Community Diary, Books of Charity, the Books of Bell Ringing will be presented in a coming book. The research has a pioneering character and has to be followed by further studies. In this place I would like to express my gratitude to the Greek and French Jesuits for gathering and preserving these documents. I also extend my gratitude to the governing body of the Ignatianum University for covering the costs of the research. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt claims the concept of brotherhood presents false notions of political community that elide historic hatreds of others and threaten modern political life. This paper explores Arendt’s critical assessment of the concept of brotherhood in order to reflect on one specific example: the politics of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in the wake of the Arab Spring of 2011. While some observers reject Arendt’s assessment of brotherhood as too narrow, her criticisms raise useful questions about democracy and plurality, which (...) confront any community that exhorts its members to act as ‘brethren’ rather than as ‘citizens.’ The Muslim concept of brotherhood suggests many different possibilities for belonging: a classic universalism of the Abrahamic natural law tradition; a progressive counter-public sphere; and as well the authoritarian private community of believers as represented in the early writings of the Muslim Brotherhood leadership. Therefore, the politically controversial Muslim Brotherhood has no monopoly over the understanding of the Muslim concept of brotherhood. However, it is the most powerful, most well-organized brotherhood movement. The paper opens and ends with reflections on the Arab Spring of 2011, its one-year anniversary in January 2012, and considers other possibilities for the concept of brotherhood against the backdrop of Arendt’s analysis. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:172 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY us," Saint-Simon wrote in 1814. Matching the development of mind of their eighteenthcentury rationalist compatriots with the development of love and action, the Saint-Simonians, Fourier and Comte saw hardly any stop to the inevitability and infinitude of progress and perfectibility. The prospect of the twentieth century, however, shows an "uneasy consensus." Manuel is not concerned to swell the flood of philosophical history but to bear (...) witness to it, and it is as a witness that he reports that man's "urge to place himself in a total time sequence" is undiminished, if anything it continues to grow and magnify. The search for a total meaning of historical existence is an apparently irrepressible drive. In this concluding chapter Manuel shows how the threads of the previously expressed ideas, particularly from French and German sources, are tied and knotted in the more familiar figures, Spengler, Sorokin, Toynbee, and a group of Christian writers and philosophers of history (de Chardin, Niebuhr, Dawson, Tillich, Pope Plus XII, and Pope John XXIII) illustrating and instantiating the vitality and longevity of the archetypal conceptions he began with. The great divide between theorists persists pretty much in the present as it did in older times. There are the progressists among whom are distinguished those still loyal to the French concept of perfectibility, a new school of philosophical life scientists writing cosmic history, and contemporary Marxists. Manuel classes the Christian theologians of history in a special category, which, although progressist in a sense, like Augustine denigrate earthly progress and restrict themselves to spiritual advance. Then there are the non- or anti-progressists, circular theorists, among whom Spengler, Sorokin, and "Toynbee I" are to be found. Having done duty for the Greeks and Romans, the Italians, French and Germans (surprisingly omitting the figure of Schopenhauer in his account) it would be a further service to have Professor Manuel's reading of English and Scottish involvement in philosophies of history of the sort he defines as "pictures of the total meaning of historical existence... (which have) included predictions of things to come as well as a reduction of the whole of the past to an order," for despite their professed empiricism it will not be denied that in figures like Hobbes, Locke, and Hume, as in some of the lesser figures of the English and Scottish Enlightenment (he mentions the "imitative works" of Price, Priestly, Spencer and Buckle), philosophies of history of the sort defined are implicit where they are not explicit and outspoken. Perhaps one day Professor Manuel will turn his illuminating searchlight to this area. While conceding Manuel's point that philosophies of history of the more distinctly speculative type have grown and even multiplied over the recent past, it should be added (what is common knowledge) that many equally responsible philosophers have tried both to discourage this growth and at the same time to make a contribution to the discipline through a more analytic approach. So far has this movement gone, indeed, that it would appear that the tide of speculative philosophies of history has ebbed greatly, and that "theories" of history are now pretty much restricted to poets, novelists, dramatists and their brethren in some of the social sciences, particularly psychology and sociology, especially in the Englishspeaking world. Whether the "analysts" are making a substantial contribution to our knowledge of historical processes (as distinguished from the language and logic of historical discourse) is still somewhat moot, but there is little doubt that the analysts are rapidly displacing the synthesists in philosophy of history. STANLEYM. DAUGERT Western Washington State College Universals: A New Look at an Old Problem. By Farhang Zabeeh. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966. Pp. vi -t- 68. $3.15.) In this short analysis of a perennial philosophical problem, Professor Zabeeh has taken upon himself the rather ambitious task of attempting to trace the development of the various attempts to explain the function, meaning, and ontological status of universals from Socrates BOOK REVIEWS 173 (or Plato) to Wittgenstein and Austin. In doing so, he has neglected (pace a few random references) the most fertile field for the analysis of universals, the medieval writers. To some extent, Professor Zabeeh does... (shrink)

This volume presents Epistles 39-41 of the Epistles of the Brethren of Purity, which deal with the types of movement; causes and effects; and definitions and descriptions of things. the Ikhwan considers both the philosophical and spiritual value of these topics.

This article studies the ideological identity of the authors of the Rasā’il Ikhwān al-Ṣafā’ and addresses the question of the authorship of the other works attributed to the Brethren of Purity. Based on these theosophical works, it provides new evidence for the authors’ political stance against the Abbasid state and confirms their Shii inclination and opposition to the Abbasid caliphs of their time. These findings highlight the Ikhwān’s involvement in political activities through preaching the end of the “state of (...) evil” and the beginning of the “state of good”. It also contributes to the debate on the Ikhwān’s relation to other political opposition movements against the Abbasid reign and their links to the Shii states. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:172 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY us," Saint-Simon wrote in 1814. Matching the development of mind of their eighteenthcentury rationalist compatriots with the development of love and action, the Saint-Simonians, Fourier and Comte saw hardly any stop to the inevitability and infinitude of progress and perfectibility. The prospect of the twentieth century, however, shows an "uneasy consensus." Manuel is not concerned to swell the flood of philosophical history but to bear (...) witness to it, and it is as a witness that he reports that man's "urge to place himself in a total time sequence" is undiminished, if anything it continues to grow and magnify. The search for a total meaning of historical existence is an apparently irrepressible drive. In this concluding chapter Manuel shows how the threads of the previously expressed ideas, particularly from French and German sources, are tied and knotted in the more familiar figures, Spengler, Sorokin, Toynbee, and a group of Christian writers and philosophers of history (de Chardin, Niebuhr, Dawson, Tillich, Pope Plus XII, and Pope John XXIII) illustrating and instantiating the vitality and longevity of the archetypal conceptions he began with. The great divide between theorists persists pretty much in the present as it did in older times. There are the progressists among whom are distinguished those still loyal to the French concept of perfectibility, a new school of philosophical life scientists writing cosmic history, and contemporary Marxists. Manuel classes the Christian theologians of history in a special category, which, although progressist in a sense, like Augustine denigrate earthly progress and restrict themselves to spiritual advance. Then there are the non- or anti-progressists, circular theorists, among whom Spengler, Sorokin, and "Toynbee I" are to be found. Having done duty for the Greeks and Romans, the Italians, French and Germans (surprisingly omitting the figure of Schopenhauer in his account) it would be a further service to have Professor Manuel's reading of English and Scottish involvement in philosophies of history of the sort he defines as "pictures of the total meaning of historical existence... (which have) included predictions of things to come as well as a reduction of the whole of the past to an order," for despite their professed empiricism it will not be denied that in figures like Hobbes, Locke, and Hume, as in some of the lesser figures of the English and Scottish Enlightenment (he mentions the "imitative works" of Price, Priestly, Spencer and Buckle), philosophies of history of the sort defined are implicit where they are not explicit and outspoken. Perhaps one day Professor Manuel will turn his illuminating searchlight to this area. While conceding Manuel's point that philosophies of history of the more distinctly speculative type have grown and even multiplied over the recent past, it should be added (what is common knowledge) that many equally responsible philosophers have tried both to discourage this growth and at the same time to make a contribution to the discipline through a more analytic approach. So far has this movement gone, indeed, that it would appear that the tide of speculative philosophies of history has ebbed greatly, and that "theories" of history are now pretty much restricted to poets, novelists, dramatists and their brethren in some of the social sciences, particularly psychology and sociology, especially in the Englishspeaking world. Whether the "analysts" are making a substantial contribution to our knowledge of historical processes (as distinguished from the language and logic of historical discourse) is still somewhat moot, but there is little doubt that the analysts are rapidly displacing the synthesists in philosophy of history. STANLEYM. DAUGERT Western Washington State College Universals: A New Look at an Old Problem. By Farhang Zabeeh. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966. Pp. vi -t- 68. $3.15.) In this short analysis of a perennial philosophical problem, Professor Zabeeh has taken upon himself the rather ambitious task of attempting to trace the development of the various attempts to explain the function, meaning, and ontological status of universals from Socrates BOOK REVIEWS 173 (or Plato) to Wittgenstein and Austin. In doing so, he has neglected (pace a few random references) the most fertile field for the analysis of universals, the medieval writers. To some extent, Professor Zabeeh does... (shrink)

Abstractabstract:This paper intervenes in a contemporary debate on the animal ethics of the Brethren of Purity's (Iḫwān al-Ṣafāʾ) epistle on animals. I argue that they present a case for justice for animals by rejecting the fallacious link between ontological superiority and moral superiority. Since human beings are vice-regents of God and since the rational soul is the vice-regent, the Brethren's account of human beings as superior in virtue of their rationality establishes a moral obligation toward animals. The (...) class='Hi'>Brethren develop this account partially under the influence of the Muʿtazilī theological tradition, and as a result, their position falls in line with other positions on justice for animals found during their time. Even on the issue of animal use, the Brethren maintain that the human need for animal labor emphasizes the obligation to treat animals justly. In the end, the greater rational capacity of human beings entails greater moral responsibility toward animals, not moral impunity. (shrink)

Clizia, the titular protagonist of Machiavelli's play, was trapped between her master's sexual advances and her mistress's attempt to avoid scandal. For their part, and with no arbiter in sight, husband and wife remained at strategic loggerheads as to whom the young girl should marry. After lengthy bickering, a solution finally emerged:Sofronia: Who should we turn to?Nicomaco: Who else but to our own confessor fra Timoteo, who is a little saint and has already performed several miracles.Sofronia: Such as?Nicomaco: What do (...) you mean, “Such as?” Don't you know that through his prayers donna Lucrezia, messer Nicia Calfucci's sterile wife, became pregnant?Sofronia: What a miracle, a friar gets a woman pregnant! It would have been a real miracle if a nun got her pregnant! (shrink)

The Ikhwan al-Safa (Brethren of Purity), the anonymous adepts of a tenth-century esoteric fraternity based in Basra and Baghdad, hold an eminent position in the history of science and philosophy in Islam due to the wide reception and assimilation of their monumental encyclopaedia, the Rasa'il Ikhwan al-Safa (Epistles of the Brethren of Purity). This compendium contains fifty-two epistles offering synoptic accounts of the classical sciences and philosophies of the age; divided into four classificatory parts, it treats themes in (...) mathematics, logic, natural philosophy, psychology, metaphysics, and theology, in addition to didactic fables. Epistles 32 to 36 comprise the first five treatises in the third division of the Rasa'il, on the sciences of the soul and intellect. Combining Islamic revelation with Hellenistic philosophy, the Ikhwan delineate herein their metaphysical system. Epistles 32 and 33 present adaptations of the Pythagorean doctrines, and of Neo-Platonist leitmotifs, whereby a numerical analogy is applied to the unique and transcendent God, or the One, from whom all existence emanates. Epistle 34 takes up the pervasive theme of the correspondence between microcosm and macrocosm, situating the human being as the central link between the celestial and terrestrial realms. In Epistle 35, we find an explanation of the intellectual faculties of the individual human soul, whose ultimate aim is ascension to the timeless reality of pure intellect. Finally, Epistle 36 presents itself as the astrological epistle par excellence of the Rasa'il; from the coming-to-be of worms, to the emergence of religions and empires, nothing in the sub-lunar sphere escapes the determining influence of the celestial cycles. (shrink)

Ikhwan al-Safa' (The Brethren of Purity) were the anonymous adepts of a tenth-century esoteric fraternity of lettered urbanites that was principally based in Basra and Baghdad. This brotherhood occupied a prominent station in the history of science and philosophy in Islam due to the wide reception and assimilation of their monumental encyclopaedia: Rasa'il Ikhwan al-Safa' (The Epistles of the Brethren of Purity). This compendium contained fifty-two epistles that offered synoptic explications of the classical sciences and philosophies of the (...) age. Divided into four classificatory parts, it treated themes in mathematics, logic, natural philosophy, psychology, metaphysics and theology, in addition to moral and didactic fables. The Ikhwan were learned compilers of scientific and philosophical knowledge, and their Rasa'il constituted a paradigmatic legacy in the canonization of philosophy and the sciences in mediaeval Islamic civilization. -/- This present volume gathers studies by leading philosophers, historians and scholars of Islamic Studies, who are also the editors and translators of the first Arabic critical editions and first complete annotated English translations of the Rasa'il Ikhwan al-Safa', which will be published in the OUP Series that this present volume initiates, as well as being members of the Editorial Board. -/- The chapters of this present volume explore the conceptual and historical aspects of the philosophical and scientific contents of the Rasa'il and their classification, as well as investigating the authorship and dating of this corpus and the impact that the Ikhwan's intellectual tradition exercised in the unfolding of the history of ideas in Islam. (shrink)

The Ikhwan al-Safa' (Brethren of Purity), the anonymous adepts of a tenth-century esoteric fraternity based in Basra and Baghdad, hold an eminent position in the history of science and philosophy in Islam due to the wide reception and assimilation of their monumental encyclopaedia, the Rasa 'il Ikhwan al-Safa' (Epistles of the Brethren of Purity). This compendium contains fifty-two epistles offering synoptic accounts of the classical sciences and philosophies of the age; divided into four classificatory parts, it treats themes (...) in mathematics, logic, natural philosophy, psychology, metaphysics, and theology, in addition to didactic fables. Epistles 6 to 8 are from the first division of the Epistles, on the propaedeutical and mathematical sciences. Epistle 6 develops ideas concerning natural numbers and their arithmetic, geometric, and harmonic ratios, marked by the influence of Nicomachus of Gerasa and of Euclid. The Brethren here emphasize practical applications of proportionality in music, medicine, and alchemy. Epistle 7 addresses theoretical scientific knowledge as directed towards the spiritual realities of souls, the goal of which is to actualize human potential; this epistle also presents a remarkable classification of sciences. Epistle 8 surveys material cultures in the Islamic mediaeval milieu, embellished by a consideration of the effects of the heavenly bodies on the predisposition of individuals to follow specific trades. These three epistles are, of course, underpinned by the Brethren's perennial tropes of the microcosm/macrocosm analogy and the emanative hierarchy of existents. (shrink)

The Ikhwan al-Safa (Brethren of Purity), the anonymous adepts of a tenth-century esoteric fraternity based in Basra and Baghdad, hold an eminent position in the history of science and philosophy in Islam due to the wide reception and assimilation of their monumental encyclopaedia, the Rasa'il Ikhwan al-Safa ( Epistles of the Brethren of Purity ). This compendium contains fifty-two epistles offering synoptic accounts of the classical sciences and philosophies of the age; divided into four classificatory parts, it treats (...) themes in mathematics, logic, natural philosophy, psychology, metaphysics, and theology, in addition to didactic fables. The Rasa'il constitutes a paradigmatic legacy in the canonization of philosophy and the sciences in mediaeval Islamic civilization, as well as having shown a permeating influence in Western culture. The present volume is the second of this definitive series, consisting of the very first critical edition of the Rasa'il in its original Arabic, complete with the first fully annotated English translation. Prepared by Professor Carmela Baffioni, Epistles 10-14 comprise the foundations of logic, which remained a fundamental component in pedagogy until the twentieth century. The Ikhwan treat the Isagoge and the larger part of the Organon , both of which were circulating through the Islamic world at that time, as they set about detailing the ten categories of existents, the five predicables, and other such commonplaces of Aristotelian logic, including his seminal method of syllogistic inference. With the claim that logic is the noblest of man's arts, and man the noblest of creatures, the Ikhwan cast Aristotelian tropes in a spiritual light. (shrink)

This is the first critical edition of a fascinating medieval work on music, written in Iraq in the tenth century. It is accompanied by an English translation and full annotation. The Epistle examines not just the technical, scientific, and mathematical aspects of music, but its cosmic, psychological, and spiritual dimensions.

This is the first critical edition of Epistles 15-21 of the Brethren of Purity, which explore the natural sciences and correspond to Aristotle's great works on philosophy of nature. Along with Epistle 22, "On Animals," Epistles 15-21 correspond to the corpus of Aristotle's great works on the philosophy of nature: Physica , De caelo , De generatione et corruption , and Meteorologica I-III . Meteorologica IV may correspond to Epistle 19 "On Minerals" (though no such Aristotelian work has reached (...) us), and Epistle 21 is a reminder of the works on plants written by Theophrastus, Aristotle's pupil, and onwards. Epistle 20, "On the Quiddity of Nature," is an exposition of Aristotelian doctrines, as well as of those of Neoplatonic origin; it opens the angelologic tradition, whose main representatives in Islamic philosophy were Ibn Sina (d. 1037) and Suhrawardi (d. 1191). Besides providing the necessary references to the works by Aristotle and other Greek authors, this book deals with various doctrines of Ismaili origin echoed in the treatises, foremost of which is the hierarchical representation of the three natural kingdoms, which corresponds to the hierarchy of human beings. The basis of human salvation is here seen in the relation between divine Artisan and human artisan, both of whom accomplish their works by actualizing their knowledge. As is known, although moral behaviour is one necessary condition, salvation cannot be reached without a thorough knowledge of the sciences described in the encyclopaedia. (shrink)

Movements of the Mind is about what it is to be an agent. Focusing on mental agency, it integrates multiple approaches, from philosophical analysis of the metaphysics of agency to the activity of neurons in the brain. Philosophical and empirical work are combined to generate concrete explanations of key features of the mind. The book should be relevant and accessible to philosophers and scientists interested in mind and agency.

In order to understand ongoing activity, observers segment it into meaningful temporal parts. Segmentation can be based on bottom‐up processing of distinctive sensory characteristics, such as movement features. Segmentation may also be affected by top‐down effects of knowledge structures, including information about actors' intentions. Three experiments investigated the role of movement features and intentions in perceptual event segmentation, using simple animations. In all conditions, movement features significantly predicted where participants segmented. This relationship was stronger when participants identified (...) larger units than when they identified smaller units, and stronger when the animations were generated randomly than when they were generated by goal‐directed human activity. This pattern suggests that bottom‐up processing played an important role in segmentation of these stimuli, but that this was modulated by top‐down influence of knowledge structures. To describe accurately how observers perceive ongoing activity, one must account for the effects of distinctive sensory characteristics, the effects of knowledge structures, and their interactions. (shrink)

Bodily movement has become an interesting topic in recent philosophy, both in analytic and phenomenological versions. Philosophy from Descartes to Kant defined the human being as a mental subject in a material body. This mechanistic attitude toward the body still lingers on in many studies of motor learning and control. The article shows how alternative philosophical views can give a better understanding of bodily movement. The article starts with Heidegger's contribution to overcoming the subject-object dichotomy and his new (...) understanding of the primacy of the practical involvement with the surrounding world. Heidegger, however, in many ways neglected the role of the human body. Merleau-Ponty took a huge step forward when he focused on the bodily intentionality of our interaction with the world. The next step was taken by Samuel Todes who presented a better understanding of how we are bodily oriented in space. After having seen how the body is oriented outward towards the environment it is proper that the final part of this article goes inward toward the role of bodily awareness and the role of proprioception in human movement. The goal of the presentation is to contribute to a better understanding of what goes on in sport. The article therefore uses examples from sport, especially football, to show the relevance of the new insights for sport studies. (shrink)

Prelude -- What moves as a body returns as a movement of thought -- Introduction: Events of relation : concepts in the making -- Incipient action : the dance of the not-yet -- The elasticity of the almost -- A mover's guide to standing still -- Taking the next step -- Dancing the technogenetic body -- Perceptions in folding -- Grace taking form : Marey's movement machines -- Animation's dance -- From biopolitics to the biogram, or, how Leni (...) Riefenstahl moves through fascism -- Of force fields and rhythm contours -- Relationscapes : how contemporary Aboriginal art moves beyond the map -- Constituting facts : Dorothy Napangardi dances the dreaming -- Cornering a beginning -- Conclusion: Propositions for thought in motion. (shrink)

The key role that animals play in our aesthetic appreciation of the natural world has only gradually been highlighted in discussions in environmental aesthetics. In this article I make use of the phenomenological notion of 'perceptual sense' as developed by Merleau-Ponty to argue that open-ended expressive-responsive movement is the primary aesthetic ground for our appreciation of animals. It is through their movement that the array of qualities we admire in animals are manifest qua animal qualities. Against functionalist and (...) formalist accounts, I defend and develop an account of expressive-responsive movement as the primary perceptual sense of animals. I go on to suggest that the primacy of movement in the aesthetic appreciation of animals is also the primary sense of animal 'wildness', and that a key part of the rewilding paradigm should be the development of such appreciation. (shrink)

Exploring the intimate tie between body movement and space and time, Lee begins with the position that body movement generates space and time and explores the ethical implications of this responsibility for the situations one’s body movements generate. Whiteness theory has come to recognize the ethical responsibility for situations not of one’s own making and hence accountability for the results of more than one’s immediate personal conscious decisions. Because of our specific history, whites have developed a particular embodiment (...) and body movement that generates places that can only be characterized as more comfortable and more enabling to whites. (shrink)

In this paper I argue for the usefulness of the concept of ‘movement compression’ for understanding sport and games, and particularly the differences between traditional sport and eSport (as currently practised). I suggest that movement compression allows us to distinguish between different activities in terms of how movement quality (in the sense of the qualities the movement possesses, rather than that the movement is of ‘high quality’) affects outcome. While it applies widely, this concept can (...) in particular help us to understand the persistent idea that eSports are in some key way distinct from traditional sports. (shrink)

This article begins with a summary phenomenological analysis of movement in conjunction with the question of “quality” in movement. It then specifies the particular kind of memory involved in a dancer’s memorization of a dance. On the basis of the phenomenological analysis and specification of memory, it proceeds to a clarification of meaning in dance. Taking its clue from the preceding sections, the concluding section of the article sets forth reasons why present-day cognitive science is unable to provide (...) insights into dance, notably because being largely tethered to happenings in the brain, it lacks foundational grounding in experience, specifically, the actual experience of movement, which is to say in kinesthesia. (shrink)

Group dynamics play an important role in the social interactions of both children and adults. A large amount of research has shown that merely being allocated to arbitrarily defined groups can evoke disproportionately positive attitudes toward one’s in-group and negative attitudes toward out-groups, and that these biases emerge in early childhood. This prompts important empirical questions with far-reaching theoretical and applied significance. How robust are these inter-group biases? Can biases be mitigated by behaviors known to bond individuals and groups together? (...) How can bonds be forged across existing group divides? To explore these questions, we examined the bonding effects of interpersonal synchrony on minimally constructed groups in a controlled experiment. In-group and out-group bonding were assessed using questionnaires administered before and after a task in which groups performed movements either synchronously or non-synchronously in a between-participants design. We also developed an implicit behavioral measure, the Island Game, in which physical proximity was used as an indirect measure of interpersonal closeness. Self-report and behavioral measures showed increased bonding between groups after synchronous movement. Bonding with the out-group was significantly higher in the condition in which movements were performed synchronously than when movements were performed non-synchronously between groups. The findings are discussed in terms of their importance for the developmental social psychology of group dynamics as well as their implications for applied intervention programs. (shrink)

In French, the verb "to live" designates both being alive and the experience of something. This ambiguity has a philosophical meaning. The task of a phenomenology of life is to describe an originary sense of living from which the very distinction between life in the intransitive sense and life in the transitive, or intentional, sense proceeds. Hans Jonas is one of those rare authors who has tried to give an account of the specificity of life instead of reducing life to (...) categories that are foreign to it. However, the concept of metabolism, by which Jonas characterizes vital activity, attests to a presupposition as to life: life is conceived as self-preservation, that is, as negation of death, in such a way that life is, in the end, not thought on the basis of itself. The aim of this article is to show that life as such must be understood as movement in a radicalized sense, in which the living being is no more the subject than the product. All living beings are in effect characterized by a movement, which nothing can cause to cease, a movement that largely exceeds what is required by the satisfaction of needs and that, because of this, bears witness to an essential incompleteness. This incompleteness reveals that life is originarily bound to a world. Because the world to which the living being relates is essentially non-totalizable and unpresentable, living movement can not essentially complete itself. Thus, in the final analysis, life must be defined as desire, and in virtue of this view, life does not tend toward self-preservation, as we have almost always thought, but toward the manifestation of the world. (shrink)

In two experiments, participants solved anagram problems while their eye movements were monitored. Each problem consisted of a circular array of five letters: a scrambled four-letter solution word containing three consonants and one vowel, and an additional randomly-placed distractor consonant. Viewing times on the distractor consonant compared to the solution consonants provided an online measure of knowledge of the solution. Viewing times on the distractor consonant and the solution consonants were indistinguishable early in the trial. In contrast, several seconds prior (...) to the response, viewing times on the distractor consonant decreased in a gradual manner compared to viewing times on the solution consonants. Importantly, this pattern was obtained across both trials in which participants reported the subjective experience of insight and trials in which they did not. These findings are consistent with the availability of partial knowledge of the solution prior to such information being accessible to subjective phenomenal awareness. (shrink)