Background The work of Research Ethics Boards (REBs), especially when involving genetics research and biobanks, has become more challenging with the growth of biotechnology and biomedical research. Some REBs have even rejected research projects where the use of a biobank with coded samples was an integral part of the study, the greatest fear being the lack of participant protection and uncontrolled use of biological samples or related genetic data. The risks of discrimination and stigmatization are a recurrent issue. In light (...) of the increasing interest in biomedical research and the resulting benefits to the health of participants, it is imperative that practical solutions be found to the problems associated with the management of biobanks: namely, protecting the integrity of the research participants, as well as guaranteeing the security and confidentiality of the participant's information. Methods We aimed to devise a practical and efficient model for the management of biobanks in biomedical research where a medical archivist plays the pivotal role as a data-protection officer. The model had to reduce the burden placed on REBs responsible for the evaluation of genetics projects and, at the same time, maximize the protection of research participants. Results The proposed model includes the following: 1) a means of protecting the information in biobanks, 2) offers ways to provide follow-up information requested about the participants, 3) protects the participant's confidentiality and 4) adequately deals with the ethical issues at stake in biobanking. Conclusion Until a governmental governance body is established in Quebec to guarantee the protection of research participants and establish harmonized guidelines for the management of biobanks in medical research, it is definitely up to REBs to find solutions that the present lack of guidelines poses. The model presented in this article offers a practical solution on a day-to-day basis for REBs, as well as researchers by promoting an archivist to a pivotal role in the process. It assures protection of all participants who altruistically donate their samples to generate and improve knowledge for better diagnosis and medical treatment. (shrink)

The situationist movement in psychology and, more recently, in philosophy has been associated with a number of striking claims, including that most people do not have the moral virtues and vices, that any ethical theory which is wedded to such character traits is empirically inadequate, and that much of our behavior is causally influenced, to significant degrees, by psychological influences about which we are often unaware. Yet Christian philosophers have had virtually nothing to say about situationist claims. The goal of (...) this paper is to consider whether Christians should start to be worried about them. (shrink)

Arab Christians and the Qurʾan from the Origins of Islam to the Medieval Period. Edited by Mark Beaumont. History of Christian-Muslim Relations, vol. 35. Leiden: Brill, 2018. Pp. xiv + 216. $120, €104.

In recent centuries Christians of various denominations have endorsed many different political philosophies that they see as being truly biblical in their approach. Over this time there has been an increasing hostility, by some Christians, towards free markets and political philosophies that hold human liberty as the highest goal such as libertarianism and classical liberalism. This criticism is unwarranted and misplaced as libertarianism and free markets are not only compatible with Christianity, they are also the most biblically sound of all (...) economics systems and political philosophies endorsed by Christians today. Therefore, this paper will argue that Christians of all denominations should endorse free markets and libertarianism if they wish to create a world that follows biblical principles and the teachings of Jesus. (shrink)

Christian Garves Texte wurden im späten 18. Jahrhundert als heraustragende Beispiele für eine gelehrte und populäre Schreibweise bewundert. Zugleich genoss der Breslauer Aufklärer auch unter Fachkollegen aus der Philosophie und der Philologie große Reputation. Mit seinen Übersetzungen und Kommentaren englischer Autoren und lateinischer Klassiker beeinflusste er Generationen von Literaten und Philosophen. Der Band bietet erstmalig eine zwiesprachige Edition seiner frühen Dissertation zur Logik sowie seine ebenso berühmte wie umstrittene Studie zum Verhältnis von 'Moral und Politik'. Ergänzt wird diese Auswahl aus (...) seinen monographischen Arbeiten durch kommentierte Editionen von Aufsätzen, dem Kommentar zur Fergussson-Übersetzung sowie repräsentative Rezensionen. (shrink)

Die Überlieferung des Briefwechsels zwischen Christian Wolff (1679–1754) und Ernst Christoph von Manteuffel (1676–1749) ist ein singulärer Glücksfall. Die in der Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig aufbewahrten Bände enthalten den nahezu geschlossen und damit am umfangreichsten erhaltenen Briefwechsel in der Gesamtkorrespondenz Christian Wolffs. Die historisch-kritische Edition des Briefwechsels stellt Materialien bereit, die die Wolff- und Aufklärungsforschung auf eine neue Grundlage stellen. Der Briefwechsel erlaubt neben bisher unbekannten biographischen Details aus Wolffs Marburger Zeit und den ersten Jahren seines Wirkens nach der Rückkehr an die (...) Universität Halle Einblicke in Wolffs und Manteuffels Positionen innerhalb der politischen, philosophischen, theologischen und naturwissenschaftlichen Debatten der Zeit. Darüber hinaus eröffnet der Briefwechsel einen innovativen Einblick in die Funktionen eines wissenschaftspolitischen und epistolären Netzwerks, das von Graf Manteuffel zum Zwecke der europaweiten Verbreitung des Wolffianismus unterhalten und gepflegt wurde. Das Editionsprojekt wurde im Rahmen eines Kooperationsvertrags zwischen der Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg und der Sächsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig am Internationalen Zentrum für die Erforschung der europäischen Aufklärung (IZEA) der Universität Halle durchgeführt. ************ The survival of the correspondence between Christian Wolff (1679–1754) and Christoph von Manteuffel (1676–1749) is a singular piece of luck. The volumes preserved in Leipzig University Library contain the almost complete and thus largest surviving exchange of letters in all of Wolff’s correspondence. This historical-critical edition presents material which sets the study of Wolff and of the Enlightenment on a new footing. As well as previously unknown biographical details about Wolff’s time in Marburg and his first years of activity after his return to the University of Halle, it provides insights into Wolff’s and Manteuffel’s positions within the political, philosophical, theological and scientific debates of the period. In addition the correspondence opens up an innovative perspective on the functions of a scholarly political and epistolary network which Count Manteuffel maintained and nurtured in order to spread Wolffianism throughout Europe. The edition is part of a collaborative project between the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg and the Saxon Academy of Sciences, based at the Interdisciplinary Centre for European Enlightenment Studies at the University of Halle. (shrink)

Brings together the key writings of Ferdinand Christian Baur across theology, biblical studies, early Christian history, and philosophy, showing his crucial role in the development of 19th-century thought.

For Nicolas Auray, works relationships in an information society would recover, an illusion, pleasure would obliterate an exploitation of resources. So informatics which creates a mutant humanity ends, actually, to a pastoral govermentality. As far as he thinks hacker’s ethics by analogy with the University, Pekka Himanen does not propose any perspective of transformation. The understanding of the freedom of hackers, is a vision which protect their sovereign power with regard to the users, but which not allows them to (...) play role, in moral regulation of the city, for which Nicolas Auray waits. (shrink)

From 1968 to 1991 the acclaimed film theorist Christian Metz wrote several remarkable books on film theory. These books set the agenda of academic film studies during its formative period. Metz's ideas were taken up, digested, refined, reinterpreted, criticized and sometimes dismissed, but rarely ignored. This volume collects and translates into English a series of interviews with Metz, who offers readable summaries, elaborations, and explanations of his sometimes complex and demanding theories of film. We also discover the contents of his (...) unpublished manuscript on jokes, his relation to Roland Barthes, and the social networks operative in the French intellectual community during the 1970s and 1980s."--Back cover. (shrink)

These five letters from Christian von Ehrenfels to Alexius Meinong contain a written record of how Ehrenfels' dissertation plans came about, based on his reading and commenting on Meinong's work.

Applied Christian Ethics addresses selected themes in Christian social ethics. Part one shows the roots of contributors in the realist school; part two focuses on different levels of the significance of economics for social justice; and part three deals with both existential experience and government policy in war and peace issues.

Contemporary Christian ethics encounters the challenge to communicate genuinely Christian normative orientations within the scientific debate in such a way as to render these orientations comprehensible, and to maintain or enhance their plausibility even for non-Christians. This essay, therefore, proceeds from a biblical motif, takes up certain themes from the Christian tradition (in particular the idea of social justice), and connects both with a compelling contemporary approach to ethics by secular moral philosophy, i.e. with Axel Honneth's reception of Hegel, as (...) based on Hegel's theory of recognition. As a first step, elements of an ethics of recognition are developed on the basis of an anthropological recourse to the conditions of intersubjective encounters. These conditions are then brought to bear on the idea of social justice, as developed in the social-Catholic tradition, and as systematically explored in the Pastoral Letter of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Economic Justice For All (1986). Proceeding from this basis, aspects of a Christian ethics of community service with regard to long-term care can be defined. (shrink)

The shift of interest from community to individuality and freedom brought by modernity challenged the central place once occupied by religion, pushing it to the outskirts of human life. All these led to an increased indifference towards any transcendental guarantor that could act in a neutral reason-governed space. In the case of Islam, such a situation is impossible to tolerate, because it would mean God’s desecration by reducing the Qur’an to the statute of a simple book like many others that (...) offer an opinion on a Supreme Being who does not decide the destiny of humanity any more, but becomes a simple matter of opinion. While Western Christianity adjusted to modernity reaching even to justify the developments which led to a dissolution of sacred, stating that they were consistent with its essence, Islam accepted modernity only to the extent of this one’s capacity to verify the realities stated by the Qur’an. (shrink)

This collection provides the first in-depth introduction to the theory of the religious imagination put forward by renowned philosopher Douglas Hedley, from his earliest essays to his principal writings. Featuring Hedley's inaugural lecture delivered at Cambridge University in 2018, the book sheds light on his robust concept of religious imagination as the chief power of the soul's knowledge of the Divine and reveals its importance in contemporary metaphysics, ethics and politics. Chapters trace the development of the religious imagination in Christian (...) Platonism from Late Antiquity to British Romanticism, drawing on Origen, Henry More and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, before providing a survey of alternative contemporary versions of the concept as outlined by Karl Rahner, René Girard and William P. Alston, as well as within Indian philosophy. By bringing Christian Platonist thought into dialogue with contemporary philosophy and theology, the volume systematically reveals the relevance of Hedley's work to current debates in religious epistemology and metaphysics. It offers a comprehensive appraisal of the historical contribution of imagination to religious understanding and, as such, will be of great interest to philosophers, theologians and historians alike. (shrink)

This article explores Muslim conversion to Christianity using a body of hagio-graphical sources in Arabic, Armenian, Georgian, Greek, and Latin. Through these lives of Christian martyrs, the article seeks to understand why Muslims undertook the surprising journey from “mosque to church” in the early centuries after the conquests. Many studies of Islamization are teleological, aiming to explain the large-scale conversion of the Middle East by the end of the Crusades. In contrast, this article aims to show why Islamization—especially in the (...) Umayyad and early ʿAbbāsid periods—could be highly contingent, even fragile, at a time when Muslims formed a numerical minority in many regions under their control. (shrink)

In the moral and spiritual vacuum left in Russia by the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989-1991, some of the thinkers who first opposed the Leninist revolution of 1917 have come to a new prominence, and among these is the religious philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev (1874-1948). He expressed a passionate protest against the revolution and was clearly the most comprehensive contemporary critic of the revolutionary project from a Christian perspective. From his consistently religious perspective he foresaw with precision much of (...) the inhuman and tyrannical potential of the revolutionary project. (shrink)

Les « collectifs en ligne » proposent un modèle original qui cherche à rendre compatible d'une part la production de quasi-unanimités avec l'exigence de ne pas perdre de temps dans la production de consensus, d'autre part l'intérêt pour la discussion argumentée avec la mise en oeuvre de techniques de délibération et de vote. L'article explore le fonctionnement de ces communautés virtuelles, en faisant l'hypothèse qu'elles construisent un modèle souverainiste de délibération.The "online group" . Propose an original model that seeks to (...) make it compatible with a production share of almost unanimities with the requirement not to lose time in the production of consensus, On the other hand the interest in reasoned discussion with the technical implementation of deliberation and vote. The article explores how these virtual communities, assuming they construct a model of deliberation sovereignty. (shrink)