The ardent antagonism between two aesthetic parties, figuration and abstraction, which for more than half a century has stamped art history in old Europe, with increasingly overlapping implications for youthful America, Japan and many other places, today tends to reduce itself to being simply the anecdotal imprint of an era: in the final analysis it seems already condemned to disappear in favor of a notion of complementarity and even synthesis.

Some time ago an article was published in this journal relating the difficulties of legislating for InVitro Fertilization in a Catholic country and the issues and side issues which had to be faced. Since then one has approached closer to having a law which regulates this technology. However several issues continue to challenge the country. The main concern, other than IVF not being a natural method of having children is the status of the embryo. The normative values of the country (...) in fact induces politicians to discuss an ‘embryology act’ rather than a ‘reproductive medicine’ act. At the eleventh hour Bishops continue to launch concerns which raises queries on how the debate moved forward over the past two decades. This paper tackles these issues and other more recent concerns and suggestions and takes a look at how such processes can be improved through a more rigorous understanding and logistic of dialogue, as certainly such debates should have implications for bioethics in general. Although the Church’s document Donum Vitae’s instructions for politicians where legislation for this technology has to occur has been vindicated, I seems that whilst many disputes have been resolved, the main conflict—that of the value of the conjugal act—has not. (shrink)

Le débat qui se déroule dans les années 1720 à l'Académie royale des inscriptions et belles-lettres, sur la possibilité ou non de connaître l'histoire des premiers siècles de Rome, est généralement interprété comme une mise au point épistémologique par l'un des protagonistes. Une mise en contexte qui prend en considération les enjeux politiques de la dispute permet de comprendre que ce débat est l'amorce d'un processus d'autonomisation du champ des études historiques savantes, non seulement du point de vue de (...) la division des savoirs, mais aussi par rapport au pouvoir monarchique. (shrink)

This article addresses the highly disputed distribution of roles in the story of Susanna. Susanna consists of a number of actors of whom only a few such as Susanna, the two elders, the Jewish people and Daniel are directly related to the central action of the story. With regard to the roles of these actors in the story however, a question arises: Who is the subject of the story of Susanna? Most scholars question the attribution of the role of subject (...) to Susanna. Their contention however, has not yet been sustained by convincing evidence stemming from the use of a suitable method. This study attempts to fill this gap by using the Greimassian approach to narratives, as refined by Everaert-Desmedt. The approach comprises three levels of analysis: the figurative, the narrative and the thematic. The contribution focuses only on the narrative level of analysis, particularly on the actantial model because the main role of this structure is to reveal different functions of actors called here actants. It is the contention here that following the actantial model of the Greimassian approach of analysis, Susanna emerges as the subject of the main concern of the story. (shrink)

Que cherchent les écrivains qui, au risque de passer sous les radars médiatiques, n'empruntent pas l'autoroute du récit linéaire et du reportage romancé? La voie étroite de la poésie débouche sur des formes minoritaires et sur des consistances bizarres de prose. Comme s'il fallait d'urgence ranimer, redessiner les mots en troublant leur usage. Mais dans quel but, au juste? De temps à autre, on m'invite à exposer des idées. Mon choix du sujet est toujours intéressé. Il concerne ce que je (...) pratique : la poésie et la prose narrative surtout, un peu le montage et le dessin. Il s'agit de parler en s'adressant à des gens en particulier. La dispute n'est jamais loin. Le ton n'est pas toujours sérieux. Limité par le temps, je procède quelquefois par simples assertions, qui se lisent alors comme les têtes de chapitres manquants. Esquisses d'une réflexion que d'autres prolongeraient, ces brefs discours sont ensuite laissés en l'état. Ils portent, donc, sur des inventions marginales : poèmes prosaïques, visuels ou animés, récits digressifs ou hétérogènes, figures de monstres, films dansants, fantômes tracés. Ils suggèrent une certaine politique des formes. Ils plaident pour une imagination technique assez négligée — ou mal vue — en littérature. (shrink)

Anselm of Cantorbery wrote Proslogion, where is formulated the famous ‘Unum argumentum’ about the existence of God. This argument was been disputed and criticized by numerous logicians from an extensional view point. The classical predicate logic is not able to give a formal frame to develop an adequate analysis of this argument. According to us, this argument is not an ontological proof; it analyses the meaning of the “quo nihil maius cogitari posit”, a characterization of God, and establish, by absurd, (...) that “quod non posit cogitare non esse” by using the hypothesis: “to think in re” is taller than “to think in solo intelectu”. We discuss this relation and the difference between the meanings of the elementary predicates ‘to be in re’, ‘to be in intellectu’ and ‘to be in solo intellectu’. We propose a new logical approach of this ‘Unum argumentum’ of Anselm by using Curry’s Combinatory Logic. Indeed, Combinatory Logic is an abstract applicative formalism of operators applied to operands; in this formalism, the predicates, viewed as specific operators, can be composed and can be transformed, by an intrinsic way, into more complex predicates, by means of abstract operators, called “combinators”, studied by Combinatory Logic. We show that this formalism is a logical frame where it becomes possible to discuss and to formulate cognitive representations of the meanings of predicates used inside of the ‘Unum argumentum’ and to explain how the argument runs. (shrink)

Suppose I am a leeway sceptic: I think that, whenever I face a choice between two courses of action, I lack true alternatives. Can my practical deliberation be rational? Call this the Deliberation Question. This paper has three aims in tackling it. Its constructive aim is to provide a unified account of practical deliberation. Its corrective aim is to amend the way that philosophers have recently framed the Deliberation Question. Finally, its disputative aim is to argue that leeway sceptics cannot (...) deliberate entirely rationally about what to do, because of the connection between deliberating and deciding. (shrink)

The margravial court astronomer Simon Marius, was involved in all of the new observations made with the recently invented telescope in the early part of the seventeenth century. He also discovered the Moons of Jupiter in January 1610, but lost the priority dispute with Galileo Galilei, because he missed to publish his findings in a timely manner. The history of astronomy neglected Marius for a long time, finding only the apologists for the Copernican system worthy of attention. In contrast (...) the papers presented on the occasion of the Simon Marius Anniversary Conference 2014, and collected in this volume, demonstrate that it is just this struggle to find the correct astronomical system that makes him particularly interesting. His research into comets, sunspots, the Moons of Jupiter and the phases of Venus led him to abandon the Ptolemaic system and adopt the Tychonic one. He could not take the final step to heliocentricity but his rejection was based on empirical arguments of his time. This volume presents a translation of the main work of Marius and shows the current state of historical research on Marius. (shrink)

La représentation et l'expression sont communément tenues pour caractéristiques des œuvres d'art. Les questions que soulèvent ces notions ont jalonné le développement de l'esthétique et durablement marqué les discussions autour desquelles un grand nombre de théories ont vu le jour en philosophie de l'art. Ce livre tente de les analyser en se frayant un chemin dans les difficultés qui leur sont liées, au carrefour des traditions et des courants qui s'en disputent aujourd'hui l'héritage.

Pierre Chanet był protestanckim lekarzem i filozofem, pochodzącym z La Rochelle. W swoich badaniach zajmował się w problemem myślenia u zwierząt. Występował przeciw tradycji reprezentowanej przez Charona i Montaigne’a, która uznawała, że zwierzęta myślą, decydują i posiadają rozum. Przeciwstawiał temu poglądowi swoją koncepcję instynktu. Rozumiał go jako działanie Boga i definiował instynkt jako „działanie Przyczyny Pierwszej, która pobudza i nakierowuje wszystkie przyczyny drugie w stronę ich celu, jeżeli nie mają one naturalnych zdolności, aby do niego dotrzeć”. Polemizował z nim (...) Marin Cureau de la Chambre, który również był lekarzem i filozofem. Twierdził on, że rozum nie jest jedynie własnością ludzi, ale występuje też w zachowaniach zwierząt. Tekst ukazuje główne tezy polemiki między uczonymi. Informuje ponadto, że zasadnicza różnica miedzy nimi dotyczya terminu „stwarzanie”. Chanet rozumia je jako majce stale miejsce w naturze, de la Chambre jako raz dokonane. Według Chaneta Bóg przez swój rozum, bez przerwy wspiera wszystko, co powołał do istnienia. W przyrodzie ożywionej i nieożywionej to działanie przejawia się jako instynkt. Zdaniem de la Chambre’a Bóg nie ingeruje w ten sposób. (shrink)

This article deals with a highly debated text, namely 2 Maccabees 12, specifically the problematic verses (38–45) which contain a theology that is distinctly non-Jewish in import. Indeed, most recent scholars concerned with this passage do not seem to be unanimous apropos the best interpretation of the events that are described, resulting in a range of different opinions concerning, inter alia, the afterlife, purgatory and/or doctrinal disputes between Pharisees and Sadducees. By means of an interpretivist or constructivist epistemology, the authors (...) advocate that normally, traditional Judaism emphasises personal, individual responsibility and accountability, whereas in this text God is portrayed as requiring material, financial payment for wrongdoing and not individual תשובה [teshuvah]. This is in contradistinction to, inter alia, Exodus 30:11–16 and theologically Jewish ‘transgression’ has clearly metamorphosed into Christian ‘sin’. In addition, Judas Maccabeus seems to have retained a half-shekel methodology (employed for Jewish men of military age – soldiers) whilst emphasising the ‘atonement for your lives’ from Exodus 30:11–16 in a more literalistic, materialistic, non-Jewish sense whilst de-emphasising the real need to maintain the Temple as well as the proper, traditional rules of תשובה. (shrink)

Pierre Duhem is the discoverer of the physics of the Middle Ages. The discovery that there existed a physics of the Middle Ages was a surprise primarily for Duhem himself. This discovery completely changed the way he saw the evolution of physics, bringing him to formulate a complex argument for the growth and continuity of scientific knowledge, which I call the ‘Pierre Duhem Thesis’ (not to be confused either with what Roger Ariew called the ‘true Duhem thesis’ as (...) opposed to the Quine-Duhem thesis, which he persuasively argued is not Duhem’s, or with the famous ‘Quine-Duhem Thesis’ itself). The ‘Pierre Duhem Thesis’ consists of five sub-theses (some transcendental in nature, some other causal, factual, or descriptive), which are not independent, as they do not work separately (but only as a system) and do not relate to reality separately (but only simultaneously). The famous and disputed ‘continuity thesis’ is part, as a sub-thesis, from this larger argument. I argue that the ‘Pierre Duhem Thesis’ wraps up all of Duhem’s discoveries in the history of science and as a whole represents his main contribution to the historiography of science. The ‘Pierre Duhem Thesis’ is the central argument of Pierre Duhem's work as historian of science. (shrink)

Pierre Bayle was professor of philosophy at the Illustrious School in Rotterdam from 1681 until 1693. Little is known about his courses there. However, the discovery of two disputations, Theses philosophicae, which were defended by students under his supervision, makes clear that he taught elementary Cartesian physics in a rather orthodox way. It is obvious that he did not change the course which he had given in Sedan in 1677, and which was published under the title Cours de philosophiein (...) volume four of his Œuvres diverses. (shrink)

In the edited book “Bourdieu and Chinese Education”, a group of scholars in China, Australia, Canada, and the USA engage in a dialogue with Bourdieu and raise persistent questions not only about issues of equity, competition, and change in Chinese education, but also about the value, venture, and violence in using established Western intellectual frameworks for analysing Chinese education. In response to these questions, this special issue analyses and discusses Chinese rural education, teacher education, language education, health and physical education, (...) and transnational education; and proposes a series of new conceptualisations, for example, regression- and network-based field analysis, Bourdieu-Chinese philosophy encounter, field of mediation, localised pedagogical capital, and new Chinese habituses (e.g., contemptuous habitus, diasporic cosmopolitan habitus, habitus (re)structuring). Such collective effort responds to the strident, and sometimes misleading, castigation of Bourdieu for determinism; and also disputes the non-reflexive, celebratory tone that consecrates the French sociologist and his canonical theorem, and hence reproduces the symbolic violence in the doxic academia. In this vein, the special issue is respectful for, but not restricted to, Bourdieu’s sociology, showing no timidity in questioning and contesting the framework of the famed thinker when research problems and findings demand so. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:AN IMPORTANT NEW STUDY OF THOMAS AQUINAS: JEAN-PIERRE TORRELL'S INITIATION A SAINT THOMAS D'AQUIN WALTER H. PRINCIPE, C.S.B. Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies Toronto, Canada BEFORE BECOMING professor of theology at the Universite de Fribourg, Jean-Pierre Torrell, O.P., was a member of the Leonine Commission. This editorial experience, together with his continuing association with members of the commission, enables him in his new work, Initiation a saint (...) Thomas d'Aquin: Sa personne et son oeuvre, to clarify and frequently modify previous research conclusions about the life and work of Thomas Aquinas.1 Thus other recent studies in this area, e.g., those of James A. Weisheipl and Simon Tugwell, will have to be reassessed in the light of Torrell's findings in this important volume.2 Torrell, however, does more than examine the dates and places of Thomas's career and writing: as the book's subtitle and introduction make clear, his aim is to present the person of Thomas Aquinas in his context. This he does in a warm but measured fashion, situating Aquinas in his times, following Thomas's journeys about France and Italy on his intellectual apostolatea true ministry in the Dominican tradition-portraying him as 1 In the series Vestigia: Pensee antique et medievale 13 (Fribourg Suisse: Editions Universitaires; Paris: Cerf, 1993), pp. xviii, 592. 2 See Weisheipl, Friar Thomas d'Aquino: His Life, Thought, and Works, 2nd ed. (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1983), and Tugwell, trans., ed., introd., Albert & Thomas: Selected Writings, The Classics of Western Spirituality (New York-Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1988), introd. [to Thomas Aquinas], pp. 201-351. 489 490 WALTER H. PRINCIPE, C.S.B. often nearly overwhelmed by the duties of this apostolate, yet vigorous and lively in defense of the faith and of the legitimate role of reason, a warm friend to many con,freres and others, a loyal and sometimes deeply involved member of his family. Torrell is especially adept at linking Thomas's apostolic activity with his profound and distinctive spirituality; this augurs well for Torrell 's promised companion volume, which will deal far more thoroughly with Thomas's spirituality than was possible within the editorial constraints of his earlier article in the Dictionnaire de spiritualite.3 New conclusions about the place and dating of Thomas's works Here, first, will be given a summary, with occasional comment, of this study's significant new conclusions about the place and dating of Thomas's works. Torrell accepts Weisheipl's view that Aquinas did his initial biblical commentary at Cologne before coming to Paris in 1252 and spent the years 1252-1256 working on the Scriptum super Sententiis. The "bref catalogue" at the end, prepared by G. Emery, O.P., states that this work is the "fruit of his teaching as bachelor of the Sentences at the begin;.. ning of his first stay in Paris ( 1252-54) ; its redaction had not yet been completed when he began his activity as Master ( 1256)" (485; emphasis mine). Weisheipl, with whom Torrell agrees as to Thomas's having done his cursory teaching of the Bible at Cologne, holds that Thomas lectured on the Senten:ces for the four years, 1252-1256 (71, 358); Tugwell seems to hold the same position when he speaks of Thomas "writing [his lectures on the Sentences] up for publication as he went" (211). Torrell's limitation of the teaching of the Sentences to 1252-1254 is based on the university statutes prescribing that this teaching be completed in two years (66), after which the candidate for the mastership would be a " formed bachelor " (baccalaureus formatus) whose main task would be to assist the master of 3 See his "Thomas d'Aquin," Dictionnaire de Spiritualite 15 (1991), cols. 718-73. INITIATION A SAINT THOMAS D1 AQUIN 491 theology with his disputed questions (58). This would mean that Thomas spent two whole years, 1254-1256, carrying out this rather minimal duty, redacting the Sentences (a task not completed until the beginning of his period as a master of theology), and composing two small works, the De ente et essentia and the De principiis naturae. Although the Scriptum is a... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Interpreting Arnauld ed. by Elmar J. KremerLisa DowningElmar J. Kremer, editor. Interpreting Arnauld. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996. Pp. xi + 183. Cloth, $65.00.This attractive volume represents (with one exception) the proceedings of what was evidently a lively colloquium on Arnauld’s philosophy, held at the University of Toronto in 1994 to commemorate the three-hundredth anniversary of his death. Although Antoine Arnauld has been best known to contemporary (...) philosophers as the author of the fourth set of objections to Descartes’ Meditations, interest in Arnauld’s own philosophical thought appears to be on the rise within the Anglo-American philosophical community, as indicated by the publication, within the last eight years, of two new translations of his Des vrayes et des fausses idées (a philosophical polemic against Malebranche) and a new translation of the Port-Royal Logic that Arnauld co-authored with Pierre Nicole. This new collection, from an international group of contributors, is thus well-timed. The two main themes that emerge from the collection as a whole serve to indicate the potential importance of Arnauld scholarship to our understanding of seventeenth century philosophy.The first theme that unites most of the papers is that of the diversity of views that existed within the constellation of philosophers who identified in one way or another with the doctrines of René Descartes. Arnauld was, of course, one such Cartesian. Nevertheless, many of the papers take the differences between Descartes and Arnauld as their starting point. Peter Schouls sets up a general contrast between the modernity of Descartes’ thought, as founded on the validity of subjective consciousness, and the tradition-grounded character of Arnauld’s philosophy. Jill Vance Buroker focuses productively on Arnauld’s and Descartes’ opposing views on the nature of assertion and judgment. Alan Nelson uses Arnauld’s challenge to Descartes’ account of the material falsity of ideas as the basis for a controversial but fascinating reassessment of a range of crucial issues in Descartes scholarship: clarity and distinctness, objective reality, and representation, as well as material falsity. Jean-Luc Solère’s contribution (described further below) documents the fact that significant philosophical debates existed, not [End Page 367] just within Cartesianism, but even within the still narrower Jansenist community that agreed in taking Augustine and Descartes as their philosophical models. In thus highlighting and documenting the diversity and richness of Cartesianism, the collection provides a valuable contribution to the history of philosophy. This theme is also very much present in the essays by Ndiaye, Kremer, and Carraud, which are discussed below.The second theme, shared by the majority of the papers, is that of philosophical theology. As Elmar Kremer remarks in his editor’s introduction (p. ix), while Arnauld himself held that philosophy and theology are distinguishable disciplines, the volume as a whole documents their many interconnections in his work. These interconnections are especially well brought out in the contributions by Kremer, Solère, and Sleigh. Kremer argues that we can understand three of Arnauld’s key departures from Descartes (with respect to the nature of body, the production of sensory ideas, and divine omnipotence) as motivated by his Christian commitments. Solère contends, in his intricate and illuminating essay, that Arnauld’s views about the metaphysical status of known truths (that they are relations in our minds, rather than entities in God grasped by us) are connected to a debate about the savability of non-Christians, and that his disputant, Pierre Nicole, developed an account of implicit or indirect knowledge in order to accommodate his commitment to general grace, a divine illumination had by everyone. Robert Sleigh’s essay considers the difficult question of how Arnauld wished to reconcile his doctrine of efficacious grace with human freedom: Arnauld clearly advocated some sort of compatibilism, but what sort, exactly? Although Sleigh admits that he cannot give an unambiguous defense of a single answer, his map of the territory is very valuable indeed. Other topics in philosophical theology touched on in the collection are the epistemology of papal infallibility (discussed by Thomas Lennon), miracles (discussed by Graeme Hunter) and divine omnipotence. This last topic (which is connected both to the question of the... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Interpreting Arnauld ed. by Elmar J. KremerLisa DowningElmar J. Kremer, editor. Interpreting Arnauld. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996. Pp. xi + 183. Cloth, $65.00.This attractive volume represents (with one exception) the proceedings of what was evidently a lively colloquium on Arnauld’s philosophy, held at the University of Toronto in 1994 to commemorate the three-hundredth anniversary of his death. Although Antoine Arnauld has been best known to contemporary (...) philosophers as the author of the fourth set of objections to Descartes’ Meditations, interest in Arnauld’s own philosophical thought appears to be on the rise within the Anglo-American philosophical community, as indicated by the publication, within the last eight years, of two new translations of his Des vrayes et des fausses idées (a philosophical polemic against Malebranche) and a new translation of the Port-Royal Logic that Arnauld co-authored with Pierre Nicole. This new collection, from an international group of contributors, is thus well-timed. The two main themes that emerge from the collection as a whole serve to indicate the potential importance of Arnauld scholarship to our understanding of seventeenth century philosophy.The first theme that unites most of the papers is that of the diversity of views that existed within the constellation of philosophers who identified in one way or another with the doctrines of René Descartes. Arnauld was, of course, one such Cartesian. Nevertheless, many of the papers take the differences between Descartes and Arnauld as their starting point. Peter Schouls sets up a general contrast between the modernity of Descartes’ thought, as founded on the validity of subjective consciousness, and the tradition-grounded character of Arnauld’s philosophy. Jill Vance Buroker focuses productively on Arnauld’s and Descartes’ opposing views on the nature of assertion and judgment. Alan Nelson uses Arnauld’s challenge to Descartes’ account of the material falsity of ideas as the basis for a controversial but fascinating reassessment of a range of crucial issues in Descartes scholarship: clarity and distinctness, objective reality, and representation, as well as material falsity. Jean-Luc Solère’s contribution (described further below) documents the fact that significant philosophical debates existed, not [End Page 367] just within Cartesianism, but even within the still narrower Jansenist community that agreed in taking Augustine and Descartes as their philosophical models. In thus highlighting and documenting the diversity and richness of Cartesianism, the collection provides a valuable contribution to the history of philosophy. This theme is also very much present in the essays by Ndiaye, Kremer, and Carraud, which are discussed below.The second theme, shared by the majority of the papers, is that of philosophical theology. As Elmar Kremer remarks in his editor’s introduction (p. ix), while Arnauld himself held that philosophy and theology are distinguishable disciplines, the volume as a whole documents their many interconnections in his work. These interconnections are especially well brought out in the contributions by Kremer, Solère, and Sleigh. Kremer argues that we can understand three of Arnauld’s key departures from Descartes (with respect to the nature of body, the production of sensory ideas, and divine omnipotence) as motivated by his Christian commitments. Solère contends, in his intricate and illuminating essay, that Arnauld’s views about the metaphysical status of known truths (that they are relations in our minds, rather than entities in God grasped by us) are connected to a debate about the savability of non-Christians, and that his disputant, Pierre Nicole, developed an account of implicit or indirect knowledge in order to accommodate his commitment to general grace, a divine illumination had by everyone. Robert Sleigh’s essay considers the difficult question of how Arnauld wished to reconcile his doctrine of efficacious grace with human freedom: Arnauld clearly advocated some sort of compatibilism, but what sort, exactly? Although Sleigh admits that he cannot give an unambiguous defense of a single answer, his map of the territory is very valuable indeed. Other topics in philosophical theology touched on in the collection are the epistemology of papal infallibility (discussed by Thomas Lennon), miracles (discussed by Graeme Hunter) and divine omnipotence. This last topic (which is connected both to the question of the... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Interpreting Arnauld ed. by Elmar J. KremerLisa DowningElmar J. Kremer, editor. Interpreting Arnauld. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996. Pp. xi + 183. Cloth, $65.00.This attractive volume represents (with one exception) the proceedings of what was evidently a lively colloquium on Arnauld’s philosophy, held at the University of Toronto in 1994 to commemorate the three-hundredth anniversary of his death. Although Antoine Arnauld has been best known to contemporary (...) philosophers as the author of the fourth set of objections to Descartes’ Meditations, interest in Arnauld’s own philosophical thought appears to be on the rise within the Anglo-American philosophical community, as indicated by the publication, within the last eight years, of two new translations of his Des vrayes et des fausses idées (a philosophical polemic against Malebranche) and a new translation of the Port-Royal Logic that Arnauld co-authored with Pierre Nicole. This new collection, from an international group of contributors, is thus well-timed. The two main themes that emerge from the collection as a whole serve to indicate the potential importance of Arnauld scholarship to our understanding of seventeenth century philosophy.The first theme that unites most of the papers is that of the diversity of views that existed within the constellation of philosophers who identified in one way or another with the doctrines of René Descartes. Arnauld was, of course, one such Cartesian. Nevertheless, many of the papers take the differences between Descartes and Arnauld as their starting point. Peter Schouls sets up a general contrast between the modernity of Descartes’ thought, as founded on the validity of subjective consciousness, and the tradition-grounded character of Arnauld’s philosophy. Jill Vance Buroker focuses productively on Arnauld’s and Descartes’ opposing views on the nature of assertion and judgment. Alan Nelson uses Arnauld’s challenge to Descartes’ account of the material falsity of ideas as the basis for a controversial but fascinating reassessment of a range of crucial issues in Descartes scholarship: clarity and distinctness, objective reality, and representation, as well as material falsity. Jean-Luc Solère’s contribution (described further below) documents the fact that significant philosophical debates existed, not [End Page 367] just within Cartesianism, but even within the still narrower Jansenist community that agreed in taking Augustine and Descartes as their philosophical models. In thus highlighting and documenting the diversity and richness of Cartesianism, the collection provides a valuable contribution to the history of philosophy. This theme is also very much present in the essays by Ndiaye, Kremer, and Carraud, which are discussed below.The second theme, shared by the majority of the papers, is that of philosophical theology. As Elmar Kremer remarks in his editor’s introduction (p. ix), while Arnauld himself held that philosophy and theology are distinguishable disciplines, the volume as a whole documents their many interconnections in his work. These interconnections are especially well brought out in the contributions by Kremer, Solère, and Sleigh. Kremer argues that we can understand three of Arnauld’s key departures from Descartes (with respect to the nature of body, the production of sensory ideas, and divine omnipotence) as motivated by his Christian commitments. Solère contends, in his intricate and illuminating essay, that Arnauld’s views about the metaphysical status of known truths (that they are relations in our minds, rather than entities in God grasped by us) are connected to a debate about the savability of non-Christians, and that his disputant, Pierre Nicole, developed an account of implicit or indirect knowledge in order to accommodate his commitment to general grace, a divine illumination had by everyone. Robert Sleigh’s essay considers the difficult question of how Arnauld wished to reconcile his doctrine of efficacious grace with human freedom: Arnauld clearly advocated some sort of compatibilism, but what sort, exactly? Although Sleigh admits that he cannot give an unambiguous defense of a single answer, his map of the territory is very valuable indeed. Other topics in philosophical theology touched on in the collection are the epistemology of papal infallibility (discussed by Thomas Lennon), miracles (discussed by Graeme Hunter) and divine omnipotence. This last topic (which is connected both to the question of the... (shrink)

A physician and spokesman for the French Ideologues, Pierre-JeanGeorges Cabanis (1757-1808) stands at the crossroads of several influential developments in modern culture--Enlightenment optimism about human perfectibility, the clinical method in medicine, and the formation and adaptation of liberal social ideals in the French Revolution. This first major study of Cabanis in English traces the influences of these developments on his thought and career. Originally published in 1980. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available (...) previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

Pierre Bourdieu is arguably one of the twentieth century’s greatest socio-philosophical thinkers and his writings have much to offer anyone interested in the ways that people value, consume and produce architecture. Bourdieu spent much of his life attempting to understand cultural consumption and production through detailed empirical research that included studies of dwellings, art, museums, photography and aesthetics. This book introduces the architectural reader to Bourdieu’s key writings on culture and outlines the ways in which they offer powerful practical (...) tools and novel conceptual frameworks for understanding architectural value, taste, and practice. (shrink)

Drawing on various resources and requirements (as expressed by Dewey, Wittgenstein, Sellars, and Brandom), this paper proposes an externalist view of conceptual mental episodes that does not equate them, even partially, with vehicles of any sort, whether the vehicles be located in the environment or in the head. The social and pragmatic nature of the use of concepts and conceptual content makes it unnecessary and indeed impossible to locate the entities that realize conceptual mental episodes in non-personal or subpersonal contentful (...) entities (vehicles). Persons, who engage in social practices of deontic scorekeeping (Brandom), and who are thus able to produce appropriate inferential behaviour, enact conceptual mental episodes and the basis of their supervenience. (shrink)

Self-Interest before Adam Smith inquires into the foundations of economic theory. It is generally assumed that the birth of modern economic science, marked by the publication of The Wealth of Nations in 1776, was the triumph of the 'selfish hypothesis'. Yet, as a neo-Epicurean idea, this hypothesis had been a matter of controversy for over a century and Smith opposed it from a neo-Stoic point of view. But how can the Epicurean principles of orthodox economic theory be reconciled with the (...) Stoic principles of Adam Smith's philosophy? Pierre Force shows how Smith's theory refutes the 'selfish hypothesis' and integrates it at the same time. He also explains how Smith appropriated Rousseau's 'republican' critique of modern commercial society, and makes the case that the autonomy of economic science is an unintended consequence of Smith's 'republican' principles. (shrink)

We study one way in which stable phenomena can exist in an NIP theory. We start by defining a notion of ‘pure instability’ that we call ‘distality’ in which no such phenomenon occurs. O-minimal theories and the p-adics for example are distal. Next, we try to understand what happens when distality fails. Given a type p over a sufficiently saturated model, we extract, in some sense, the stable part of p and define a notion of stable independence which is implied (...) by non-forking and has bounded weight. (shrink)

The book situates the works and reception of the French scholar Pierre de la Ramée (Petrus Ramus) in a variety of European cultural and educational contexts, from Britain and France to Eastern Europe, from Germany to the Iberian peninsula, and from Scandinavia to the Netherlands. Pierre de la Ramée or Petrus Ramus (1515-1572) has long been a controversial figure in educational reform and innovation, from the moment of his first public academic statements in the 1530s, to his reception (...) among scholars in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. What is beyond dispute, however, is the vast reach of his influence throughout Europe. Ramus's ideas were disseminated through copious editions and translations of his own textbooks, and in wave after wave of adaptations and re-imaginings of his ideas that swept across the continent. This volume embarks on a European tour of Ramism, using a wide range of previously unpublished or untranslated archival evidence from throughout the continent to examine the dissemination of Ramus's works and his intellectual influence in geographic and in disciplinary terms. The ten chapters explore the spread of Ramism from his home country of France to Protestant strongholds in Germany, Holland, and Britain, and in the Catholic context of the Iberian peninsula. The book also examines Ramism in the less familiar territories (to most Anglophone readers) of Scandinavia and Hungary, and considers the preceding and contemporary Dutch and German educational reform movements from which Ramus borrowed to forge his own distinctive intellectual method. (shrink)

We show basic facts about dp-minimal ordered structures. The main results are: dp-minimal groups are abelian-by-finite-exponent, in a divisible ordered dp-minimal group, any infinite set has non-empty interior, and any theory of pure tree is dp-minimal.

This paper suggests an epistemic interpretation of Belnap’s branching space-times theory based on Everett’s relative state formulation of the measurement operation in quantum mechanics. The informational branching models of the universe are evolving structures defined from a partial ordering relation on the set of memory states of the impersonal observer. The totally ordered set of their information contents defines a linear “time” scale to which the decoherent alternative histories of the informational universe can be referred—which is quite necessary for assigning (...) them a probability distribution. The “historical” state of a physical system is represented in an appropriate extended Hilbert space and an algebra of multi-branch operators is developed. An age operator computes the informational depth of historical states and its standard deviation can be used to provide a universal information/energy uncertainty relation. An information operator computes the encoding complexity of historical states, the rate of change of its average value accounting for the process of correlation destruction inherent to the branching dynamics. In the informational branching models of the universe, the asymmetry of phenomena in nature appears as a mere consequence of the subject’s activity of measuring, which defines the flow of time-information. (shrink)

Through a detailed study of Spinoza's concept of 'experience', Moreau shows how Spinoza extends the power of reason to capture the singularity of individuals: their lives, languages, passions and societies.

The main objective of this article is to capitalise on many years of research, and of practice, relating to the use of introspection in a research context, and thus to provide an initial outline description of introspection, while developing an introspection of introspection. After a description of the context of this research, I define the institutional conditions which would enable the renewal of introspection as a research methodology. Then I describe three aspects of introspective practice: 1) introspection as a process (...) of becoming aware, theorized through Husserl's model of consciousness modes; 2) introspection as recollection, through the model of retention and awakening in Husserl's theory of memory; 3) the use of universal descriptive categories for the description of all lived experiences, as a guide for skilled practice of introspection in research. Finally I examine the question of the validation of introspective data, suggesting a strong distinction between the ethical criterion and the epistemic criterion of truth. (shrink)

Le Professeur Pierre Magnard n'a eu de cesse, au cours de son itinéraire intellectuel, où le pédagogue et le chercheur opérèrent toujours en synergie, de révéler, de construire et d'enrichir la tradition philosophique et théologique gréco-latine, notamment à travers l'étude du Néoplatonisme, de travailler à mieux faire connaître les auteurs des quinzième et seizième siècles, comme Nicolas de Cues, Marsile Ficin,Jean Pic de la Mirandole, Michel de Montaigne ou Charles de Bovelles, et d'y entretenir inlassablement la flamme de celui (...) qui demeurera à ses yeux un penseur phare : Blaise Pascal. Constitués en académie platonicienne une pléiade de chercheurs, issus de cet enseignement, a voulu en témoigner par quelques-unes de leurs avancées, manifestant la convergence de leur investigation sans prétendre en couvrir le champ. (shrink)