The article explores a range of social scientific representations of credit and debt in the United States and Britain and how these have been organized around the problem of freedom. On the one hand, credit is projected as productive, embodying and securing liberal values of individual autonomy and self-determination. On the other, debt is portrayed as consumptive, ensnaring the individual, subverting her or his will and undermining the capacity for self-determination. The classic cultural injunction against consumer borrowing is captured under (...) the rubric of the Puritan ethic which portrays indebtedness as contrary to the values of individual freedom and autonomy; however, it is shown here how the meanings attached to credit and debt have always been ambiguous in practice. Over the 20th century, and continuing today, a number of economic writers have attempted to legitimize the development of consumer credit by demonstrating how it contributes towards freedom and security. However, it is shown how these accounts shift in response to changing economic discourses as well as credit’s growing pervasiveness. In contrast, sociological writers have tended to criticize the accumulation of debt as damaging to both individual autonomy and societal welfare. Again, these accounts also manifest a notable change in emphasis over time in response to shifting constructions of the problem of social change. Finally, recent empirical work is drawn upon to demonstrate the ways in which freedom itself can be a contingent and contextual element in the production of consumer credit. (shrink)

Extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) is currently reserved predominantly for bridging patients to a different destination therapy, but the use of ECMO as a destination therapy itself (ECMO-DT...

Introduction : playing with play -- Child's play : childhood and "the lack" in organizational discourse -- Playful representations of work -- Dance as play and work : images of organization in Irish dance -- Talk and silence : playing with silence as an organizational resource -- Playing the fool : the university as fool -- Play and madness in the market -- Playing business : gambling and "casino capitalism".

An anthropocentric scope for clinical medical ethics (CME) has largely separated this area of bioethics from environmental concerns. In this article, we first identify and reconcile the ethical issues imposed on CME by climate change including the dispersion of related causes and effects, the transdisciplinary and transhuman nature of climate change, and the historic divorce of CME from the environment. We then establish how several moral theories undergirding modern CME, such as virtue ethics, feminist ethics, and several theories of justice, (...) promote both a flourishing of human medical practice and the environment. We conclude by defining an expanded the scope of CME as inclusive of not only patients, families, physicians, and other health professionals but other humans, non-humans, and their shared environment. We then apply this scope and theory to a widely used framework for applying CME, the Four Topics model, to construct a climate conscious approach to CME. (shrink)

v. 1. A doctrine of divine illumination -- v. 2. God at the core of cognition.

This paper aims at investigating the vocabulary of thingness in the thought of Henry of Ghent. The paper features two main parts: in the first part we try to clarify the statement and the implications of the distinction between the concept of res a reor, reris and the concept of res a ratitudine. On the subject the thesis argued that this distinction has essentially an epistemological function in Henry of Ghent's thought. The second part of the paper, instead, takes into (...) consideration the concept of realitas as it is formulated by Henry in some sections of his Quodlibeta. The argued thesis is that realitas is not a synonym of being, but rather designates the inner foundation of every ontological attribution. (shrink)

Focusing on the seminal works of two early thirteenth-century philosophers, Steven P. Marrone shows how the idea of science" and the desire to be "scientific" first penetrated the scholarly discourse of the medieval West. Originally published in 1983. 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)

Both in antiquity and ever since the Renaissance Lucretius' De Rerum Natura has been admired – and condemned – for its startling poetry, its evangelical faith in materialist causation, and its seductive advocacy of the Epicurean good life. Approaches to Lucretius assembles an international team of classicists and philosophers to take stock of a range of critical approaches to which this influential poem has given rise and which in turn have shaped its interpretation, including textual criticism, the text's strategies for (...) engaging the reader with its author and his message, the 'atomology' that posits a correlation of the letters of the poem with the atoms of the universe, the literary and philosophical intertexts that mediate the poem, and the political and ideological questions that it raises. Thirteen essays take up a variety of positions within these traditions of interpretation, innovating within them and advancing beyond them in new directions. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has been unprecedented, in every sense of the word. At the time of writing, there have been nearly 80 million confirmed cases of coronavirus and nearly 2 million deaths worldw...

This paper focuses on the formulation of the concept of ‘reality’ between the XV and the XVI centuries by investigating the classification of being of reason and its distinction from real being in...

Journal Name: Semiotica Issue: Ahead of print.

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Heft: Ahead of print.

The idea of a special connection between the thought of John Duns Scotus and that of his forebear, Henry of Ghent, goes back to the time of Duns himself, and in the modern scholarly world it is as old as the critical study of medieval philosophy. Moreover in the last four decades there has been a proliferation of articles claiming that one cannot understand Duns until one has mastered the work of Henry. Nowhere has the connection between the two stood (...) out in sharper relief than in the related areas of epistemology and noetics, and here most especially on the matter of the analogy or univocity of the concept of being. (shrink)

In many ways, Maddie’s case brings together some of the most challenging features seen in clinical ethics consultation. First, it centers around a heart-wrenching event—the near-drowning of a young...

This paper offers a new interpretation of Bernard Williams’s infamous claim that the demands of morality violate our integrity. It begins by showing how Williams’s critique targets an underexplored demand for genericity in moral philosophy. It then argues that while this demand is currently a foundational methodological commitment in moral theorizing, it cannot always be met without distorting the very values that theorizing intends to accommodate. Through careful consideration of the importance of practical experience for appreciating the value of ground (...) projects like human relationships, the paper reinterprets the integrity objection as a radical pushback against the way moral philosophy, by and large, represents the phenomenology of personal valuing. This conclusion offers two contributions. First, it reimagines a significant and yet poorly understood implication of Williams’s argument. Second, it raises a new challenge in an old debate: does moral philosophy fairly represent the values it purports to be about? (shrink)

This collection of eight essays on Augustine’s most widely read work focuses, as William Mann says in his introduction, on Augustine as a philosopher. Not every reader will agree that Augustine did indeed philosophize. Many would insist that whatever speculation Augustine engaged in, it was solely as a theologian. Yet each of the authors in this superb volume approaches Augustine in the context of the philosophy of the late Roman world, especially Neoplatonic philosophy. Their success in showing how the themes (...) of the Confessions resonate with the language of philosophers of the time—Plotinus chief among them—and wrestle with many of the same issues vindicates Mann’s claim. Anyone interested in understanding the.. (shrink)

La storia medievale della teologia e della metafisica è attraversata da una rilevante discussione a proposito della predicazione della nozione di ente. I modelli più spesso evocati a tal fine sono stati, com’è noto, l’analogia e l’univocità. Rispetto a questa alternativa, la tendenza generale degli interpreti è stata quella di intendere l’univocità e l’analogia come regimi predicativi opposti o contraddittori. Questa tesi ha dato vita a una sorta di opinione comune e diffusamente condivisa. La verità di questa tesi, tuttavia, non (...) si è mai imposta in maniera definitiva: il primo dibattito sulla compatibilità dell’univocità e dell’analogia risale proprio al Medioevo. A tal proposito appare decisivo il contributo di Pietro di Tommaso (Pere Tomàs, Pietro Tomàs, Petrus Thomae): la settima delle sue Quaestiones de ente (ca. 1325) chiede infatti Utrum vera analogia et vera univocatio possint se compati in eodem conceptu. Il presente contributo cerca di riscostruire gli snodi principali dell’argomentazione che Pietro di Tommaso elabora in questo testo con la duplice finalità di valorizzare il contributo di questo autore nel quadro del dibattito teologico medievale e di giustificare l’opportunità delle ricerche che tentano oggi di ripensare il rapporto tra l’univocità e l’analogia nel pensiero scotista. The history of medieval theology and metaphysics is marked by a relevant discussion about the predication of being. The semantic devices most frequently referred to in this regard were, as is well known, analogy and univocity. With respect to this alternative, the general tendency of scholars has been to understand univocity and analogy as opposite and contradictory modes of predication. This view has led to a kind of common and widely shared opinion. This thesis, however, has never prevailed conclusively: a debate on whether univocity and analogy were compatible dates back to the Middle Ages. In this respect, the contribution of Petrus Thomae is decisive: the seventh of his Quaestiones de ente (ca. 1325) asks in fact Utrum vera analogia et vera univocatio possint se compati in eodem conceptu. This contribution tries to reconstruct the main points of Petrus Thomae’s argumentation with the twofold purpose of enhancing the contribution of this author in the framework of the medieval theological debate and of justifying the opportunity of the current research that tries to rethink the relationship between univocity and analogy in the context of Duns Scotus’ thought. (shrink)

In this paper, the author criticises some basic assumptions of Ferrara's book, which deal with: a) the concept of the so-called 'fact of pluralism'; b) the idea of linguistical turn; c) some of Ferrara's episodical but significant remarks on strategic rationality; d) the role of experts in sciences.

The aim of this paper is to focus on the role of fairness within an apparently secondary passage of Rawls’ A Theory of Justice, in order to show that it is necessary to the impartial construction of perfect procedural justice.

: In this paper I offer some criticisms of Jonathan Dancy’s moral particularism. In Dancy’s version moral particularism states that there are neither general nor universal moral principles, that moral action is not the application of principles to particular cases, that moral reasoning has no motivational force because it deduces what must be done by moral principles, and that the agent who acts morally is not a person who has moral principles. However, Dancy’s proposal fails to explain the regularity of (...) moral behavior and the function of stability that moral agents and moral psychology play within social cooperation, nor is it able to explain the possibility of moral progress. Keywords: Jonathan Dancy; Moral Progress; Moral Psychology; Principles; Cooperation La mente morale particolarista Riassunto: In questo articolo espongo alcune critiche al particolarismo morale di Jonathan Dancy. Nella versione di Dancy il particolarismo morale afferma che non ci sono né principi morali generali né universali, che l’azione morale non è l’applicazione di principi a casi particolari, che il ragionamento morale non ha forza motivazionale perché deduce ciò che deve essere fatto dai principi morali, e che l’agente che agisce moralmente non è una persona che ha principi morali. Tuttavia, la proposta di Dancy non riesce a spiegare la regolarità del comportamento morale e la funzione di stabilità che gli agenti morali e la psicologia morale svolgono all’interno della cooperazione sociale, né è in grado di spiegare la possibilità del progresso morale. Parole chiave: Jonathan Dancy; Progresso morale; Psicologia morale; Principi; Cooperazione. (shrink)

I argue that the dominant conception of normative reasons in moral philosophy works to exclude certain modes of valuing from fair representation in moral deliberation and justification. I then argue that while reasons are taken to be the center and focus of practical thought, there are a wide and familiar range of activities in everyday life whose full appreciation escapes meaningful formulation in terms of reasons. As a result, the significance of these activities is systematically discounted or ignored by the (...) dominant assumptions about what counts as a reason in the methodology of moral philosophy. I conclude by putting forward my own positive account of practical thinking called loving attention, which contributes to a richer understanding of the elements of practical thought in some familiar cases of valuing, moral concept acquisition, imagination, and attention. (shrink)

In Benet Perera’s De communibus, the question on the first object of the intellectual knowledge is not addressed as a particular topic. On the contrary, it does constitute the general background in which Perera tries to sketch an original theory of the knowledge. Starting from this premise, the following article aims to demonstrate how Perera’s quaestio de primo cognito can clarify, for its reader, the nature of the intellectual knowledge, the relationship between the intellectual knowledge and the sensible knowledge, and (...) the ontology presupposed by this noetics.Through a detailed analysis of Perera’s arguments and of his claim that the first object of the intellect is the singular, the article focuses on some consequences of the solution proposed by the Spanish Jesuit. To this end, particular attention is given to Perera’s doctrine of the intellect and to the theoretical consequences of its formulation, in connection to the question of the relationship between sensible and intellectual knowledge. (shrink)

This paper deals with the major concepts of Scanlon’s moral contractualism. It is possible to describe moral contractualism as the ability to identify priorities and moral reasons in deliberative action, that no one could reasonably reject. These capabilities require us to take into account the interests of others in our moral judgments. The result is that Scanlon overthrow the philosophy of Hobbes: morality is not originated from politics; on the contrary, politics is a function of morality. His answer to the (...) dilemma of Prichard is particularly persuasive, though the proof of the falsity of the skeptical position can only be dialectic and persuasive is its intellectualistic position on relations between reasons and desires, too. (shrink)

El propósito de este ensayo es señalar, revisar y comentar algunas estrategias intertextuales presentes en los artefactos poéticos de la Antigüedad Tardía. Específicamente, examinaremos dos pasajes de los poemas de Draconcio, donde la relación de copresencia entre los textos está ligada a ciertas anomalías en la cadencia métrica de los versos. Intentaremos probar cómo, a veces, la relegatio de variantes textuales al aparato crítico ha impedido percibir procedimientos poéticos fónica y semánticamente relevantes.

Expressionism, holism, and deflationism are central concepts in Blackburn quasi-realistic metaethics. The paper deals with these in order to evaluate the general tenability of Blackburn’s version of non-cognitivism.