From Patristic writings ample evidence can be gathered about the important part which hymn-singing held in Early Christianity. Until recently, however, Early Christian hymnography was known only from documents transmitting the text but not the music. The discovery and publication of a Christian hymn in Greek with musical notation was, therefore, bound to change the whole aspect of studies concerned with the history of Early Christian music. This happened, as is well known, in 1922 when, under No. 1786 of the (...) fifteenth volume of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri A. S. Hunt edited a fragment of a hymn, dating from the late third century, together with a transcript of the music by H. Stuart Jones. For the first time it became possible to realize what kind of music Greek-speaking Christians in Egypt sang in praise of the Lord. (shrink)

‘Water is H2O’ is one of the most frequently cited sentences in analytic philosophy, thanks to the seminal work of Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam in the 1970s on the semantics of natural kind terms. Both of these philosophers owe an intellectual debt to the empiricist metaphysics of John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding, while disagreeing profoundly with Locke about the reality of natural kinds. Locke employs an intriguing example involving water to support his view that kinds (or ‘species’), such (...) as water and gold, are the workmanship of the human mind. This is the point of his story about a winter visitor to England from Jamaica, who is astonished to find that the water in his basin has turned solid overnight, and proceeds to call it ‘hardened water’. Locke criticizes this judgement, maintaining that it is more consonant with common sense to regard water and ice as different kinds of substance. Putnam, by implication, disagrees. Deploying his imaginary example of Twin Earth—a distant planet where a watery-looking substance, XYZ, rather than H2O, fills the oceans and rivers—he maintains that common sense supports the judgement that XYZ and H2O, despite their superficial similarity, are not the same kind of substance, precisely because their molecular compositions are different. Here it will be argued that both views are mistaken, but that, in this dispute, Locke has more right on his side than his modern opponents do. (shrink)

Stephen Mumford and Rani Lill Anjum have recently attacked causal necessitarianism – the doctrine that causes necessitate their effects – on the grounds that causation does not survive what they describe as the test of antecedent strengthening. This article shows that there are credible conditional logics which do not sanction this test, thereby providing an escape route for proponents of causal necessitarianism from Mumford and Anjum's argument.

What kinds of things can we be morally responsible for? Andrew Khoury offers an answer that includes (i) an argument for the impossibility of blameworthiness for overt action, and (ii) the assertion that “willings are the proper object of responsibility in the context of action”. After presenting an argument for the inconsistency of Khoury’s answer to our focal question, I defend the following partial answer that resembles, but differs importantly from, Khoury’s answer: one can be blameworthy for a practical decision—that (...) is, an essentially intentional momentary mental action of forming an intention to do something that resolves prior felt unsettledness about what to do. (shrink)

Changes being introduced to deregulate the Dutch health care system after decades of extensive state control are to be welcomed, and will in future require consumers to be ‘well‐informed, cost‐conscious and assertive patients, who are aware of their responsibility for their own health.’ R.B. Kool MD, PhD and E.J.J.M. Kimman PhD are attached to the Department of Business Ethics in the Faculty of Economics and Econometrics at The Free University, P.O. Box 7161, 10107 MC Amsterdam.

Changes being introduced to deregulate the Dutch health care system after decades of extensive state control are to be welcomed, and will in future require consumers to be ‘well‐informed, cost‐conscious and assertive patients, who are aware of their responsibility for their own health.’ R.B. Kool MD, PhD and E.J.J.M. Kimman PhD are attached to the Department of Business Ethics in the Faculty of Economics and Econometrics at The Free University, P.O. Box 7161, 10107 MC Amsterdam.

The institution of slavery has served to perform different functions in different societies. The distinction between ‘closed’ and ‘open’ slavery can be a useful one: in some societies slavery is a mechanism for the permanent exclusion of certain individuals from political and economic privileges, while in others it has served precisely to facilitate the integration of outsiders into the community. ‘The African slave, brought by a foray to the tribe, enjoys, from the beginning, the privileges and name of a child, (...) and looks upon his master and mistress in every respect as his new parents… by care and diligence, he may soon become a master himself, and even more rich and powerful than he who led him captive.’ The model of an ‘open’ slavery implies that service as a slave is not a state to which a person is permanently, let alone ‘naturally’, assigned, but more akin to an age-grade. A parallel might be domestic or agricultural service as it was practised in much of Europe until this century — a period spent serving in another household after childhood and prior to marriage. A Roman slave, on formal manumission, joined the community of citizens. To what extent ought we therefore to succumb to the temptation to see slavery at Rome — in contrast to the Greek world — in terms of the ideal type of a ‘process of integration’? In a noted article on ‘Die Freilassung von Sklaven und die Struktur der Sklaverei in der römischen Kaiserzeit’ , G. Alföldi argued that in the Roman Empire slavery was an ‘Übergangszustand’ , a transitional state which ultimately gave most slaves a recognised if not a fully equal place as members of the Roman citizen community. (shrink)