Several recent publications have questioned prevailing doctrines and offered new views on the antiquity of writing in early India and on the source and early development of the Indian scripts (Brāhmī and Kharoṣṭhī). Most of the new studies agree in assigning the origin of these scripts to a later period, i.e., the early Mauryan era (late fourth to mid third centuries B. C.), than has generally been done in the past, and in deriving them from prototypes in Semitic or Semitic-derived (...) scripts. The main works to be evaluated here are Oskar von Hinüber's Der Beginn der Schrift und frühe Schriftlichkeit in Indien and Harry Falk's Schrift im alten Indien: Ein Forschungsbericht mit Anmerkungen. Also discussed are two recent articles on similar topics, Gérard Fussman's "Les premiers systèmes d'écriture en Inde" and Kenneth R. Norman's "The Development of Writing in India and its Effect upon the Pāli Cannon," as well as some other relevant publications. The authority and significance of this new trend toward assigning a later date of origin for the Indian scripts is evaluated and placed in the context of broader historical and cultural issues. (shrink)

This paper elaborates on conceptual, empirical and practical arguments why corporations need to focus on their social dimensions, in order to further enhance organizational performance. The paper starts with an introduction on the general trend towards inclusiveness and connectedness. It then elaborates on the phase-wise development of cultures and organizational structures. Managing corporate improvement by building cultures of trust is the central focus of this contribution. By showing the cultural dimensions of Great Places to Work and their workplace practices, worthwhile (...) experiences leading to organizational improvement and superior financial performance are demonstrated. (shrink)

For organizational development that is future-oriented, enterprises increasingly need qualified, motivated and efficient workers who are able and willing to contribute actively to technical and organizational innovations. Furthermore, customers and consumers are increasingly interested in healthy products and services. Therefore, health has become a (potential) business value of strategic importance. In interaction with all relevant stakeholders, an approach was developed for companies that want to manage their health impact in a proactive and preventive manner. The approach was termed Integral Health (...) Management (IHM). IHM forms a strategic approach for reducing the costs of sickness absence and working disability, while the productivity and resilience of the company and its employees are increased. This brings the company direct economic benefits. Finally, it is of prime interest for employees to remain physically and mentally healthy and employable. The IHM approach distinguishes seven lines of development: (1) health as a strategic company interest; (2) the realization of a healthy primary process; (3) a safe and sound physical (work) environment; (4) an inspiring social (work) environment; (5) vital people; (6) a sound relationship with the immediate organizational environment and local community, and (7) healthy products and/or services. The inter-relationships between the seven development lines are essential for combining an improvement of the business impact on health with a strategic interest of companies and organizations. The seven lines of IHM development can easily be linked to the European Foundation for Quality Management''s European Excellence Model. (shrink)

Reading Galileo: Scribal Technologies and The Two New Sciences, by Renée Raphael, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017, ix + 265 pp., figs., bibl., index, £40.50 (cloth), ISBN 9781421421...

In this book the author intends to present a careful analysis of the Stoic teaching on human action and to apply it to the moral doctrine of mainly Zeno and Chrysippus. The work is divided into two parts: the first deals with the structure of human action, whereas the second applies the result of the performed analysis to the moral theory, especially to the teaching on passions and the ethical evolution of an individual from a pre-moral to a moral stage. (...) In the first chapter the author draws the attention to the Aristotelian background of the Stoic theory: the notion of phantasia, being the faculty which provides images of sensible reality and interprets them, plays an important part in both doctrines. In his analysis of action Aristotle uses logical and linguistic concepts and the Stoics proceed in the same way. According to Zeno, the founder of the Stoic school, human soul comprises eight parts, one of them being the hegemonikon or the mind. Within the mind four powers are distinguished: presentation, assent, impulse and reason; they are enduring and stable entities and they govern the activities corresponding to them. So they exist even when they are not being exercised, they are dispositions of the pneuma of the mind. In spite of their determinism the Stoics were anxious to preserve man's responsibility: therefore they stressed particularly the importance of assent, which causes impulse, whereas impulse produces action. Assent is an internal factor: man is a responsible being because his actions are the result of a personal assent. In this respect man differs from mere animals, which are unable to produce such an act; as a matter of fact assent is not given to a presentation as such, but to the meaning or content of a presentation. Since mere animals are unable to form lekta, they do not have the capacity of performing an act of assent. However mere animals may have something similar, which is called yielding. According to the Stoics no human action is performed without an act of assent, even when the agent is not aware of it: in these cases the assent is implicitly present in the action. This factor does not coincide with the Aristotelian bouleusis: within the Stoic theory of action there is no room for deliberation. The assent is the internal cause of an impulse, which is directed at a predicate, related to an imperative: in this way impulse is the immediate cause of action. (shrink)

This paper notes the apparent ineffectiveness of the critical response to competence-based education and training (CBET) and suggests that this results from a failure to correctly isolate CBET's unique, identifying features. It is argued that the prevailing tendency to identify CBET with ‘competence’ is fundamentally mistaken and that the competence approach is more properly characterised in terms of its philosophically naïve methodological strategy. It is suggested that this strategy is based upon untenable assumptions relating to the semantic status of statements (...) of outcome and the epistemological and ontological constructs to which such statements are intended to correspond. (shrink)

La riche pensée de Paul Tillich sur les liens entre théologie et culture donnent matière à réflexion dans la crise des fondements qui secoue aujourd’hui le monde occidental. L’article examine également comment la distinction établie par Tillich entre « théologie de la culture » et « théologie de l’Église » est utile à notre époque pour le dialogue interreligieux, si nécessaire, ce qui n’est pas sans conséquence pour le rôle des Facultés de théologie dans notre société et nos Églises.

Face aux trois tentations majeures du catholicisme traditionnel, à savoir le particularisme absolutisé de la compréhension qu’il a de lui-même, le supranaturalisme de sa compréhension de Dieu, l’an-historisme de la théologie mystique, face ainsi à la théologie dualiste de la délimitation par rapport à ce qui n’est pas lui, le concile Vatican II représente, dans sa visée, l’ouverture au réel tel qu’il est, dans un esprit non de discrimination mais de discernement, avec la question : qu’est-ce qui dans le réel (...) est constructeur, qu’est-ce qui est destructeur? Il est mû par la conscience que Dieu est le Dieu du réel et la foi, foi au coeur du réel. Il marque l’ouverture à une théologie de la récapitulation selon laquelle toutes choses sont récapitulées par Dieu en Christ, et ainsi à une intégration critique du réel, dépassant par là l’exclusivisme du catholicisme traditionnel et accédant à l’exigence d’une théologie critique — exclusive et inclusive à la fois — de la catholicité. Over against the three major temptations of catholicism, which are the absolutized particularism of its autocomprehension, the supernaturalism of its comprehension of God, the nonhistorical character of mystical theology, then over against the dualistic conception of its distinction from what is different from itself. Council Vatican II stands for an opening to the real as it is, in a spirit not of discrimination but of discernment, with the question : what in the real is creative, what is destructive? It is motivated by the consciousness that God is the God of the real, and that faith is to be found at the heart of the real. It means the opening to a theology which recapitulates everything in Christ, that is, the opening to a critical integration of the real, according to the requirements of a critical theology of catholicity — at the same time exclusivist and inclusivist — over against the exclusivism of traditional catholicism. (shrink)

It is sometimes said that there has been a ‘paradigm shift’ in the field of assessment over the last two or three decades: a new preoccupation with what learners can do, what they know or what they have achieved. It is suggested in this article that this change has precipitated a need to distinguish two conceptually and logically distinct methodological approaches to assessment that have hitherto gone unacknowledged. The upshot, it is argued, is that there appears to be a fundamental (...) confusion at the heart of current policy, a confusion occasioned by the demand to know what learners know and compounded by a failure to recognise what this properly entails for assessment methodology. (shrink)

_Explores the origin and evolution of the Greek concept of nature up until the time of Plato._.

Classical theories of truth are monistic, since they fundamentally search for the essence of truth. The correspondence theory of truth is the most representative in this regard. There are several difficulties with the essentialist theories of truth, which led to the emergence of several alternatives. The purpose of this article is to critically evaluate three of them: the pragmatic theory of truth, the deflationary theory and the pluralistic approach. I argue for overcoming monism and for accepting pluralism in our understanding (...) of truth. At the same time, I argue – from a wittgensteinian point of view – for abandoning the attempt to build a general philosophical theory of truth. I plead for limiting the philosopher’s role to the clarification of the specific ways in which the concept of truth is used in various forms of life and areas of scientific investigation. Multiple uses of the concept of truth in different thematic areas cannot be synthesized, properly speaking, through a particular philosophical theory. (shrink)

This paper elaborates on conceptual, empirical and practical arguments why corporations need to focus on their social dimensions, in order to further enhance organizational performance. The paper starts with an introduction on the general trend towards inclusiveness and connectedness. It then elaborates on the phase-wise development of cultures and organizational structures. Managing corporate improvement by building cultures of trust is the central focus of this contribution. By showing the cultural dimensions of Great Places to Work and their workplace practices, worthwhile (...) experiences leading to organizational improvement and superior financial performance are demonstrated. (shrink)

Cet article entend montrer comment, quand il expose la doctrine dite Assumptus homo, le philosophe et théologien latin Jean Duns Scot (1265 - 1308) prend appui sur le théologien grec Jean de Damas (c. 675 - c. 749), concernant trois points principaux: dans le Christ, la nature humaine est assumée par la personne du Verbe intégralement; elle est assumée dans un individu, non dans une personne; éternellement et temporellement. Le présent article complète l'étude des rapports entre les deux auteurs, après (...) l'article paru dans le numéro 3-4 la revue Chôra (2005-2006), sous le titre «Jean de Damas et Jean Duns Scot surl'infinité de l'essence divine». (shrink)

In reaffirming the intimate link between mind and life, John Duns Scotus is faithful to Augustine. His conception of the rational soul, however, differs from Augustine's trinitarian image, since he stresses the difference between intellect and memory on the one hand, and will on the other hand. He also departs from Augustine by attributing, in his theory of intelligible species, a real, if partial, causal role to the external object in their generation. The principle that there cannot be more reality (...) in an effect than in its cause is true only of the total cause, and not of a partial cause, because an inferior partial cause can concur with a superior partial cause, such as the intellect, to produce a common effect, the perfection of which surpasses its own. (shrink)

In this paper I pursue two goals. Firstly, I try to evaluate how Susan Haack receives and categorically rejects Rorty's anti-epistemological message from Philosophy and the Mirror of the Nature and some subsequent writings. I reconstruct Haack's counterarguments and Rorty's responses to these counterarguments. Secondly, I propose to deconstruct the theoretical position from which Haack orchestrates her attack on Rorty. On the one hand I show that she assumes a series of classical metaphysical presuppositions that are difficult to accept today, (...) which predisposes her to a lack of hermeneutical flexibility and clarity. On the other hand, at least some of Haack's arguments against Rorty are erroneous. Following Michael Williams, I point out that Rorty's position in Mirror is not against knowledge, since it raises questions about the legitimacy of epistemology. The challenge of my approach is not to defend Rorty, but rather to examine the mechanism of a charge against him in the name of a pretended philosophical correctness. I call this type of charge “hermeneutics of annihilation”. Haack's hermeneutics of annihilation is a pseudo-hermeneutics, since her goal is not to understand the stake of Rorty's philosophy exposed in Mirror. She only understood, from the point of view of an epistemologist ideology, that this work would be a threat to Truth, Knowledge, Epistemology, Science, and Reason. (shrink)