SummaryThe present analysis compares the distribution of surnames by means of spatial autocorrelation analysis in the Spain–Portugal border region. The Spanish National Institute of Statistics provides a database of surnames of residents in the western Spanish provinces of Zamora, Salamanca, Cáceres, Badajoz and Huelva. The Spanish and Portuguese patterns of surname distribution were established according to various geographic axes. The results obtained show a low diversity of surnames in this region – especially in the centre – which can be explained (...) by the absence of any major geographic barriers, with the exception of the mountain ranges between hydrographic basins, and by the presence of traditional roads that have existed since Roman times. The latter have resulted in a constant migratory flow over short–median distances, which, as can be deduced from the surnames, fits two north/south territorial axes running parallel to the border between Spain and Portugal. The distribution patterns of Portuguese and Spanish surnames differ with regard to their frequencies in the five provinces studied, which can be attributed to their respective historical, economic and social conditions. It is concluded that the border delimiting these two countries has affected the migratory flow, thereby conditioning the demographic and genetic structure of the western Spanish regions. (shrink)

Jurgen Habermas' construction of a critical social theory of society grounded in communicative reason is one of the very few real philosophical inventions of recent times that demands and repays extended engagement. In this elaborate and sympathetic study which places Habermas' project in the context of critical theory as a whole past and future, J. M. Bernstein argues that despite its undoubted achievements, it contributes to the very problems of ethical dislocation and meaninglessness it aims to diagnose and remedy. Bernstein (...) further argues that the precise character of the failures of Habermas' program demonstrate the necessity for a return to the first generation critical theory of Adorno. Reading across nearly the whole range of Habermas' corpus, Recovering Ethical Life traces the development of the theory of communicative reason from its inception in Knowledge and Human Interests through its elaboration in The Theory of Communicative Action and into its defense against postmodernism in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity . In separate chapters Habermas' readings of Freud, Durkheim amd Mead, Adorno and Foucault, Castoriadis and Taylor are critically examined. The focus of Bernstein's analyses, however, is always problem centered and thematic rather than textual psychoanalytic theory as an account of self knowledge, the competing claims of ethical identity and moral reason, the place of judgment in practical reason, and the debate between philosophies of language based communities versus those oriented towards world-disclosure. Critical theory is unique among current philosophies in engaging with the problems of social injustice and nihilism by siding with an abstract moral reason that forfeits the processes of intersubjective recognition it intended to salvage. Even in the fine grain of Habermas' account of performative contradictions and the theory of discourses of application, Bernstein perceives a squandering of the resources of an ethical life in need of transfiguration. (shrink)

[This is a revised and expanded version of an article of the same name published in the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, October 2000: 31(3), 277–299.].

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Readymades, Monochromes, Etc.:Nominalism and the Paradox of ModernismJ. M. Bernstein (bio)If Schopenhauer's thesis of art as an image of the world once over bears a kernel of truth, then it does so only insofar as this second world is composed out of elements that have been transposed out of the empirical world in accord with Jewish descriptions of the messianic order as an order just like the habitual order (...) but changed in the slightest degree.—T. W. Adorno, Aesthetic TheoryAdorno's philosophy as a whole, and his aesthetic theory in particular, is irrevocably bound to the tradition and achievements of high modernism. Although Adorno himself did not recognize American Abstract Expression as the apotheosis of high modernism in painting, that judgment now hardly seems contentious.1 And that raises a problem: it is the problem of R. Mutt, again, the problem of the porcelain urinal called Fountain, which was refused admittance to the Society of Independent Artists' Exhibition in April 1917 in spite of the Society's proclaimed democratic slogan "No jury, no prizes"—the work whose life or after-life begins with the beautiful photograph of it by Stieglitz set against the background of Marsden Hartley's The Warriors and that appeared shortly thereafter in the new avant-garde journal The Blind Man. Whatever the immediate repercussions of Fountain, there can be little doubt that much of what is most vital in art in the second half of this century is unthinkable without it; Duchamp's readymade offers an exemplary alternative to the tradition of high modernist painting that has continued to be generative. For a modernist like Adorno, for whom authentic art is that which best rises to the demands and necessities of artistic materials, for whom internal consistency and rigor would appear to be everything, for whom, finally, aesthetic form is the "objective organization within each artwork of what appears as bindingly eloquent" [AT 143; emphasis mine], Duchamp's gesture of simply naming or claiming artistic status for an ordinary bathroom fixture must be anathema. In this respect, Adorno's aesthetic theory would seem to be in the same predicament as Clement Greenberg's modernism: inextricably bound to a tradition that history has left behind. And while the option of refuting the claim of Fountain is certainly possible, and should not be too quickly suppressed (there is something in the claim that will forever be skeptically self-defeating), nonetheless there does appear to be an exemplariness to Fountain that exceeds the narrow provocation of Duchamp's nominalist gesture; something in the readymade, in fact, seems (art historically? aesthetically? conceptually?) irresistible. If so, then modernist [End Page 83] formalism must either find a way of accommodating the readymade without departing from its internal logic or find its claim to our attention forfeited.After laying out the bold outlines of Adorno's formalism, the remainder of this essay will seek to uncover an account of the readymade in the context of what I will eventually call "the paradox of modernism" in order to locate in what way the readymade can be accommodated to a defense of Adorno's late modernism. For the purposes of this argument, I am going to assume that the best overall defense of Duchamp's gesture, which makes it foundational for the understanding of modern art, is that offered by Thierry de Duve in his Kant after Duchamp. My elaboration of Adorno's late modernism will hence proceed, in part, through a charting of some of the fault lines in de Duve's Duchamp. My contention shall be that the generativity of Fountain as readymade not only belongs within modernism, but is only intelligible within a wholly modernist and formalist frame of reference.Adorno's Formalism and the Material MotiveAdorno opens the section of Aesthetic Theory entitled "Coherence and Meaning" with the drastic sounding thesis that "Although artworks are neither conceptual nor judgmental, they are logical" [AT 136]. He continues:In them nothing would be enigmatic if their immanent logicality did not accommodate discursive thought, which criteria they nevertheless regularly disappoint. They most resemble the form of a syllogism and its prototype in empirical thought. That in the temporal... (shrink)

Infertility affects 15 per cent of the world's couples. Research at Edinburgh University has been directed at transplanting fetal ovarian tissue into infertile women, thus enabling them to bear children. Fetal ovary transplantation (FOT) has generated substantial controversy; in fact, one ethicist deemed the procedure 'so grotesque as to be unbelievable' (1). Some have suggested that fetal eggs may harbour unknown chromosomal abnormalities: however, there is no evidence that these eggs possess a higher incidence of genetic anomaly than ova found (...) in a healthy adult female. There is also concern that fetal egg children will be psychologically harmed by the knowledge of their special conceptual status. It will be demonstrated that special conceptual status in and of itself does not determine developmental success. Rather, psychological well-being is dependent upon how the family and child cope with the unique challenges inherent in FOT. Lastly, though considering FOT a legitimate method of family building, given the global population crisis the wisdom of procreational rights will be challenged. Inherent to this challenge is a re-evaluation of the treatment of infertility as a significant disease necessitating remedy. (shrink)

After recently meeting with his biological parents, the author--a 29-year-old-married male--learned he had been an hour away from being aborted, being 'saved' only by extraordinary circumstances. In the paper the author reflects upon previous strong pro-choice beliefs and reasserts his commitment to a pro-choice philosophy, integrating his new personal experience. The paper pays particular attention to the biological mother's experience and how her fresh insights have reinforced the author's views on abortion.

Arguably, there is no gesture more typical to philosophy than its repudiation, the sense that philosophical endeavor is a symptom of the pathologies or dislocations of everyday life it seeks to remedy. Throughout the nineteenth century—in the writings of the German Romantics, Young Hegelians, Marx, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche—the repudiation of philosophy is a constant. Sometimes this repudiation takes a reflective form in which traditional philosophical claims are translated into another vocabulary, or are deflated ; sometimes alternative methods are adopted that (...) attempt to undermine, explain away, what is thought of as uniquely philosophical; sometimes rhetorical strategies are adopted that aim to bring about a “conversion” in the reader away from philosophy and toward a more fully immanent or existential self-understanding; and sometimes that more everyday self-understanding that is to be the antidote to philosophical reflection is construed as not yet available but would come to be in an ideal or utopian future if particular radical transformations of current practices were accomplished. Apart from Kierkegaard, these attempts typically construe themselves as continuous with the critique of religion, as if philosophy were nothing but religious excess in rational dress, and thus continuous with modernity’s drive toward secularity. Because the stakes of repudiation are inevitably normative—the protest against philosophy for the sake of a more “realistic,” more truly natural or historical, conception of what is rational or good—the critique of philosophy becomes, despite itself, philosophical, burdened with presuppositions it can neither sustain nor forgo. In brief, this is the lesson of Daniel Brudney’s meticulous and patient excavation of the writings of the young Marx. (shrink)

This article revisits the manuscript tradition and the different redactions of John Buridan’s commentaries on Aristotle’s Physics. The aim of the article is threefold. First, it makes some corrections to the lists of manuscripts containing the third redaction and the final redaction of Buridan’s questions commentary on the Physics. Second, it argues that manuscript Zaragoza, Biblioteca Capitular de la Seo, cod. 15-61, ff. 1r-62v, contains a previously unknown version of the final redaction (together with the standard version from f. 62v (...) onwards). Third, to facilitate further study of the manuscripts of Buridan’s questions on the Physics and their mutual relations, appendices at the end of the article provide detailed tables of contents for the third redaction and the final redaction, as well as editions of selected questions from the Zaragoza manuscript, the third redaction of Buridan’s questions on the Physics, and the so-called Quaestiones breves. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: Just War Tradition and the Restraint of War: A Moral and Historical Inquiry. By James Turner Johnson.

Aristotle and the sea battle, by G. E. M. Anscombe.--Aristotle's different possibilities, by K. J. J. Hintikka.--On Aristotle's square of opposition, by M. Thompson.--Categories in Aristotle and in Kant, by J. C. Wilson.--Aristotle's Categories, chapters I-V: translation and notes, by J. L. Ackrill--Aristotle's theory of categories, by J. M. E. Moravcsik.--Essence and accident, by I. M. Copi.--Tithenai ta phainomena, by G. E. L. Owen.--Matter and predication in Aristotle, by J. Owens.--Problems in Metaphysics Z, chapter 13, by M. J. Woods.--The meaning (...) of agathon in the Ethics of Aristotle, by H. A. Prichard.--Agathon and eudaimonia in the Ethics of Aristotle, by J. L. Austin.--The final good in Aristotle's Ethics, by W. F. R. Hardie.--Aristotle on pleasure, by J. O. Urmson.--Bibliography (p. 335-41). (shrink)

The latter part of the 20th century is known for a surge in the so-called ‘genitive theologies’. Usually, a genitive theology has an ulterior motive, aiming at the transformation of a society or the promotion of sound politics and economy. In recent years, this trend culminated in public theology. The issue of religion with an ulterior motive was raised by Van de Beek in a seminal article focusing on theology without gaining anything from it as an answer to the surging (...) genitive theologies of the latter part of the 20th century and the public theologies of today. Taking into account Van de Beek’s critique against ‘religion with an ulterior motive’, this article explores the concept of the church as a moral agent in dialogue with Van de Beek. The central theoretical argument of this investigation is that Van de Beek’s ecclesiology is valuable when defining the role of the church as a moral agent. However, the perspective of the Kingdom of God concerning the church can enrich one’s views and can add value to his valid critique on public theology. (shrink)

By way of conclusion we may add the following three items to A. Maier's and G. Federici-Vescovini's investigations: 1. The Questiones super libris Physicorum in the ms. Cesena, B. Malatestiana S.VIII.5 have been incorrectly attributed to John Buridan. Their real author is Albert of Saxony. 2. The ms. Cesena, B. Malatestiana S.VIII.5 ff. 4ra-4vb contains the Prologue and the tabula questionum of the Questions on De gen. et corr., whereas the ms. Vat. lat. 3097 ff. 103ra-146rb has the complete text. (...) This Prologue and the questions 1 and 3 can also be found in Vat. lat. 2185 ff. 50ra-50vb. This text certainly cannot be considered as another copy of Buridan's well known Questions on De gen. et corr. Neither is it certain that Nicole Oresme is their author, as A. Maier seems to believe. There are indications pointing in the direction of a redaction other than the one known, of Buridan's Questions. In any case this possibility cannot be ruled out by the material that has been presented here. 3. The ms. Cesena, B. Malatestiana S.VIII.5 has at one time had the same owner as the codices Vat. lat. 2159, 2160, 2185 and 3066, and the codices Cesena, B. Malatestiana S.VII.5 and S.VIII.2. This owner was in all probability Bernardus a Campanea of Verona, a physician. (shrink)

This article deals with the role that churches can and should play in civil society to develop societal morally. The central-theoretical argument is that the biblical notion of the kingdom of God can, when it is systematically and theologically developed, offer an acceptable foundation for the civil action of churches. In light of this the article takes a new look at the neo-Calvinist view on church and society. The kingdom implies the life encompassing governance of God, the formation of the (...) church and the creation of a moral sense amongst people. The church can, from the perspective of the kingdom, be seen as a community within which Christians should be equipped for social action. The church is a power station which carries forth the light of the Gospel by means of the social involvement of believers in civil society. Christians can, based on natural law, work with civil organisations to pursue the common good of the community. Such collaboration becomes possible only when civil society works purpose- and not paradigm-driven. Based on the moral sense that is founded in natural law, Christians can be socially active within civil society in search of the greatest benefit for all people within the community. (shrink)

This article deals with the burning issue of moral decision-making by major church assemblies,such as regional and general synods. Moral decisions by church assemblies have createdmany conflicts in churches in the past and at times did an injustice to the prophetic testimonyof churches in society. The question arises as follows: To what extent should church assembliesbe involved in moral decision-making? The central theoretical argument of this study is thatalthough the notion of a ‘biblical ethic’ is valid, synods and council of (...) churches should beextremely cautious and even hesitant to formulate moral decisions because of differences inhermeneutical approaches and the principle that the church is primarily the ‘local congregationof believers’. The church is not in the first instance a national, general or international socialstructure that should pass conclusive resolutions and that testifies by way of moderators orelected church leaders. To unfurl this central theoretical argument, the researcher refers to thecurrent hermeneutical discourses and proposes certain ideas regarding the possible role ofthe church with respect to moral decision-making. In view of the information provided, apoint of view is advocated regarding the way in which churches could be involved in moraldecision-making today. (shrink)