Antoine de Baecque proposes a new historiography of cinema, exploring film as a visual archive of the twentieth century, as well as history's imprint on the cinematic image. Whether portraying events that occurred in the past or stories unfolding before their eyes, certain twentieth-century filmmakers used a particular mise-en-scène to give form to history, becoming in the process historians themselves. Historical events, in turn, irrupted into cinema. This double movement, which de Baecque terms the "cinematographic form of history," disrupts the (...) very material of film, much like historical events disturb the narrative of human progress. De Baecque defines, locates, and interprets cinematographic forms in seven distinct bodies of cinema: 1950s modern cinema and its conjuring of the morbid trauma of war; French New Wave and its style, which became the negative imprint of the malaise felt by young contemporaries of the Algerian War; post-Communist Russian films, or the "de-modern" works of _catastroika_; contemporary Hollywood films that attach themselves to the master fiction of 9/11; the characteristic _mise en forme_ of filmmaker Sacha Guitry, who, in _Si_ _Versailles m'était conté, filmed French history from inside its chateau; the work of Jean-Luc Godard, who evoked history through his own museum memory of the twentieth century; and the achievements of Peter Watkins, the British filmmaker who reported on history like a war correspondent. De Baecque's introduction clearly lays out his theoretical framework, a profoundly brilliant conceptualization of the many ways cinema and history relate._. (shrink)

Epistemology has for a long time focused on the concept of knowledge and tried to answer questions such as whether knowledge is possible and how much of it there is. Often missing from this inquiry, however, is a discussion on the value of knowledge. In The Value of Knowledge and the Pursuit of Understanding Jonathan Kvanvig argues that epistemology properly conceived cannot ignore the question of the value of knowledge. He also questions one of the most fundamental assumptions in (...) epistemology, namely that knowledge is always more valuable than the value of its subparts. Taking Platos' Meno as a starting point of his discussion, Kvanvig tackles the different arguments about the value of knowledge and comes to the conclusion that knowledge is less valuable than generally assumed. Clearly written and well argued, this 2003 book will appeal to students and professionals in epistemology. (shrink)

It is clearly impermissible to kill one person because his organs can be used to save five others who are in need of transplants. It has seemed to many that the explanation for this lies in the fact that in such cases we would be intending the death of the person whom we killed, or failed to save. What makes these actions impermissible, however, is not the agent's intention but rather the fact that the benefit envisaged does not justify an (...) exception to the prohibition against killing or the requirement to give aid. The difference between this explanation and one appealing to intention is easily overlooked if one fails to distinguish between the prospective use of a moral principle to guide action and its retrospective use to appraise the way an agent governed him or herself. Even if this explanation is accepted, however, it remains an open question whether and how an agent's intention may be relevant to the permissibility of actions in other cases. \\\ [Jonathan Dancy] My first four sections concentrate on the second section of Professor Scanlon's contribution, where he lays out his conception of moral principles and of the role they play in theory and practice. I will raise questions on the following issues: 1. Scanlon's initial introduction of the notion of a principle. 2. His rejection of the standard view that principles are concerned with the forbidding, permitting and requiring of actions. 3. His rejection of pro tanto conceptions of principles in favour of a conception of them as conclusive. 4. The resulting account of what it is for a principle to face and survive exceptions. Scanlon's discussion of these matters here both appeals to and is in some respects more detailed than the relevant section of his recent What We Owe to Each Other. The topic is interesting both for the role played by principles in Scanlon's present discussion of intention and permissibility, and more generally because of his account of wrongness: an act is wrong iff it is ruled out by principles that nobody could reasonably reject. The remainder of my contribution is concerned with the ostensible focus of IP, namely the relevance of agent-intentions to the permissibility of what is done. (shrink)

_The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere_, co-edited by Eduardo Mendieta and Jonathan VanAntwerpen, represents a rare opportunity to experience a diverse group of preeminent philosophers confronting one pervasive contemporary concern: what role does, or should, religion play in our public lives? Reflecting on her recent work concerning state violence in Israel-Palestine, Judith Butler explores the potential of religious perspectives for renewing cultural and political criticism, while Jürgen Habermas, best known for his seminal conception of the public sphere, (...) thinks through the ambiguous legacy of the concept of "the political" in contemporary theory. Charles Taylor argues for a radical redefinition of secularism, and Cornel West defends civil disobedience and emancipatory theology. Eduardo Mendieta and Jonathan VanAntwerpen detail the immense contribution of these philosophers to contemporary social and political theory, and an afterword by Craig Calhoun places these attempts to reconceive the significance of both religion and the secular in the context of contemporary national and international politics. (shrink)

Jonathan L. Kvanvig presents a new account of rationality, Perspectivalism, which both avoids elevating rationality so that only the most reflective of us are capable of rational beliefs, and avoids reducing it to the level of beasts. He defends optionality about what it is reasonable to think, and provides a framework for rational disagreement.

Personal autonomy is often lauded as a key value in contemporary Western bioethics. Though the claim that there is an important relationship between autonomy and rationality is often treated as uncontroversial in this sphere, there is also considerable disagreement about how we should cash out the relationship. In particular, it is unclear whether a rationalist view of autonomy can be compatible with legal judgments that enshrine a patient's right to refuse medical treatment, regardless of whether the reasons underpinning the choice (...) are known and rational, or indeed whether they even exist. Jonathan Pugh brings recent philosophical work on the nature of rationality to bear on the question of how we should understand personal autonomy in contemporary bioethics. In doing so, he develops a new framework for thinking about the concept of autonomy, one that is grounded in an understanding of the different roles that rational beliefs and rational desires have to play in it. Pugh's account allows for a deeper understanding of d the relationship between our freedom to act and our capacity to decide autonomously. His rationalist perspective is contrasted with other prominent accounts of autonomy in bioethics, and the revisionary implications it has for practical questions in biomedicine are also outlined. (shrink)

The paradox of knowability poses real difficulities to our understanding of truth. It does so by claiming that if we assume a truth is knowable, we can demonstrate that it is known. This demonstration threatens our understanding of truth in two quite different ways, only one of which has been recognized to this point in the literature on the paradox. Jonathan Kvanvig first unearths the ways in which the paradox is threatening, and then delineates an approach to the paradox (...) that solves both of the problems raised by the paradox for our understanding of truth. His book will be of interest throughout philosophy, but especially to logicians and epistemologists. (shrink)

_Introduction of the book: _Ethics and Public Policy: A Philosophical Inquiry_, by Jonathan Wolff. Published with the author’s and Routledge permissions._.

How do we explain the truth of true propositions? Truthmaker theory is the branch of metaphysics that explores the relationships between what is true and what exists. It plays an important role in contemporary debates about the nature of metaphysics and metaphysical enquiry. -/- In this book Jonathan Tallant argues, controversially, that we should reject truthmaker theory. In its place he argues for an 'explanationist' approach. Drawing on a deflationary theory of truth he shows that it allows us to (...) explain the truth of true propositions and respond to recent arguments that purport to show otherwise. He augments this with a distinction between internally and externally quantified claims: externally quantified claims are claims that quantify over elements of our ontology that play an indispensable explanatory role; internally quantified claims do not. He deploys this union of deflationism and a distinction between kinds of quantification to pursue metaphysical inquiry, sketching the implications for a number of first-order debates, including those in the philosophy of time, modality and mathematics, and also shows how this explanationist model can be used to solve the key problems that afflicted truthmaker theory. -/- Truth and the World is an important contribution to debates about truth and truthmaker theory as well as metametaphysics, the metaphysics of time and the metaphysics of mathematics, and is essential reading for students and scholars engaged in the study of these topics. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 7, July 2020, Page 103-106.

For hundreds of years English people have claimed that fair play is at the core of their national identity. Jonathan Duke-Evans looks at the history of fair play in Britain from earliest times to the present, asking whether it is in fact a British, or alternatively an English, characteristic at all - and if so, whether fair play still matters today? In An English Tradition?, Jonathan Duke-Evans explores the origins of the idea of fair play, tracing it back (...) to the classical world and the Dark Ages, and finding its genesis deep within England's social structure. Charting its early development through both the tales of chivalry and the stories of popular legend, the book shows how fair play manifested itself in literature, the law, the Christian religion, and the family. It examines the way in which fair play was conceived during the ages of slavery and empire, and it proposes a new account of the birth of modern sport in the encounter between age-old popular games and the Victorian cult of amateurism. Taking in the Scottish, Irish, and Welsh manifestations of fair play, Duke-Evans offers contrasts and comparisons from cultures all around the world, and suggests new perspectives on the relevance of fair play in the twenty-first century. (shrink)

Conventionalism about essence is the view that truths about what is (and isn’t) essential to things are based upon talk and thought about the world, rather than mind-independent facts. This chapter presents motivations for conventionalism, and explains how conventionalism can be (and has been) developed to accommodate essences that can only be discovered with the help of empirical investigation, like “water is H2O” or “Obama is human”. We examine a range of objections that have been raised against conventionalism—often presented dismissively (...) and decisively—and show how conventionalism has ample resources with which to plausibly respond to these challenges. (shrink)

Emerging reprogenetic technologies may enable the enhancement of our offspring's genes. Beyond raising ethical questions, these biotechnologies may change some aspects of future morality. In the reproductive field, biotechnological innovations may transform moral views about reproductive choices regarding what we consider to be just or even of equal standing.

Multiple states are at risk of becoming uninhabitable due to climate change, forcing their populations to flee. While the 1951 Refugee Convention provides the gold standard of international protection, it is only applied to a limited subset of people fleeing their countries, those who suffer persecution, which most people fleeing climate change cannot establish. While many journalists and non-lawyers freely use the term “climate refugees,” governments, and courts, as well as UNHCR and many refugee experts, have excluded most climate refugees (...) from the Convention as a matter of legal interpretation. In our 2015 paper, “Unable to Return in the 1951 Refugee Convention: Stateless Refugees and Climate Change”, we sought to reopen the debate on “climate refugees” by arguing that some climate refugees qualify under the 1951 Convention as it is currently written (even if they are not persecuted): those who are stateless and are unable to return to their country of origin because climate change has rendered it uninhabitable. Our interpretation, however, has been rejected by Goodwin-Gill and McAdam (2021) and by Foster and Lambert (2019), which explicitly responds to our paper. Here, we address and respond to their arguments, and develop a new supplementary one, drawing on the principle of systemic integration, as enshrined in Article 31(3)(c) of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties. (shrink)

Chater & Loewenstein argue that i-frame research has been coopted by private interests opposed to system-level reform, leading to ineffective interventions. They recommend that behavioural scientists refocus on system-level interventions. We suggest that the influence of private interests on research is problematic for wider normative and epistemic reasons. A system-level intervention to shield research from private influence is needed.

Existing research has shown that norm violations influence causal judgments, and a number of different models have been developed to explain these effects. One such model, the necessity/sufficiency model, predicts an interac- tion pattern in people’s judgments. Specifically, it predicts that when people are judging the degree to which a particular factor is a cause, there should be an interaction between (a) the degree to which that factor violates a norm and (b) the degree to which another factor in the (...) situation violates norms. A study of moral norms (N = 1000) and norms of proper functioning (N = 3000) revealed robust evidence for the predicted interaction effect. The implications of these patterns for existing theories of causal judgments is discussed. (shrink)

The twentieth-century Dutch philosopher Herman Dooyeweerd left behind an impressive canon of philosophical works and has continued to influence a scholarly community in Europe and North America, which has extended, critiqued, and applied his thought in many academic fields. Jonathan Chaplin introduces Dooyeweerd for the first time to many English readers by critically expounding Dooyeweerd's social and political thought and by exhibiting its pertinence to contemporary civil society debates. Chaplin begins by contextualizing Dooyeweerd's thought, first in relation to present-day (...) debates and then in relation to the work of the Dutch philosopher Abraham Kuyper. Chaplin outlines the distinctive theory of historical and cultural development that serves as an essential backdrop to Dooyeweerd's substantive social philosophy; examines Dooyeweerd's notion of societal structural principles; and sets forth his complex classification of particular types of social structure and their various interrelationships. Chaplin provides a detailed examination of Dooyeweerd's theory of the state, its definitive nature, and its proper role vis-a-vis other elements of society. Dooyeweerd's contributions, Chaplin concludes, assist us in mapping the ways in which state and civil society should be related to achieve justice and the public good. "This superb study simultaneously introduces and critically engages the work of one of the most important and neglected Christian thinkers of the twentieth century, while showing its connection to the pluralist tradition and bringing it to bear on the contemporary debate about civil society. More than just providing an overview of Dooyeweerd's thought, it seeks to advance his intellectual project and show its contemporary relevance. It is essential reading not only for those interested in the neo-Calvinist tradition, but for anyone interested in Christian social thought, structural pluralism, or the nature and fate of civil society." --_Kenneth L. Grasso, Texas State University _ "The subtlety, scope, and insightfulness of Dooyeweerd's social philosophy were unparalleled among Protestant thinkers in the past century. Yet his contributions are not well known. Jonathan Chaplin promises to remedy this neglect. His lucid and masterful study brings a new and transformative voice to contemporary debates about the future of a democratic society." --_Lambert Zuidervaart, Institute for Christian Studies and University of Toronto_ "Finally, an authoritative book that brings to brilliant light and life Herman Dooyeweerd's Christian philosophy of law, politics, and society. For the past half century, the profound and original teachings of this prolific Dutch sage have been lost on most readers. Jonathan Chaplin has rescued Dooyeweerd from his own obscure prose, poor translations, and cultic mystique to reveal his astonishing and engaging insights into our lives as persons and peoples, rulers and citizens, preachers and parishioners, parents and children. This will be the go-to book on Dooyeweerd for many years to come." --_John Witte, Jr., Emory University_ "Herman Dooyeweerd was both deep and original. Much of his writing is an articulation of rather undeveloped lines of thought in his Dutch predecessor, Abraham Kuyper. In the course of his exposition, Chaplin effectively highlights Dooyeweerd's significance for a theory of civil society and for present-day social theory in general." --_Nicholas Wolterstorff, Yale University and the Institute for Advanced Studies, University of Virginia_. (shrink)

This article is based on a public lecture hosted by the Monash University Centre for Human Bioethics in Melbourne, Australia on 11 April 2013. The lecture recording was transcribed by Vicky Ryan; and, the original transcript has been edited — for clarity and brevity — by Vicky Ryan, Michael Selgelid and Jonathan Moreno.

Contextualists claim two important virtues for their view. First, contextualism is a non-skeptical epistemology, given the plausible idea that not all contexts invoke the high standards for knowledge needed to generate the skeptical conclusion that we know little or nothing. Second, contextualism is able to preserve closure concerning knowledge – the idea that knowledge is extendable on the basis of competent deduction from known premises. As long as one keeps the context fixed, it is plausible to think that some closure (...) principle can be articulated that will survive scrutiny. Opponents of contextualism often try to gain an advantage over it by claiming that their view mimics these virtues of contextualism as well as having other virtues. A recent example of the same is termed ‘contrastivism," as presented by Jonathan Schaffer. I will argue that the representation made is chimerical, that in fact contrastivism has no hope of mirroring these twin virtues of contextualism. (shrink)

In Perfection and Disharmony in the Thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Jonathan Marks offers an interpretation of the philosopher's thought and its place in the contemporary debate between liberals and communitarians. Against prevailing views, he argues that Rousseau's thought revolves around the natural perfection of a naturally disharmonious being. At the foundation of Rousseau's thought he finds a natural teleology that takes account of and seeks to harmonize conflicting ends. The Rousseau who emerges from this interpretation is a radical critic (...) of liberalism who is nonetheless more cautious about protecting individual freedom than his milder communitarian successors. Marks elaborates on the challenge that Rousseau poses to liberals and communitarians alike by setting up a dialogue between him and Charles Taylor, one of the most distinguished ethical and political theorists at work today. (shrink)

In her 1947 book _Toward an Ethics of Ambiguity_, Simone de Beauvoir sketches the outlines of a systematic existentialist ethical theory. This short and startlingly ambitious text purports to offer nothing less than a new way to meet the challenge of moral skepticism with a theory that at once grounds moral normativity and entails certain first-order moral norms. We argue that Beauvoir offers a distinctive and promising version of metaethical constructivism that deserves to be treated as a live option in (...) contemporary debates. Beauvoirian constructivism has much in common with Kantian constructivist approaches to metaethics. It departs from them in that the Beauvoirian existential imperative to will freedom is derived not from rational agency as such but from contingent features of our embodied subjectivity. (shrink)

o ne -taking -Life ana Oavmg .Life The Islamic Context Jonathan E. Brockopp The great ethicists of the western world, Augustine, Aquinas, Kant, and others, ...

Although The Origin of Species contained just a single visual illustration, Charles Darwin's other books, from his monograph on barnacles in the early 1850s to his volume on earthworms in 1881, were copiously illustrated by well-known artists and engravers. In this 2006 book, Jonathan Smith explains how Darwin managed to illustrate the unillustratable - his theories of natural selection - by manipulating and modifying the visual conventions of natural history, using images to support the claims made in his texts. (...) Moreover, Smith looks outward to analyse the relationships between Darwin's illustrations and Victorian visual culture, especially the late-Victorian debates about aesthetics, and shows how Darwin's evolutionary explanation of beauty, based on his observations of colour and the visual in nature, were a direct challenge to the aesthetics of John Ruskin. The many illustrations reproduced here enhance this fascinating study of a little known aspect of Darwin's lasting influence on literature, art and culture. (shrink)

In response to De Proost and Segers, we provide further reflections on how technologies induce moral change. We discuss moral changes at the societal level as distinguished from changes in bioethical principles or ethical concepts, impacts on theories of justice, and whether the transformations are negative or positive.

In this magisterial survey of the Enlightenment, Jonathan Israel returns to the primary texts to offer a major new reinterpretation of the nature and development of the important currents in philosophical thinking, arguing that supposed national enlightenments are of less significance than the rift between conservative and radical thought.

The observational-theoretical distinction has played a central role in the philosophy of science from logical empiricism onwards. Developments within the discipline have shown that such a distinction hides two non-identical distinctions: observational vs. non-observational and theoretical vs. non-theoretical. Likewise, metatheoretical structuralism proposed a more sophisticated treatment of theoricity in terms of the operational dependence or independence of concepts from the theories in which they appear. Despite this remarkable sophistication, it is still generally accepted that the distinction between theoretical and non-theoretical (...) concepts coincides with the explanatory vs. non-explanatory and testing vs. non-testing distinctions. Ginnobili and Carman argued for the independence between theoricity and explanation. In this paper we will focus on testing and argue for its independence from both theoricity and explanation. To do so, we propose an account of theory testing based on the framework of metatheoretical structuralism and apply it to natural selection theory and cladistics. (shrink)

Nosology is the science of defining and classifying diseases. Meta‐nosology is the study of how we do this, on what principles nosological practices are based, the quality of the resulting medical taxonomy, and primarily whether/how diseases can be defined better than they are now. In modern Western medicine, there are a wide variety of ways in which diseases are defined and categorized. Examples include by the symptoms they present with (syndromic), their underlying causes (etiological), the biological mechanisms involved (pathogenetic), available (...) treatments, historical precedent, and through diagnostic exclusion. Here, I explore the hypothesis that how we define diseases has an impact on how (and how effectively) we research and treat them. I explore the philosophical implications of this thesis and suggest a direction that the underlying metaphysics of disease definition might follow. I conclude that further research is warranted into whether our current disease definitions could be improved upon. (shrink)

1. Ethics and public policy .Jonathan.Boston,.Andrew.Bradstock,.and.David.Eng Introduction This book is about ethics and public policy. ...

Medical-Legal Partnerships (MLPs) have been widely acclaimed for promoting health equity and achieving meaningful outcomes. Yet, little to no research has analyzed if this critical work has been done with communities — through meaningful engagement and building power — or if it has been done for communities without their involvement.

Organisms and other biological entities are mistake-prone: they get things wrong. The entities of pure physics, such as atoms and inorganic molecules, do not make mistakes: they do what they do according to physical law, with no room for error except on the part of the physicist or their theory. We set out a novel framework for understanding biology and its demarcation from physics – that of mistake-making. We distinguish biological mistakes from mere failures. We then propose a rigorous definition (...) of mistakes that, although invoking the concept of function, is compatible with various views about what functions are. The definition of mistake-making is agential, since mistakes do not just happen ¬– at least in the sense analysed here – but are made. This requires, then, a notion of biological agency which we set out as a definition of the Minimal Biological Agent. The paper then considers a series of objections to the theory presented here, along with our replies. Two key features of our theory of mistakes are, first, that it is a supplement to, not a replacement for, existing general frameworks within which biology is understood and practised. Secondly, it is designed to be experimentally productive. Hence we end with a series of case studies where mistake theory can be shown to be useful in the potential generation of research questions and novel hypotheses of interest to the working biologist. (shrink)

We present a set of algorithms for automated simplification of symbolic constants of the form ∑iαixi with αi rational and xi complex. The included algorithms, called SimplifySum2 and implemented in Mathematica, remove redundant terms, attempt to make terms and the full expression real, and remove terms using repeated application of the multipair PSLQ integer relation detection algorithm. Also included are facilities for making substitutions according to user-specified identities. We illustrate this toolset by giving some real-world examples of its usage, including (...) one, for instance, where the tool reduced a symbolic expression of approximately 100 000 characters in size enough to enable manual manipulation to one with just four simple terms.2Available from https://github.com/alexkaiser/SimplifySum. (shrink)

The UNESCO International Bioethics Committee is an international body that sets standards in the field of bioethics. This collection represents the contributions of the IBC to global bioethics. The IBC is a body of 36 independent experts that follows progress in the life sciences and its applications in order to ensure respect for human dignity and freedom. Currently, some of the topics of the IBC contributions have been discussed in the bioethics literature, mostly journal articles. However, this is a unique (...) contribution by the scholars who developed these universal declarations and reports. The contributors have not only provided a scholarly up to date discussion of their research topics, but as members of the IBC they have also discussed specific practical challenges in the development of such international documents. This book will be suited to academics within bioethics, health care policy and international law. (shrink)

In his writings, Pope Francis describes a culture of interfaith and intercultural encounter as the foundation of lasting peace, friendship, and reconciliation among peoples. Far from superficial, a culture of encounter is built upon the slow work of honoring differences and forming social bonds across differences. In the first part of this paper, the authors investigate correspondences between the theology of encounter in the teaching and witness of Martin Buber and Pope Francis, in which the sacred, the ground of reality, (...) and the potential for redemption are revealed in the engaged space “between” self and other. In the second part of the paper, they explore how these ideas are actualized in practices of nonviolence, such as dialogue. In conclusion, they identify how these ideas and role models suggest a road map to build a culture of nonviolence and just peace through encounter within fractured societies throughout the world today. (shrink)

This is the first book to unpack the legal and ethical issues surrounding unauthorised intimate examinations during labour. The book uses feminist, socio-legal and philosophical tools to explore the issues of power, vulnerability and autonomy. The collection challenges the perception that the law adequately addresses different manifestations of unauthorised medical touch through the lens of women's experiences of unauthorised vaginal examinations during labour. The book unearths several broader themes that are of huge significance to lawyers and healthcare professionals such as (...) the legal status of women and their bodies. The book raises questions about women's experiences during childbirth in hospital settings. It explores the status of women's bodies during labour and childbirth where too easily they become objectified, and it raises important issues around consent. The book highlights links to the law on sexual offences and women's loss of power under the medical gaze. The book includes contributions from leading feminist philosophers, medical professionals, and academics in medicine and law, and offers pioneering analysis relevant to lawyers and healthcare professionals with an interest in medical law and ethics; feminist theory; criminal law; tort law; and human rights law. (shrink)

Boyer presents a compelling account of ownership as the outcome of interaction between two evolved cognitive systems. We integrate this model into current discussions of moral pluralism, suggesting that ownership meets the criteria to be a moral foundation. We caution against ignoring cultural variation in ownership norms and against explaining complex, contested moral phenomena using a monist approach.

A collection of essays written by arts and humanities scholars across disciplines, this book argues that higher education has been compromised by its uncritical acceptance of our culture's standards of productivity, busyness, and speed. Inspired by the Slow Movement, contributors explain how and why university culture has come to value productivity over contemplation and rapidity over slowness. Chapter authors argue that the arts and humanities offer a cogent critique of fast culture in higher education, and reframe the discussion of the (...) value of their fields by emphasizing the dialectic between speed and slowness. (shrink)

This book demonstrates that ancient Christian Gnosticism was an ancient form of cultural criticism in a mythological garb. It establishes that, much like modern forms of critical theory, ancient Gnosticism was set on deconstructing mainstream discourses and cultural premises. Strains of critical theory dealt with include the Frankfurt School, queer theory, and poststructural philosophy. The book documents how in both ancient Gnosticism and modern critical theories issues that used to serve as premises for discussion or as concepts relegated to the (...) realms of the “natural” and the “given” in their respective historical contexts, are transformed into objects of contention. The main aim of this book is to salvage the historical category of Gnosticism from its present scholarly disavowal, if only because Gnosticism, when read as a cultural, and not only a religious phenomenon, presents us an ancient form of culture criticism which would be hard to parallel until (post) modernity. While Hans Jonas remarked many years ago that “something in Gnosticism knocks at the door of our Being and of our twentieth-century Being in particular,” by the 21st century global world this something has already entered and lives with us. We can thus still benefit from another perspective, even if it comes from Mediterranean people who lived almost 2,000 years ago. (shrink)

If rising seas render small islands uninhabitable, will displaced islanders become stateless? The modern intellectual and legal tradition tells us that states must have defined, habitable territory. If so, small islands will cease to be states, and their inhabitants will accordingly become stateless. Against this, leading scholars have recently argued that the principle of presumption of continuity of state existence implies that island states continue to be states even after becoming uninhabitable. We argue to the contrary: the principle of presumption (...) of continuity of state existence implies no such thing. If nothing is done to prevent the loss of their territory, small islands will lose their statehood, making displaced islanders stateless. (shrink)

El objetivo de este trabajo fue analizar cuantitativamente los métodos y técnicas de la investigación teológica en países latinoamericanos de habla hispana, entre 2018 y 2020, para el fomento de herramientas que favorezcan estudios en el área. El estudio fue cuantitativo, positivista y descriptivo, examinando el Scimago Journal & Country Rank (SJR) 2018, revisando, además, artículos publicados entre 2018 y 2020, nueve publicaciones de universidades que ofrecen el programa Teología, trabajos de grado y tesis en repositorios digitales. Para un total (...) de 402 investigaciones sistematizadas, usando el análisis de contenido para discriminar métodos y técnicas utilizados. La información se registró en una matriz para su análisis porcentual por criterios. Se concluye que una quinta parte de las investigaciones usaron exclusivamente métodos sociales, en su mayoría de enfoque cuantitativo y nivel descriptivo. Entre los sociales cualitativos destacaron la fenomenología, IAP, método comparativo y biográfico. Se usaron mayoritariamente métodos teológicos tradicionales: hermenéutico, exegético, praxeológico latinoamericano e histórico-crítico, pero el primero sigue siendo preferido. Las técnicas fueron variadas, mezclando enfoques y métodos, especialmente reflexión, análisis semántico, análisis histórico-gramatical y narración. De las técnicas sociales, la favorita fue encuesta-cuestionario. El país con más publicaciones fue Colombia (45,7 %) y el año con mayor número de estas fue el 2018 (55 %). El enfoque predilecto fue cualitativo (87,1 %), usado mayoritariamente en universidades católicas (78,6 %). El resto (21,4 %) corresponde a universidades adventistas, con más igualdad en los enfoques. (shrink)

The dawn of music semiology showcases the work of ten leading musicologists inspired by the work of Jean-Jacques Nattiez. Reflecting the energy and diversity of the young field of music semiology, chapters in this volume discuss music and gesture, the psychology of music, and the role of ethnotheory, and offer new research on topics as diverse as modeling folk polyphony, spatialization in the Darmstadt repertoire, Schenker's theory of musical content, and modernism from Wagner to Boulez.

In the New Essays on Human Understanding, Leibniz argues chapter by chapter with John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding, challenging his views about knowledge, personal identity, God, morality, mind and matter, nature versus nurture, logic and language, and a host of other topics. The work is a series of sharp, deep discussions by one great philosopher of the work of another. Leibniz's references to his contemporaries and his discussions of the ideas and institutions of the age make this a fascinating (...) and valuable document in the history of ideas. The work was originally written in French, and the version by Peter Remnant and Jonathan Bennett, based on the only reliable French edition, first appeared in 1981 and has become the standard English translation. It has been thoroughly revised for this series and provided with a new and longer introduction, a chronology on Leibniz's life and career and a guide to further reading. (shrink)

Plato’s Phaedrus is a dialogue in which rhetoric is not only discussed, but also displayed. The first half of the plot depicts a rhetorical contest in which Socrates himself offers two opposite speeches on love, a kind of dissoi logoi. The current paper tries to explain that the second half of the dialogue offers the necessary keys to understand that for Plato true rhetoric is nothing but dialectic and that beyond the apparent antilogic exercise carried out by Socrates there can (...) be found philosopher’s dialectical practice itself. Last but not least, the article defends that dialectic does not necessarily deal with Forms. (shrink)