This paper discusses the views of three medieval thinkers—Anselm, Thomas Aquinas, and John Duns Scotus—about a specific aspect of the problem of evil, which can be dubbed ‘the Lucifer problem’. What was the object of the first evil choice? What could entice a perfectly rational agent placed in ideal circumstances into doing evil? Those thinkers agreed that Lucifer wanted to be happier, but while Anselm thought that that was something Lucifer could achieve by his natural powers, Aquinas (...) held that it was not naturally possible for Lucifer to be happier, even though it was something he could obtain supernaturally. By contrast, Scotus posited that what Lucifer wanted was beyond what was logically possible, i.e. to be as happy as God (or to be God’s equal). An interesting consequence of Scotus’s hypothesis is that God could have done nothing to make Lucifer’s evil choice less likely. (shrink)

My thesis is that you can lie with ‘ P therefore Q ’ without P or Q being lies. For you can lie by virtue of not believing that P supports Q. My thesis is reconciled with the principle that all lies are assertions through H. P. Grice’s account of conventional implicatures. These semantic cousins of conversational implicatures are secondary assertions that clarify the speaker’s attitude toward his primary assertions. The meaning of ‘therefore’ commits the speaker to an entailment thesis (...) even though the speaker does not enter that commitment into the text. Insincere conventional implicatures are akin to insincerely asserted footnotes. An absence of lies in the text is compatible with the presence of lies in the meta-text. (shrink)

Routledge is now re-issuing this prestigious series of 204 volumes originally published between 1910 and 1965. The titles include works by key figures such asC.G. Jung, Sigmund Freud, Jean Piaget, Otto Rank, James Hillman, Erich Fromm, Karen Horney and Susan Isaacs. Each volume is available on its own, as part of a themed mini-set, or as part of a specially-priced 204-volume set. A brochure listing each title in the "International Library of Psychology" series is available upon request.

The article reviews the book The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, by Philip G. Zimbardo.

La Fraternidad de la Flecha Dorada, fundada por la ocultista Maria de Naglowska en el París de 1932, fue una de las distintas órdenes mágicas de la Edad Contemporánea sobre las que se ha investigado en contextos relacionados con el satanismo, aunque en un número muy reducido de obras y nunca con demasiada profundidad. La fraternidad, que destacó por su sacerdocio exclusivamente femenino y el gran protagonismo de la magia sexual, se basaba en la particular e integradora visión teológica de (...) Naglowska, de carácter no dualista, que incluía una trinidad compuesta por Dios, Jesús y, por último, Satán. Sin embargo, ni Satán ni Lucifer ejercen el papel de figura central dentro de este sistema esotérico cuya autora tampoco parece haber ejercido algún tipo de influencia en las bases del fenómeno conocido como «satanismo contemporáneo». Expuesto este fondo, mi comunicación tendrá un objetivo doble: presentar los cimientos teóricos de la Fraternidad de la Flecha Dorada, así como algunos de los rituales destacados de esta orden, para, en segundo lugar, determinar su naturaleza y revisar, debido a las razones mencionadas, la etiqueta de «satanismo» que ha sobrevolado la misma, tratando de clasificarla. Para ello, centraré mi análisis en el marco de las Ciencias de las Religiones, más concretamente en el de los nuevos movimientos religiosos y el esoterismo occidental, abordando los textos de Maria de Naglowska utilizados por la fraternidad. Además, me apoyaré en investigaciones anteriores con el fin de recopilar los datos históricos necesarios para introducir a la orden y a su carismática suma sacerdotisa. (shrink)

The famous Epistola Luciferi, written in late 1351 or early 1352, caused quite a stir in the Avignon of Pope Clement vi, quickly became a medieval best-seller, and thereafter remained topical, being copied and printed down to the present day. Traditionally ascribed to Nicole Oresme or Henry of Langenstein, the letter was attributed to the Cistercian Pierre Ceffons by Damasus Trapp in 1957. Trapp merely took Ceffons’ authorship for granted, however, and in the most thorough study of the Epistola Luciferi (...) and of the entire genre of Devil’s letters, her 1982 PhD dissertation, Helen C. Feng rejected the attribution. Presenting codices and works of Ceffons of which Trapp was unaware, this article argues in favor of Ceffons’ responsibility for the Epistola Luciferi, while offering a new critical edition of the letter, an English translation, and a supplemental list of manuscripts and editions. (shrink)

Humans were created in the image of God and animals are subordinate to them. The physical death of humans was a consequence of the Fall. Must that not automatically affect animals? Can superior human beings die whereas inferior animals not die? Therefore, animals were either already affected by the Fall of Lucifer or else the Fall of Man affected animals so that they would always be different in kind from humans. Hence, it is more logical to attribute animal pain (...) and death to Satan and not to an omnipotent God. (shrink)

The article reviews the book The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, by Philip G. Zimbardo.

The article reviews the book The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, by Philip G. Zimbardo.

FERRAZ, Salma (org.). As malasartes de Lúcifer : textos críticos de Teologia e Literatura. Londrina: Editora da Universidade Estadual de Londrina, 2012. 281p. ISBN: 978 85 7216 618-8.

The article reviews the book The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, by Philip G. Zimbardo.

I propose an ‘intellectual genealogy’ of the widespread contemporary lifestyle called ‘expressive individualism’, tracing it back first to the cult of the artist as genius, which flourished during the 19th century, but which has been democratized and universalized in our time. I then trace it back one step further, somewhat surprisingly, to the altered depiction of Lucifer John Milton gives in his poem Paradise Lost. Milton's Lucifer rejects not only Jesus as the highest creature, he rejects the Father (...) as father; he announces ‘I know none before me; I am self-begot.’ To the extent that we embrace the ethic of ‘expressive individualism’, therefore, we are implicitly committed to Milton's Lucifer as an archetype for human fulfilment, which I suggest, however, is a toxic model. (shrink)

This book argues that the sin of the devil compels a view of moral responsibility that undermines concerns about luck. It surveys the biblical account of the primal sin, its major interpretation in the tradition, and navigates that interpretation through objections from the perspective of moral luck.

The paper explores the philosophical and theological opinions of Friedrich Leubnitz (1597-1652), Leibniz’s father and the Dean of Philosophy in Leipzig, by examining an address he delivered in the magister ordination ceremony of 1646. The lecture depicts a perpetual conflict between Lucifer, who is also Apollo, the god of knowledge, and Christian philosophers. Among other features, the lecture presents Eve as a serpent and Christian philosophy as an occupation to avoid. Accordingly, Friedrich was probably more heterodox than usually portrayed, (...) a style of thinking that might have influenced his son. (shrink)

The author argues that Rand’s ethical theory is much closer in essence to the eudaimonist, self-perfectionist perspectives of Aristotle and the neo-Aristotelians, Douglas Den Uyl and Douglas Rasmussen, than to the “selfish,” egoistic ethics many assume to be her basic position. He discusses Rand’s anti-hedonist and pro-rational selfishness positions as corollaries of man’s life as the standard of moral value, as well as Rand’s point that treating either happiness or personal benefit as the standard of moral value is a reversal (...) of cause and effect. He also identifies the oppressive negativism in Rand’s discussion of the seven canonical Objectivist virtues. (shrink)

Isabel Paterson is the founding godmother of the libertarian movement, known best for her book The God of the Machine, which Ayn Rand credited for having done “for capitalism what the Bible did for Christianity.” Often overlooked is her twenty-five-year career as a literary columnist for the New York Herald Tribune. Culture and Liberty: Writings of Isabel Paterson, edited by Stephen Cox, presents a selection of those columns along with private letters and other essays. They are a treasure. Paterson’s critical (...) performances show us a systematic yet unpredictable mind at work—a model not only of the first but also of any future libertarian worthy of the name. (shrink)

From Homeric heroes, Lucifer and Faust to the phenomenology of individual and social emotions, this book unfolds historical dimensions, literary recreations and philosophical analyses of the most ambivalent emotion of pride, from worst of sins to noblest feeling.

Eric Cunnigham's exciting new book combines a new translation of the Chinese classic Daodejing with a synthetic interpretation of the Dao. It innovatively employs the interweaving perspectives of Anthroposophy and esoteric world history. Among the inspirations for this work's unique reading of the verses of the *Daodejing*is the speculation of contemporary esoteric scholars that the Yellow Emperor of Chinese mytho-history was actually a human incarnation of the spirit known elsewhere as Lucifer. This argument has been used to explain the (...) manner in which "demigods" introduced themselves to the earthly sphere in order to manipulate human history. This theory resonates with the theological claims of Genesis 6: the notion that fallen angels infiltrated the human world is a contributing element to numerous theories regarding the establishment of ruling classes and elite bloodlines in history. Cunningham considers these claims from the standpoint of esoteric history and evaluates them on the basis of their convergence with kindred concepts (such as Zen illumination, mysticism, and the simulation hypothesis), to show the operations and implications of Gnosticism in history. The book makes a bold case for this common thread in various "all is consciousness" theories of Mind, from Plato, through the ancient skeptics, to Daoism, Zen, and even to the idealism of the 1960s, leading to directly to postmodern theories of "digital consciousness." What philosophers are exploring today through such topics as virtual reality and digital simulation are presented as new ways of discussing the same contours of reality hinted at in the *Daodejing*. Rather than leading us to a more humanistic vision of reality, as the Daoist scholars traditionally maintain, this theory of mind may lie at the bottom of a systematic anti-humanist impulse that has operated throughout world history. (shrink)

Heaven falls into chaos during God's absence, and Hell becomes fairly democratic. With Lucifer caged up and out of the picture, demons build a relatively civil society through contracts. This is sovereignty by institution as opposed to acquisition. The leviathans are unlike the angels in that the angels lacked a unity of wills. Driven by their nature, people—and angels—cannot live in harmony without a central and absolute authority to keep them in order. Without the presence of God to command (...) the angels there can be no peace, only a natural state of war. The fact that even the heavenly host can fall into a Hobbesian state of nature does not bode well for humanity, but maybe that's why business has been so good for the King of the Crossroads. Each demon, after all, has willingly agreed to enter into the civil society of Hell. (shrink)

Goethe en una carta de 1825 a su sobrino, Alfred Nicolovius, acuñaba un vocablo curioso destinado a definir el futuro que estaba surgiendo: veloziferisch, «velocifero», un cruzamiento entre «velocidad» y «Lucifer». Y lo describía como un tiempo que «no deja madurar nada, donde el momento siguiente se traga completamente al anterior». Será precisamente la meta hacia la cual tenderá la tentación de Mefistófeles para con Fausto, aunque al final aspirará a un «momento hermoso» y perfecto, en la práctica a (...) la eternidad, que no tiene ya la amargura de la disolución del pasado ni la pesadilla del futuro. (shrink)

Preparing for the journey -- Memory: who am I? -- True being -- The Lucifer effect -- Blame is socially contagious -- The spiritual quest -- The meaning of it all -- Pets and an afterlife -- Crime and punishment -- The dream within the dream -- A rich inner life -- Love thy neighbor -- What if there were no chapter 13? -- Pursuit of happiness -- The drive for power -- Innocent -- Camelot -- Human rights -- (...) E followed by F -- Certainty -- Biases? -- Growing up -- Meaning: it's all a simulation -- The little lie -- Discernment -- The unexamined life -- Conclusion: the exam. (shrink)

Let’s say that an act requires Person-Affecting Justification if and only if some alternative would have been better for someone. So, Lucifer breaking Xavier’s back requires Person-Affecting Justification because the alternative would have been better for Xavier. But the story continues: While Lucifer evades justice, Xavier moves on and founds a school for gifted children. Xavier’s deepest values become identified with the school and its community. When authorities catch Lucifer, he claims no Person-Affecting Justification is needed: because (...) the attack set Xavier on his life’s path, it’s no longer true that the alternative would have been better by the standard of what Xavier now values most. An unappealingly paternalistic way to hold Lucifer to account is to discount Xavier’s preferences as merely adaptive. Instead, I propose understanding the persons of Person-Affecting Justification to be not persons but person stages. This allows us to hold Lucifer to account without having to discount Xavier’s actual preferences, and has interesting implications for compensatory justice, including making sense of reparations for historical wrongs. (shrink)

Police officers around the world must often select between equally unappealing, uncertain courses of action in an attempt to achieve the best outcome. Despite the immense importance of such decisions, there remains a lack of understanding in the study of individual differences in police decision-making. Here, using a sample of senior police officers recruited from decision-making training events across the United Kingdom (n = 96), we used the Least-worst Uncertain Choice Inventory For Emergency Responses (LUCIFER) to measure the effect (...) of maximization on both domain-specific (police) and domain-general (military) decisions. In line with a wealth of research on traditional “consumer” decisions, we found that police officers who were “maximizers” found decisions more difficult. Gender and previous military experience also influenced the process of decision-making. Specifically, police officers with military experience took more time to assess the situation but were faster to choose a course of action and commit to it. Female police officers also were slower to assess the situation. As recent events show, the outcomes of police decisions have significant consequences for the public, the officers involved, the police force as a whole, and the wider population, yet psychological research has yet to fully explore the role of individual differences in how such decisions are made. While this study does not seek to identify factors associated with “good” or “better” decision-makers, it provides strong support for the need to factor in perspectives of the individual when creating theory, or applied tools, in support of police decision-making. (shrink)

This paper surveys the doctrine on angels taught by theologians in the first century of scholasticism. This topic has received virtually no scholarly attention; but it is of interest for the light it sheds on the concerns of school theologians during this formative stage of their discipline. We can subdivide our target century into three parts, the first half of the twelfth century closing with the Sentences of Peter Lombard, the second half of the twelfth century, and the first quarter (...) of the thirteenth century. In the first of these three stages, scholastic theologians, for the first time, faced the challenge of creating a syllabus for the teaching of systematic theology and developed the sentence collection as their genre of choice for that purpose. The question of where to place angels within that context and genre, or even if they should be placed there at all, was the single most heavily debated topic on their angelological agenda. Another major matter on that agenda on which agreement reigned as to the desired outcome, although different masters proposed different itineraries to their common destination, was the felt need to refute Origen's claim that backsliding and conversion remained eternal options, so that Lucifer and the fallen angels might even be saved. Other issues that attracted attention had to do with the psychology of angels and their exercise of reason and will both before and after their fall or confirmation in glory. (shrink)

This paper, based on some historical sources of the IV and the V century, aims to examine the existence of a fundamentalist Christian community, separated from the Catholics, in Sardinia, between 362 AD and the last decades of the IV century. After his years of exile, the bishop Lucifer returned to his diocese and made the Church of Rome community of Cagliari the symbol of the firm resistance by the intransigent anti-Arians to the conciliatory politics of the rest of (...) the Church towards Arianism. Nevertheless, this separation cannot be recognized as a schism from the Church; it was a voluntary isolation encouraged by Lucifer and perpetuated by his successors. (shrink)

This paper surveys the doctrine on angels taught by theologians in the first century of scholasticism . This topic has received virtually no scholarly attention; but it is of interest for the light it sheds on the concerns of school theologians during this formative stage of their discipline. We can subdivide our target century into three parts, the first half of the twelfth century closing with the Sentences of Peter Lombard, the second half of the twelfth century, and the first (...) quarter of the thirteenth century. In the first of these three stages, scholastic theologians, for the first time, faced the challenge of creating a syllabus for the teaching of systematic theology and developed the sentence collection as their genre of choice for that purpose. The question of where to place angels within that context and genre, or even if they should be placed there at all, was the single most heavily debated topic on their angelological agenda. Another major matter on that agenda on which agreement reigned as to the desired outcome, although different masters proposed different itineraries to their common destination, was the felt need to refute Origen's claim that backsliding and conversion remained eternal options, so that Lucifer and the fallen angels might even be saved. Other issues that attracted attention had to do with the psychology of angels and their exercise of reason and will both before and after their fall or confirmation in glory. (shrink)

En la Antigüedad, ante los logros y hechos extraordinarios de una persona, especialmente si en la época no podían tener más explicación que la intervención sobrenatural, la comunidad encontraba una rápida vía aclaratoria en la atribución a una influencia demoníaca, a una traición a Dios cuyo responsable se afanaba en ocultar: a la persona de éxito se le relacionaba con el diablo a través de un pacto formal, de una hipoteca sobre la salvación de su alma que rubricaba como parte (...) interesada a cambio de un inmenso poder. Por su parte, y como parte contratante, Lucifer obraba de buena fe y de acuerdo a la relación contractual, a cambio de que la persona le cediera su alma, le confería un poder sobrenatural. (shrink)