This is a new release of the original 1960 edition.

Theory and practice are interconnected and analogous to each other. Theory gives rise to action, and action precipitates or begets new theories which may lead to further actions and so on, even though, some people try to force reality to fit into their preconceived theories. Discrepancies between theory and practice, word and action have caused disaffection, rifts and conflicts. Matching words with action inspires trust just as duplicity, i.e. saying one thing and doing another, generates bad blood. The problem of (...) the world is the discrepancy between theory and practice or between the spoken word and action. When people (all over the world) begin to match word with action there will be peace, harmony and resounding success in global affairs, especially international relationships. The bridging of the gap requires the concerted efforts of one and all. In this paper, we shall take a critical look at the interrelatedness of theory and practice. We will seek also how to enable philosophy to transform the human world just as science transforms the physical world. (shrink)

Crisis means “decisive moment,” a dangerous time when action must be taken to avoid a complete disaster. In the digital age, the influx of information is extremely rapid. Many people lack the wisdom and prudence to process data correctly and to take timely moral decisions. Too much information is driving people crazy as increase in knowledge goes with an upsurge in crime rate, particularly cybercrime. This historic period is an era of multiple crises, especially crisis of human values, particularly moral (...) ones. What is so special about the crisis of this age? Why does increase in knowledge not correspond to a rise in civility and economic power for all? Is knowledge no longer empowering? Can humans co-exist in tranquility without moral values? This paper will critically reflect on the concerns raised, the challenges and prospects of the digital age, ask seminal questions and proffer invaluable solutions. And also assert the functional role of philosophy, which is needed in order to stem the moral and social crises of the information age. (shrink)

Every human person is a cultural being. Each culture has incomplete knowledge of reality, and the sharing of viewpoints makes for mutual enrichment, hence the need for intercultural perspectives. Even in a human being, body and spirit, emotion and reason reciprocally influence on each other. Life is dialogical. Action gives flesh to theory, and the abstract reason is exemplified in real things, which is what embodiment of reason is all about. Principles govern all things and public reason, as a causal (...) principle, regulates the affairs of embodied homogeneous communities. African embodiment of reason is self-evident in names and allegories wherein rational thoughts and ideas are personified the way sentient robots embody or personify Artificial Intelligence. In this treatise, we shall use allegory, nomenclature, traditional songs, apophthegms, etc., to show how Africans wisely incarnate ideas in things. As it is analogous to modern-day AI, we shall not only highlight the African approach to public reason and embodied community but also tangentially discuss the effect of AI on the global community, of which Africa is a subunit. In conclusion, we shall caution against the empowering of robots with logical reasoning, and the disempowering and denaturalizing of humans. Keywords: Reason, Embodiment, Philosophy, Principle and Community. (shrink)

The woman being is a human being. This paper critiques gender politics and questions the mistreatment, the second class status and some of the socio-cultural gender roles of women. It posits critical education of men and women, sensitivity and sensibleness as the surest way out of the quagmire.

In everyday conversation, messages are often communicated indirectly, implicitly. Why do we seem to communicate so inefficiently? How speakers choose to express a message (modulating confidence, using less explicit formulations) has been proposed to impact how committed they will appear to be to its content. This commitment can be assessed in terms of accountability – is the speaker held accountable for what they communicated? – and deniability – can the speaker plausibly deny they intended to communicate it? We investigated two (...) factors that may influence commitment to implicitly conveyed messages. In a preregistered online study, we tested the hypothesis that the degree of meaning strength (strongly or weakly communicated) and the level of meaning used by the speaker (an enrichment or a conversational implicature) modulate accountability and plausible deniability. Our results show that both meaning strength and level of meaning influence speaker accountability and plausible deniability. Participants perceived enrichments to be harder to deny than conversational implicatures, and strongly implied content as more difficult to deny than weakly implied content. Furthermore, participants held the speaker more accountable to content conveyed via an enrichment than to content conveyed via an implicature. These results corroborate previously found differences between levels of meaning (enrichment vs. implicature). They also highlight the largely understudied role of meaning strength as a cue to speaker commitment in communication. (shrink)

Post-modernism offers a revolutionary approach to the study of society: in questioning the validity of modern science and the notion of objective knowledge, this movement discards history, rejects humanism, and resists any truth claims. In this comprehensive assessment of post-modernism, Pauline Rosenau traces its origins in the humanities and describes how its key concepts are today being applied to, and are restructuring, the social sciences. Serving as neither an opponent nor an apologist for the movement, she cuts through post-modernism's (...) often incomprehensible jargon in order to offer all readers a lucid exposition of its propositions. Rosenau shows how the post-modern challenge to reason and rational organization radiates across academic fields. For example, in psychology it questions the conscious, logical, coherent subject; in public administration it encourages a retreat from central planning and from reliance on specialists; in political science it calls into question the authority of hierarchical, bureaucratic decision-making structures that function in carefully defined spheres; in anthropology it inspires the protection of local, primitive cultures from First World attempts to reorganize them. In all of the social sciences, she argues, post-modernism repudiates representative democracy and plays havoc with the very meaning of "left-wing" and "right-wing." Rosenau also highlights how post-modernism has inspired a new generation of social movements, ranging from New Age sensitivities to Third World fundamentalism. In weighing its strengths and weaknesses, the author examines two major tendencies within post-modernism, the largely European, skeptical form and the predominantly Anglo-North-American form, which suggests alternative political, social, and cultural projects. She draws examples from anthropology, economics, geography, history, international relations, law, planning, political science, psychology, sociology, urban studies, and women's studies, and provides a glossary of post-modern terms to assist the uninitiated reader with special meanings not found in standard dictionaries. (shrink)

Summary A number of elite boys? schools in England have admitted girls for over 30 years, some thereby becoming mixed schools. In other schools, girls remain a very small minority. This paper focuses upon prospectuses from the latter type of school, arguing that prospectuses are particularly valuable as a basis for judging schools? policies and practices in their own terms. The researchers ask questions about the nature of this form of ?co-education?, particularly as it affects girls? educational and social opportunities. (...) On balance, the prospectuses paint a picture of boys? schools which happen to have girls in them rather than of schools whose policies and practices have become genuinely co-educational. (shrink)

On 18–19 May 2018, a symposium was held in the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the death of Ronald W. Hepburn (1927–2008). The speakers at this event discussed Hepburn’s oeuvre from several perspectives. For this book, the collection of the revised versions of their talks has been supplemented by the papers of other scholars who were unable to attend the symposium itself. Thus this volume contains contributions from (...) eighteen notable scholars of different disciplines, ranging from contemporary aesthetics and art theory through to philosophical approaches to religion, education and social anthropology. It also includes a bibliography of Hepburn’s writings. The essays were first published in two special issues of the Journal of Scottish Thought, vols. 10–11 (2018–2019). -/- Ronald William Hepburn was born in Aberdeen on 16 March 1927. He went to Aberdeen Grammar School, then he graduated with an M.A. in Philosophy (1951) and obtained his doctorate from the University of Aberdeen (1955). His tutor at Aberdeen was Donald MacKinnon (1913– 1994), a Scottish philosopher and theologian, the author of A Study in Ethical Theory (1957) and The Problem of Metaphysics (1974). Hepburn taught as Lecturer at the Department of Moral Philosophy at Aberdeen (1956–60), and he was also Visiting Associate Professor of Philosophy at New York University (1959–60). He returned from the United States as Professor of Philosophy at Nottingham University. In 1964, he was appointed as a Chair in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and between 1965 and 1968 he was also Stanton Lecturer in the Philosophy of Religion at the University of Cambridge. From 1975 until his retirement in 1996, he held the Professorship of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh. He died in Edinburgh on 23 December 2008. His philosophical interests ranged from theology and the philosophy of religion through moral philosophy and the philosophy of education to art theory and aesthetics. Notably, Hepburn is widely regarded as the founder of modern environmental and everyday aesthetics as a result of the influence of papers in the 1960s which pioneered a new approach to the aesthetics of the natural world. (shrink)

In two recent articles I have argued that Kant’s legal and political philosophy can shed new light on his much-contested account of moral autonomy and that important changes in his political theory help to explain why in his later work the Formula of Autonomy disappears. In the present essay, I respond to comments by Sorin Baiasu and Marie Newhouse, who argue that the changes in Kant’s political theory fail to explain the disappearance of the Formula of Autonomy, since in (...) both phases Kant held that laws are given by the people’s representatives. I offer additional support for my original argument by developing a more detailed account of Kant’s conception of the relation between the legislating representatives and the people they are taken to represent. I argue that Kant’s conception of the proper representation relation changed, and that it changed so fundamentally that the analogy at the basis of the Formula of Autonomy was no longer apt, thus providing a plausible explanation for its disappearance. I also address several related comments and propose an explanation for why Kant dropped the very idea of autonomy as a property of the will. (shrink)

Pauline Kleingeld has argued persuasively that Kant’s Principle of Autonomy draws an analogy between two relationships: 1) that between an individual agent and their maxim, and 2) that between a legislator and their legislation. She also suggests that Kant’s evolving views on the normative significance of popular elections made his analogy inapt, which explains its disappearance from his later writings. This comment concurs with Sorin Baiasu that the merits of Kant’s analogy were untouched by his evolving political views. The (...) analogy presupposes that when lawmakers legislate, they do so as representatives of the people, but even Kant’s mature writings posit that unelected lawmakers are representatives of the people in the necessary sense. Facts about whether a lawmaker acquired legislative authority by election, heredity, or conquest do have normative implications in the larger context of Kant’s political theory, but such facts are necessarily temporally upstream of the relation between legislator and legislation, just as facts about how an agent became rational are upstream of the relation between individual agent and maxim. Because the analogy focuses exclusively on these two relationships, it cannot be damaged by such upstream facts. Moreover, we should consider the possibility that Kant’s Principle of Autonomy compares a human will to the united general will of the people itself rather than to the will of a fallible public official or institution. On this alternative reading, it is even more clear that Kant’s evolving views on the significance of elections could have no possible relevance to the Principle of Autonomy. (shrink)

Une plaisanterie qui se retourne contre la toute-puissance de Google permet à une descendante de Stagecoach Mary d’accélérer notre passage à la télépathie en re-matérialisant humoristiquement nos courriels sur des déchets de toutes sorte. La planète des utopies à venir est à inventer en riant de nos dystopies présentes.

Few, if any, present‐day undergraduate degree courses in Theology include in their syllabus a study of the Epistle to the Hebrews or other New Testament writings other than the Gospels and the Pauline epistles. The result is in effect that we create a canon within a canon.This paper, originally read at a postgraduate seminar, gives reasons why Hebrews in particular should not be neglected.Hebrews provides evidence of the diversity of early Christian tradition, for example, with its teaching that it (...) is impossible to be re‐admitted to the community of faith, having once abandoned it, and with its unique use of Israel’s day of Atonement rites in its presentation of Christ. Moreover, the very genre of Hebrews merits particular interest.Hebrews also evidences a Christian community which has yet to break with Judaism. Its thoroughly Jewish background illustrates for students of the New Testament the necessity of knowing the Jewish Scriptures as well as the writings of the New Testament. Moreover, a study of the Epistle could make a constructive contribution to present‐day Jewish–Christian dialogue, even if in the past it has been enlisted on the side of a thinly‐disguised anti‐Semitism.Finally, Hebrews brings the student face to face with the metaphorical character of much of the language of the New Testament – a form of language which is not to be taken less seriously than other kinds of language; and in this case, Hebrews’ Day of Atonement metaphors issue in new insights – in an innovative theology of access to God.For this and other reasons, the study of Hebrews has an important contribution to make to theology degree syllabuses. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:preface The essays in this special issue on Indigenous Feminisms in Settler Contexts engage feminist politics from multiple Indigenous geographies, histories, and standpoints. What emerges is a panoramic view of Indigenous feminist scholarship’s conceptual, linguistic, and artistic activism at this moment in time. We learn of praxis aimed at reclaiming Indigenous languages and ecological perspectives and the varied modes of resistance, survivance, and persistence. We also unpack the complex (...) racial/gender politics of colonial encounters in contexts where white women cared intimately for Indigenous children, or where they helped to recover Indigenous oral traditions, and we note how modes of help can also reproduce imperial power relations. Some essays, art works, and poems extend the geographic ambit of critiques of settler colonialism beyond American contexts: they deploy feminist rubrics to critique the continuing violent settlement of Palestine and Kashmir to demonstrate that the occupation of “marginal” places is constitutive of state-​ society relations; others describe how Australian Aboriginal and Sámi artists engage the question of Indigenous visibility. In different ways, they each show how staying in place, against all odds, can be radical. Our first two articles examine the politics of praxis. Michelle M. Jacob, Virginia R. Beavert, Regan Anderson, Leilani Sabzalian, and Joana Jansen analyze Indigenous feminist praxis surrounding Ichishkíin Indigenous language education. The “artivism” of Sámi artists Maxida 284Preface and Timimie Märak, which expresses concern for land and water rights, gender and sexuality, and Indigenous rights in Northern Europe takes center stage in Kyle Bladow’s essay. The next three articles interrogate historical records shaping Indigenous lives in northern Canada, southwest Pacific, and southwestern United States and Mexico. Val Marie Johnson examines how white women staff members’ intimate care relations at residential schools for Inuvialuit, Inuinnait, and Iñupiat peoples in Canada were bound up with the latter’s dispossession. Carolyn J. Eichner recounts the encounter between the Indigenous Kanak people and Louise Michel, a feminist and participant in the revolutionary Paris Commune of 1871 who was banished to New Caledonia for seven years; Eichner argues that although Michel was staunchly anti-imperialist, her liberatory political project bore the temporal logics of colonization. Drawing on examples of Nahua reconfigurations of Christian scripture, Kenna Neitch proposes the language of “persistence” as a heuristic for avoiding the reactive, relational connotations that can pervade scholarly usages of “resistance” rhetoric. Next, our review essay by Jennifer McLerran describes recent Indigenous feminist scholarship that recasts the concept of sovereignty. Our News and Views piece focuses on modalities of occupation in the context of Kashmir: Nosheen Ali, Mona Bhan, Sahana Ghosh, Hafsa Kanjwal, Zunaira Komal, Deepti Misri, Shruti Mukherjee, Nishant Upadhyay, Saiba Varma, and Ather Zia argue that occupation is foundational to the making and reproduction of nationstates, and not exceptional to state power. The varied forms of resistance to occupation are examined by Sara Ihmoud in her article about how a group of Palestinian women, the Murabitat al-Haram, agitate for religious freedom simply by “staying in place.” Rabab Abdulhadi comments on shifts in contemporary settler colonial discourse in Israel, noting the increasingly overt and unapologetic deployment of highly sexualized and gendered images. Marina Tyquiengco examines the art of Australian Aboriginal artist Fiona Foley, specifically her Black Velvet series. Art and myth are also fused in Shantell Powell’s textual and visual rendering of Inuit memory. This issue features a range of poetry on topics such as language loss, human-land relationships, and sexual violence, written by Katherine Agyemaa Agard, Kei Kaimana, and Kai Minosh Pyle, and curated by our creative writing editor, Alexis Pauline Gumbs. In “Átaw Iwá Ichishkíin Sínwit: The Importance of Ichishkíin Language in Advancing Indigenous Feminist Education,” Michelle M. Jacob, Preface 285 Virginia R. Beavert, Regan Anderson, Leilani Sabzalian, and Joana Jansen examine Indigenous feminist praxis surrounding Ichishkíin-language education. They critique how Western education systems inflict pernicious forms of violence within Native communities, engaging in practices of linguistic genocide and alienating Indigenous peoples from their homelands. In response, Native peoples, along with non-Native allies, are engaging in educational and political activism to reclaim and revitalize Indigenous languages and ecological perspectives. In examining the foundational teaching of Ichishk... (shrink)

The possibility of dialogue between human beings and nature has been a subject of controversy with fundamental interpretations and reinterpretations among philosophers. Some have argued that the idea of human–nature dialogue is ill-informed, absurd and misleading because humans and non-humans lack the capacity for mutual linguistic understanding and reciprocity. This paper argues otherwise, by appropriating Marie Pauline Eboh’s concept of “Ecogynism as Unspoken Dialogue” to analytically show the dialogical possibility between human beings and nature. Ecogynism is considered as (...) an approach and method towards the consideration of a new form of dialogue with a view to achieving friendly and harmonious synthesis of existence, and proffering solutions to natural disasters and issues relating to environmental sustainability. However, the form of dialogue accentuated in this article is not akin to conversation or discussion that requires an exchange of views, but an unspoken dialogue that is based on meta-epistemic and existential modes of communication, sensibility, and interaction, to reveal the natural interrelatedness and mutuality of all existents and supplant the dominance of androcentrism. (shrink)

Recent scholarship on the Pastoral Epistles shows that they are addressing several controversies. The author, on one hand, claims to be the legitimate heir to a long-standing Pauline tradition and, on the other, he seeks to advance a doctrine that provides important information about gender roles at the beginning of Christianity. The present article, drawing on Mary Douglas´ theory on the relationship between the social and the physical body, compares the gender ideals contained in the Pastoral Letters with those (...) in the Apocryphal Acts of Paul and Thecla. (shrink)

BackgroundInformation processing speed is a marker for cognitive function. It is associated with neural maturation and increases during development. Traditionally, IPS is measured using paper and pencil tasks requiring fine motor skills. Such skills are often impaired in patients with neurological conditions. Therefore, an alternative that does not need motor dexterity is desirable. One option is the computerized symbol digit modalities test, which requires the patient to verbally associate numbers with symbols.MethodsEighty-six participants were examined, 38 healthy and 48 hospitalized for (...) a non-neurological disease. All participants performed the written SDMT, c-SDMT, and the Test of Non-verbal Intelligence Fourth Edition. Statistical analyses included a multivariate analysis of covariance for the effects of intelligence and hospitalization on the performance of the SDMT and c-SDMT. A repeated measures analysis of variance was used to compare performance across c-SDMT trials between inpatients and outpatients.ResultsThe MANCOVA showed that hospitalization had a significant effect on IPS when measured with the SDMT but not with the c-SDMT, while IQ had no effect on IPS. Age was the best predictor of performance of both tests. The repeated measures ANOVA revealed no significant difference in within-test performance between outpatient and inpatient participants in the c-SDMT.ConclusionPerformance of the c-SDMT is not confounded by hospitalization and gives within-test information. As a valid and reliable measure of IPS for children and adolescents, it is suitable for use in both inpatient and outpatient populations. (shrink)

"After observing the trial of Adolf Eichmann, Hannah Arendt articulated her controversial concept of the "banality of evil", thereby one of the most chilling and divisive moral questions of the twentieth century: How can genocidal acts be carried out by non-psychopathic people? By revealing the full complexity of the trial with reasoning that defied prevailing attitudes, Arendt became the object of severe and often slanderous criticism... [This book] explores the ways in which [Arendt] "unlearned" recognized trends and patterns - both (...) philosophical and cultural - to establish a theoretical praxis all her own. Through an analysis of the social context and intellectual influences - Karl Jaspers, Walter Benjamin, and Martin Heidegger - that helped shape Arendt's process, Knott has formed a historically engaged and incisive contribution to Arendt's legacy."--Jacket. (shrink)

Liana Badr's The Eye of the Mirror explores the historical trauma of the 1975–6 siege of the Palestinian refugee camp Tal el–Zaatar in Beirut and the massacre of thousands of its inhabitants by Christian militias. Analogous to Holocaust writing, Badr's fictionalized history, grounded in actual survivor testimonies, enacts a complex politics of cultural memory, but does so from a specifically female perspective. Collapsing the personal and political, private and public, inside and outside through figured violations of bodies and psyches, Badr (...) repositions women at the centre of the Palestinians’ struggle for and story of survival. Badr's novel traces the annihilation of the possibility of address, accompanied by self–loss and the ability to witness, and the laborious recreation of address. Claiming authority on the basis of the emotional, visceral truth of suffering, she seeks to break the endless cycle of an oppressive and impotent masculine history, constructing an alternative history which at least attempts to address the voice of cultural, national, and gender difference. (shrink)

Discussion of Wittgenstein's Tractatus is currently dominated by two opposing interpretations of the work: a metaphysical or realist reading and the 'resolute' reading of Diamond and Conant. Marie McGinn's principal aim in this book is to develop an alternative interpretative line, which rejects the idea, central to the metaphysical reading, that Wittgenstein sets out to ground the logic of our language in features of an independently constituted reality, but which allows that he aims to provide positive philosophical insights into (...) how language functions. McGinn takes as a guiding principle the idea that we should see Wittgenstein's early work as an attempt to eschew philosophical theory and to allow language itself to reveal how it functions. By this account, the aim of the work is to elucidate what language itself makes clear, namely, what is essential to its capacity to express thoughts that are true or false. However, the early Wittgenstein undertakes this descriptive project in the grip of a set of preconceptions concerning the essence of language that determine both how he conceives the problem and the approach he takes to the task of clarification. Nevertheless, the Tractatus contains philosophical insights, achieved despite his early preconceptions, that form the foundation of his later philosophy. -/- The anti-metaphysical interpretation that is presented includes a novel reading of the problematic opening sections of the Tractatus, in which the apparently metaphysical status of Wittgenstein's remarks is shown to be an illusion. The book includes a discussion of the philosophical background to the Tractatus, a comprehensive interpretation of Wittgenstein's early views of logic and language, and an interpretation of the remarks on solipsism. The final chapter is a discussion of the relation between the early and the later philosophy that articulates the fundamental shift in Wittgenstein's approach to the task of understanding how language functions and reveal the still more fundamental continuity in his conception of his philosophical task. (shrink)

In dialogue with the most famous myth for the origin of different languages - The Tower of Babel - A Psychoanalytic Exploration on Sameness and Otherness: Beyond Babel provides a series of timely reflections on the themes of sameness and otherness from a contemporary psychoanalytic perspective. How are we dealing with communication and its difficulties, the confusion of tongues and loss of common ground within a European context today? Can we move beyond Babel? Confusion and feared loss of shared values (...) and identity are a major part of the daily work of psychoanalytic psychotherapists. Bringing together an international range psychoanalytic practitioners and researchers, the book is divided into six parts and covers an array of resonant topics, including: language and translation; cultural identity; families and children; the cyber world; the psychotherapeutic process; and migration. Whereas the quest for unity, which underpins the myth of Babel, leads to mystification, simplification and the exclusion of people or things, multilingual communities necessitate mutual understanding through dialogue. This book examines those factors which further or threaten communication, aiming not to reduce but to gain complexity. It suggests that diversification enriches communication and that, by relating to others, we can create something new. As opposed to cultural and linguistic homogeneity, Babel is not only a metaphor for mangled communication, alienation, and distraction, it is also about the acceptance or rejection of differences between self and other. This book will be of great interest to psychoanalytic psychotherapists and researchers from a wide variety of backgrounds. (shrink)

The positive psychology landscape is changing, and its initial identity is being challenged. Moving beyond the “third wave of PP,” two roads for future research and practice in well-being studies are discerned: The first is the state of the art PP trajectory that will continue as a scientific discipline in/next to psychology. The second trajectory links to pointers described as part of the so-called third wave of PP, which will be argued as actually being the beginning of a new domain (...) of inter- or transdisciplinary well-being studies in its own right. It has a broader scope than the state of the art in PP, but is more delineated than in planetary well-being studies. It is in particular suitable to understand the complex nature of bio-psycho-social-ecological well-being, and to promote health and wellness in times of enormous challenges and changes. A unique cohering focus for this post-disciplinary well-being research domain is proposed. In both trajectories, future research will have to increase cognizance of metatheoretical assumptions, develop more encompassing theories to bridge the conceptual fragmentation in the field, and implement methodological reforms, while keeping context and the interwovenness of the various levels of the scientific text in mind. Opportunities are indicated to contribute to the discourse on the identity and development of scientific knowledge in mainstream positive psychology and the evolving post-disciplinary domain of well-being studies. (shrink)

This book re-envisions the cosmos with the holistic, spherical imagination of the Middle Ages, figured in circles, cycles, epicycles, equants, and offers a new perspective on the power of images and metaphors to shape the way humans see the universe and their own role in it.

This work is designed to show that there is an implicit connection between Ockham's academic and political careers in his theory of conscience. ;Thomas Aquinas offers a theory of moral responsibility according to which the conscientious individual has knowledge of the rightness of her act which does not preclude her doing otherwise. His account of the will, however, proves that this state of affairs never obtains. Ockham's alternative presupposes that we freely choose our own ends. He is therefore entitled to (...) assert that conscience is the knowledge of one's own acts as right or wrong. ;The libertarian metaphysics underlying Ockham's ethics is tested by the problem of unfulfilled prophecy. Thomas Bradwardine argues that the Antichrist is free not to come because it is possible for God to undo the past. Thomas Buckingham argues for the possibility that the prophecy never meant that the Antichrist was going to come. Meanwhile, Ockham is left with the possibility that God lied. Ockhamist John of Mirecourt shows why this 'heretical' solution is the only way to save the faith. Ockham's theory of conscience provides a sound basis for interpreting his treatise on heresy. Heresy is disobedience, not to authority, but to the truth. Since the condemnation of heresy is itself a paradigm instance of this kind of perversity, freedom of speech prevails by default. Ockham's conception of a community united by this realization provides an answer to twentieth-century speech-regulation advocates. ;Ockham thought that it is through our obedience to the truth that Jesus's promise to be with his disciples 'always, to the end of the age' will be fulfilled. According to Walter Burley, 'I promise you a Christian' converts with 'A Christian is promised to you by me.' According to Ockham, in contrast, it is an opaque construction. This account of the logic of indefinite promises implies that no individual can claim to be one of the disciples to whom Jesus was referring. ;I hope to leave the reader in a better position to appreciate the sense in which the claim that Ockham's two careers are united by his nominalism may be considered correct. (shrink)

Wittgenstein is the most influential twentieth century philosopher in the English-speaking world. In the _Philosophical Investigations_, his most important work, he introduces the famous 'private language argument' which changed the whole philosophical view of language. _Wittgenstein and the Philosophical Investigations_ introduces and assesses: * Wittgenstein's life, and its connection with his thought * the text of the _Philosophical Investigations_ * the importance of Wittgenstein's work to contemporary philosophy.

Depuis Droit, mythe et raison (1980) écrit avec Jacques Lenoble jusqu’aux récents À quoi sert le droit? Usages, fonctions et finalités (2016) ou Le droit, objet de passions (2018), François Ost ne cesse de questionner les rapports de nos sociétés au droit et la place de celui-ci dans nos sociétés contemporaines. Avec Le droit malgré tout, il s’agit de rendre hommage à l’œuvre et à la carrière d’une figure centrale de la théorie du droit contemporaine et aussi au fondateur, avec (...) le regretté Michel van de Kerchove, de ce que l’on appelle parfois « l’école de Saint-Louis ». Abordant les deux pôles de la dialectique à laquelle François Ost est si attaché - la critique et la reconstruction -, l’ouvrage propose un regard interdisciplinaire sur le droit, à travers les principaux thèmes qui ont nourri la pensée de l’auteur. Du statut épistémologique de la science du droit à un questionnement sur les fondements et l’avenir du droit et de la justice, des liens qu’entretiennent le droit et la littérature jusqu’à l’environnement saisi par le droit en passant par les « communs », les approches de ses collègues et amis sont toutes réflexives et critiques. En ce qu’elles sont soucieuses de soumettre le droit au regard des sciences sociales et, inversement, les normativités extra-juridiques au regard du droit, elles sont fidèles à la démarche de François Ost. Ce Liber Amicorum propose aussi un retour réflexif sur son œuvre par l’auteur lui-même, dans un entretien avec Manuel Atienza. Contributeurs : Yves CARTUYVELS, Robert JACOB, Mark VAN HOECKE, Jacques COMMAILLE, Isabelle HACHEZ, Laurent VAN EYNDE, Jacques LENOBLE, Benoit FRYDMAN, Alain PAPAUX, Guillaume DE STEXHE, Diane BERNARD, Antoine GARAPON, Jacques CHEVALLIER, Alain SUPIOT, Paul MARTENS, Jérémie VAN MEERBEECK, Sébastien VAN DROOGHENBROECK, Nicolas BERNARD et Françoise TULKENS, Pierre LEGRAND, Annette RUELLE, Isabelle OST, Jeanne GAAKEER, Massimo VOGLIOTTI, Denis SALAS, Pauline BÉGASSE DE DHAEM et Marie-Sophie DE CLIPPELE, Xavier DELGRANGE, Delphine MISONNE, Benoît JADOT, Alain STROWEL, Hugues DUMONT, Jean-Guy BELLEY, Antoine BAILLEU. (shrink)