In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Guillaume Budé, Andrea Alciato, Pierre de l’Estoile: Renaissance Interpreters of Roman LawMichael L. MonheitIn the Renaissance, jurists and other scholars intensely debated the problem of how to interpret correctly the Corpus iuris civilis (CIC), Justinian’s great sixth-century-ad compilation of Roman law. 1 Yet by the sixteenth century jurists had been closely interpreting its texts for four centuries; indeed Roman law jurists, much more than pre-Reformation theologians, innovated through close (...) commentary on the text (a characteristic sometimes wrongly considered a humanist innovation). Assuming that these texts were fully consistent, largely lacking a sense of historical distance, they “found” the CIC’s dictum on a given question by weaving many passages that seemed to address it partially into a complex logical fabric, and eliminated apparent internal conceptual disparities in the same way. 2But from the fifteenth century such humanists as Lorenzo Valla (1407–57) and Angelo Politiano (1454–94) applied humanist critical methods to the CIC and ridiculed the methods of the civilians. In the early sixteenth century the work of Guillaume Budé (1468–1540), Andrea Alciato (1492–1550), and Ulrich Zasius (1461–1535) intensified the crisis in legal interpretation. Budé, the [End Page 21] period’s leading French humanist, was the first humanist to publish an exhaustive study of Justinian’s Digest, while the Milanese jurist Alciato and the German jurist Zasius were among the first humanist-trained Roman lawyers to tackle the CIC. Across the century’s first three decades these humanists debated each other and other jurists, including the eminent Orléans professor of Roman law, Pierre de l’Estoile (1480–1537), best known to scholars as the teacher of a youthful law student named Jean Calvin. 3 We consider here a debate between Budé, Alciato, and Estoile, which also involved Nicolas Duchemin, Estoile’s student and partisan, and Calvin himself, who made his first appearance in print by contributing a preface to the work of his friend Duchemin. Though often referred to in Calvin scholarship, the debate has never been thoroughly explored. 4 [End Page 22]Unlike some recent studies of interpretation in the Renaissance, this study focuses on each interpreter’s practice, rather than his explicit methodological pronouncements alone, on what Wittgenstein calls a writer’s “language game”—here the meaning of each interpreter’s statements in the context of his interpretive practices. Indeed we shall view this debate as a clash of three “forms of life,” since the three protagonists could not agree as to what rules to follow to determine the meaning of a particular expression. 5In the passage in question, Lex Nec quicquam, §Ubi decretum, from the Digest section On the Duties of the Proconsul and Legate (D.1.16.9.1), the third century Imperial jurist Ulpian, declares:Ubi decretum necessarium est per libellum id expedire proconsul non poterit: Omnia enim quaecunque causae cognitionem desiderant per libellum non possunt expediri. (Where a decretum [decree] is required, the proconsul will not be able to dispose of the matter per libellum. All matters whatsoever requiring causae cognitio [judicial investigation] cannot be disposed of per libellum.)In unravelling the meaning of such key terms as decretum and libellus, the interpreters applied assumptions and practices rooted in both the humanist and [End Page 23] scholastic traditions—sometimes the same individual applied both. The debate presents the issue of interpretation apart from that of textual recovery, for no participant claimed any passage involved had been corrupted or offered a significant variant. Had they possessed the Mommsen edition of the CIC (albeit without necessarily understanding its principles of construction), each would have faced little added difficulty.I. Guillaume Budé on §Ubi decretumGuillaume Budé sparked the debate with his comments on the passage in the first part of his famous study of Justinian’s Digest, the Annotationes in quattuor & viginti Pandectarum libros (1508). He argued that the term libellus as used in the passage meant a supplicatory petition addressed to the Emperor. The matters involved could include both controversial cases, for which the Emperor would rely on the judgment of his council, and uncontested matters in which Emperors acted by their own “liberality or beneficence.” Budé confined himself to the... (shrink)

[Michael Friedman] This paper considers the extent to which Kant's vision of a distinctively 'transcendental' task for philosophy is essentially tied to his views on the foundations of the mathematical and physical sciences. Contemporary philosophers with broadly Kantian sympathies have attempted to reinterpret his project so as to isolate a more general philosophical core not so closely tied to the details of now outmoded mathematical-physical theories (Euclidean geometry and Newtonian physics). I consider two such attempts, those of Strawson and (...) McDowell, and argue that they fundamentally distort the original Kantian impulse. I then consider Buchdahl's attempt to preserve the link between Kantian philosophy and the sciences while simultaneously generalizing Kant's doctrines in light of later scientific developments. I argue that Buchdahl's view, while not adequate as in interpretation of Kant in his own eighteenth century context, is nonetheless suggestive of an historicized and relativized revision of Kantianism that can do justice to both Kant's original philosophical impulse and the radical changes in the sciences that have occurred since Kant's day. ***********[Graham Bird] Michael Friedman criticises some recent accounts of Kant which 'detach' his transcendental principles from the sciences, and do so in order to evade naturalism. I argue that Friedman's rejection of that 'detachment' is ambiguous. In its strong form, which I claim Kant rejects, the principles of Euclidean geometry and Newtonian physics are represented as transcendental principles. In its weak form, which I believe Kant accepts, it treats those latter principles as higher order conditions of the possibility of both science and ordinary experience. I argue also that the appeal to naturalism is unhelpful because that doctrine is seriously unclear, and because the accounts Friedman criticises are open to objections independent of any appeal to naturalism. (shrink)

Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) have significant deficits in language ability that cannot be attributed to neurological damage, hearing impairment, or intellectual disability. The symptoms displayed by children with DLD differ across languages. In English, DLD is often marked by severe difficulties acquiring verb inflection. Such difficulties are less apparent in languages with rich verb morphology like Spanish and Italian. Here we show how these differential profiles can be understood in terms of an interaction between properties of the input (...) language, and the child's ability to learn predictive relations between linguistic elements that are separated within a sentence. We apply a simple associative learning model to sequential English and Spanish stimuli and show how the model's ability to associate cues occurring earlier in time with later outcomes affects the acquisition of verb inflection in English more than in Spanish. We relate this to the high frequency of the English bare form (which acts as a default) and the English process of question formation, which means that (unlike in Spanish) bare forms frequently occur in third‐person singular contexts. Finally, we hypothesize that the pro‐drop nature of Spanish makes it easier to associate person and number cues with the verb inflection than in English. Since the factors that conspire to make English verb inflection particularly challenging for learners with weak sequential learning abilities are much reduced or absent in Spanish, this provides an explanation for why learning Spanish verb inflection is relatively unaffected in children with DLD. (shrink)

[Michael Friedman] This paper considers the extent to which Kant's vision of a distinctively 'transcendental' task for philosophy is essentially tied to his views on the foundations of the mathematical and physical sciences. Contemporary philosophers with broadly Kantian sympathies have attempted to reinterpret his project so as to isolate a more general philosophical core not so closely tied to the details of now outmoded mathematical-physical theories. I consider two such attempts, those of Strawson and McDowell, and argue that they (...) fundamentally distort the original Kantian impulse. I then consider Buchdahl's attempt to preserve the link between Kantian philosophy and the sciences while simultaneously generalizing Kant's doctrines in light of later scientific developments. I argue that Buchdahl's view, while not adequate as in interpretation of Kant in his own eighteenth century context, is nonetheless suggestive of an historicized and relativized revision of Kantianism that can do justice to both Kant's original philosophical impulse and the radical changes in the sciences that have occurred since Kant's day. /// [Graham Bird] Michael Friedman criticises some recent accounts of Kant which 'detach' his transcendental principles from the sciences, and do so in order to evade naturalism. I argue that Friedman's rejection of that 'detachment' is ambiguous. In its strong form, which I claim Kant rejects, the principles of Euclidean geometry and Newtonian physics are represented as transcendental principles. In its weak form, which I believe Kant accepts, it treats those latter principles as higher order conditions of the possibility of both science and ordinary experience. I argue also that the appeal to naturalism is unhelpful because that doctrine is seriously unclear, and because the accounts Friedman criticises are open to objections independent of any appeal to naturalism. (shrink)

Nick Trakakis and Yujin Nagasawa criticise the argument in Almeida and Oppy . According to Trakakis and Nagasawa, we are mistaken in our claim that the sceptical theist response to evidential arguments from evil is unacceptable because it would undermine ordinary moral reasoning. In their view, there is no good reason to think that sceptical theism leads to an objectionable form of moral scepticism. We disagree. In this paper, we explain why we think that the argument of Nagasawa and Trakakis (...) fails to overthrow our objection to sceptical theism. (shrink)

In this paper we respond to criticisms by Michael Bergmann and Michael Rea in their “In Defense of Sceptical Theism : A Reply to Almeida and Oppy,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 83.

We live in an age dominated by money. As capitalism has intensified and expanded as a social form, money has increasingly colonised the production and reproduction of the human condition. We live in an age of monetarism: an age in which social and political regulation are increasingly subordinate to the dictates of ‘sound money'. We live in an age of national lotteries: an age where millions attempt each week to garner enough money to ‘free’ themselves from the grinding agony of (...) wage labour. We live in an age in which people increasingly grasp the alienation inherent in the domination of society by money and attempt to reassert a sense of human community through the introduction of local currency and barter schemes. But we also live in an age where Marxism is supposedly dead; where we can only gaze in ironic postmodern wonder at the increasing domination of the human condition by money and its social forms. In this paper we go beyond this postmodern orthodoxy to suggest that it is not only possible to develop a historically materialist analysis of money and its social forms but also that this project is essential if we are to reclaim our humanity from the deadening alienation of money and its social forms. We explore the magical qualities of money, the qualities which have enthralled and transfixed bourgeois social science from the classical economy of Adam Smith to the present day postmodernists. We argue that the lasting legacy of Marx was to uncover the historical materiality underlying the magical appearance of money: a discovery of the alchemic properties of money capital through which money becomes more money and which involves the material subordination of living labour to the valorisation of money capital. (shrink)

This paper aims to provide some theoretical starting points for constructing a social science approach to environmental issues which goes beyond narrower forms of constructivism without dismissing the importance of interpretative sociology. An ecological understanding of society is compared with the notion of structuration and integrated into the concept of coevolution in order to shed light on the dynamic nature of socioenvironmental relations and move beyond the constructivist/realist dualism.

Sceptical theists--e.g., William Alston and Michael Bergmann--have claimed that considerations concerning human cognitive limitations are alone sufficient to undermine evidential arguments from evil. We argue that, if the considerations deployed by sceptical theists are sufficient to undermine evidential arguments from evil, then those considerations are also sufficient to undermine inferences that play a crucial role in ordinary moral reasoning. If cogent, our argument suffices to discredit sceptical theist responses to evidential arguments from evil.

This paper, while neutral on questions about the minimality of truth, argues for the non-minimality of truth-aptness.

This paper aims to provide some theoretical starting points for constructing a social science approach to environmental issues which goes beyond narrower forms of constructivism without dismissing the importance of interpretative sociology. An ecological understanding of society is compared with the notion of structuration and integrated into the concept of coevolution in order to shed light on the dynamic nature of socioenvironmental relations and move beyond the constructivist/realist dualism.

What impact are we having on the environment around us? How can we limit the effect of human life on the natural world? These questions and more are considered in 'Advances in Sustainability and Environmental Justice' volume 13, which looks at environmental philosophy, humanity's place in the world, and how we can live in harmony with our planet.

Abstractabstract:The Capuchin missionary Domenico da Fano (1674–1728) presented a report to the Propaganda Fide in 1713 based on his experiences in the Tibet mission from 1707 until 1711 when this mission was temporarily abandoned, principally due to lack of funds. The Report (Relazione) was the first detailed description of Tibet by a resident European observer since 1624, and it resulted in new funding and manpower for the mission, in which da Fano served as Prefect in Lhasa from 1714 to 1722. (...) In the introduction to this first English translation of da Fano's Report, we assess the background of the Capuchin mission and da Fano's contributions to it and touch on some of the highlights of the Report and its detailed account of the economy, agriculture, lifestyle, and politics of Tibet. Special attention is given to his conception of Tibetan Buddhism as having many similarities to Roman Catholicism, and especially to his view of the Buddhist Three Precious Objects of Refuge (dkon mchog gsum; triratna) as analogous to the Trinitarian doctrine of Christianity. (shrink)

De Bie et al. (2023) call attention at the conclusion of their essay to the “novel questions” generated by complete ectogenesis. The question I explore is how complete ectogenesis from conception t...

I fundamentally agree with Childress et al. (2023) in the scenario they have constructed with Mr. J. None of the arguments they critically assess are ethically persuasive enough to justify removing...

The first attempt at a systematic approach to axiomatic theories of truth was undertaken by Friedman and Sheard (Ann Pure Appl Log 33:1–21, 1987). There twelve principles consisting of axioms, axiom schemata and rules of inference, each embodying a reasonable property of truth were isolated for study. Working with a base theory of truth conservative over PA, Friedman and Sheard raised the following questions. Which subsets of the Optional Axioms are consistent over the base theory? What are the proof-theoretic strengths (...) of the consistent theories? The first question was answered completely by Friedman and Sheard; all subsets of the Optional Axioms were classified as either consistent or inconsistent giving rise to nine maximal consistent theories of truth.They also determined the proof-theoretic strength of two subsets of the Optional Axioms. The aim of this paper is to continue the work begun by Friedman and Sheard. We will establish the proof-theoretic strength of all the remaining seven theories and relate their arithmetic part to well-known theories ranging from PA to the theory of ${\Sigma^1_1}$ dependent choice. (shrink)

An international medical tribunal should be established with power to impose criminal sanctions against physicians who are guilty of crimes against humanity.

We argue that prevailing definitions of Berkeley’s idealism fail to rule out a nearby Spinozist rival view that we call ‘mind-body identity panpsychism.’ Since Berkeley certainly does not agree with Spinoza on this issue, we call for more care in defining Berkeley’s view. After we propose our own definition of Berkeley’s idealism, we survey two Berkeleyan strategies to block the mind-body identity panpsychist and establish his idealism. We argue that Berkeley should follow Leibniz and further develop his account of the (...) mind’s unity. Unity—not activity—is the best way for Berkeley to establish his view at the expense of his panpsychist competitors. (shrink)

Michael A. PetersBeijing Normal UniversityMy deepest condolences to Pepe, Dom and Marcus and to Jim’s grandchildren. Tina and I spent a lot of time at the Marshall family home, often attending dinn...

Essays in Memory of Richard Helgerson: Laureations brings together new essays by leading literary scholars of the British and European middle ages and early modern period who have been influenced by the groundbreaking scholarship of Richard Helgerson. The contributors evince the ongoing impact of Helgerson's work in critical debates including those of nationalism, formal analysis, and literary careerism.

Recent studies of Aristotle’s meteorology have often focused on questions of scientific methodology rather than on the empirical accuracy of the explanations. Here we wish to focus on Aristotle’s theory of storms, considering them in their historical context and in light of Aristotle’s theoretical commitments, but testing them in terms of their ability to explain the phenomena in question. Aristotle’s approach to storm events follows a general pattern of “outburst” theories proposed by Presocratic thinkers, in which wind, fire, and the (...) like burst out of clouds. Aristotle proposes a two-exhalation theory in which a dry and a moist gas arise by evaporation and can conflict with each other. In Meteorologica II.9 and III.1, he provides his own theory of storms. Modern accounts are hampered by a mistranslation of ‘eknephias’ as “hurricane.” We argue that an eknephias is never a hurricane, but in the first place a theoretical construct meant to account for three distinct phenomena: tuphōn, keraunos, and prēstēr, all of which need to be identified more clearly with actual meteorological phenomena than they have been. We identify appropriate phenomena and also propose a phenomenon corresponding to eknephias, which makes sense of Aristotle’s account. (shrink)

Hirschman's (1970) exit, voice, and loyalty framework draws attention to both economic and political behavior as instruments for organizational change. The framework is simple but powerful; it has stimulated much cross-disciplinary analysis and debate. This paper extends this analysis by examining normative implications of Hirschman's basic premise: that exit and voice are primarily mechanisms for enhancing organizational (vs. individual) well-being.

This paper compares the roles classical and intuitionistic logic play in restricting the free use of truth principles in arithmetic. We consider fifteen of the most commonly used axiomatic principles of truth and classify every subset of them as either consistent or inconsistent over a weak purely intuitionistic theory of truth.

Cross-disciplinary scientific collaboration is emerging as standard operating procedure for many scholarly research enterprises. And yet, the skill set needed for effective collaboration is neither taught nor mentored. The goal of the Toolbox Dialogue Initiative is to facilitate cross-disciplinary collaboration. This book, inspired by this initiative, presents dialogue-based methods designed to increase mutual understanding among collaborators so as to enhance the quality and productivity of cross-disciplinary collaboration. It provides a theoretical context, principal activities, and evidence for effectiveness that will assist (...) readers in honing their collaborative skills. (shrink)

Galasso calls for “the actualization of the public health potential of precision medicine….as the best realistic contribution to health equity” (Galasso 2024, 83). Unfortunately, this is wishful th...

This personal narrative tugs at the heart strings. However, personal narratives are not sufficient to justify public funding for any screening policy. We have to take seriously the ‘just caring’ problem. We have only limited resources to meet virtually unlimited health care needs. No doubt, screening tests often save lives. The author wants public funding for prostate-specific antigen screening for prostate cancer. However, why only prostate cancer? Numerous cancers at various stages can be screened for. Are all of them equally (...) deserving of public funding? What about screening for a very long list of other life-threatening medical disorders? There is nothing ethically special about cancer. Where does the money come from to pay for all these screening tests? Do we reduce expensive life-prolonging care for patients in late-stage diseases? Ultimately, a balance must be struck between saving statistical lives through screening and saving identifiable lives in the intensive care unit. Achieving a just balance requires rational democratic deliberation as justification for these choices, not personal narratives. (shrink)

An authoritative, interdisciplinary approach to the field of biomedical and behavioural research with children encompassing science, medicine, child psychology, ethics, and law.

Compiles the photographs taken by Leonard Freed of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, during which Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech.

This is the first scholarly study of Atlas Shrugged, covering in detail the historical, literary, and philosophical aspects of Ayn Rand's magnum opus. Topics explored in depth include the history behind the novel's creation, publication, and reception; its nature as a romantic novel; and its presentation of a radical new philosophy.

This volume inaugurates a new critical edition of the writings of the great English philosopher and sage Francis Bacon - the first such complete edition for more than a hundred years. It contains six of Bacon's Latin scientific works, each accompanied by entirely new facing-page translations which, together with the extensive introduction and commentaries, offer fresh insights into one of the great minds of the early seventeenth century.