The various aspects of Christian Liberty and of the life of the Christian in the world are linked in a singular way in Paul’s pronouncements on marriage, as is found in 1 Cor 7:1–7 ff. Our choice of St. Augustine in the numerous contemporary scholarly attempted hermeneutics of 1 Cor 7:1–7 is that he adopts and elaborated an already existing tradition on sex and marriage. Moreover, this text in the New Testament is the only one that speaks explicitly of (...) the significance of conjugal intercourse. The interpretation of this text or passage has to an extent determined the development of the church’s tradition. Thus, the importance of the passage has to be considered. In Cor 7:1, Paul starts answering the questions the Corinthians put to him. Verse 1 reads: “Now concerning the matters about which you wrote”. The first of these questions concerns marriage. According to the superscription of this work, Augustine’s interpretation of 1 Cor 7:1–7 has implications for Christians in the contemporary world. In as much as it raises numerous problems to our contemporary understanding of marriage and sexuality, the problem of sexuality characterized our society today. (shrink)

This essay elucidates the theological and philosophical backgrounds of the ethics of solidarity in the thoughts of Pope John Paul II and expounds the basic hermeneutical conditions for its reappraisal in social ethics and contemporary debates. While it does not principally concern itself with defining solidarity , the question of its meaning is not completely ignored.This paper contributes to a better historico-critical understanding of the thoughts of John Paul II and an evaluation of his input to the development (...) of Catholic social thought.This essay argues that the insights of John Paul’s ethics of solidarity are as relevant as they are insufficient in constituting an ethical framework in contemporary debates on international poverty, social welfare, social change and the effects of economic globalization.The author views the writings of Paul Ricoeur as enriching the perspectives of John Paul II. (shrink)

The author traces the thought of George Santayana, Brad S. Gregory, Pierre Manent, and Rémi Brague, who addressed the transformation of the West into its modern present. They all show that by being cut off from its cultural and political inheritance in modern times, Western Civilization presently finds itself in a burning need of recovering its identity. To save its identity, the West is to challenge the errors of modernity. We used to have the example of Winston Churchill and Charles (...) de Gaulle in the darkest hours of World War II, and the remarkable example of John Paul II who through his leadership of the Solidarity movement inspired hope not only in his own people but also for others in the Soviet bloc at the time. “The cultural task awaiting Europe,” to use a phrase of Rémi Brague, challenging though it may be, may in time find its voice in another Churchill or John Paul II. At present, with no remedy in sight, all we can do is to hope. (shrink)

By examining selected works by Stephen Gaukroger, Alfred North Whitehead, Lynn White, Jr., Benjamin Farrington, and Paul Gans, the author discusses the formation of Western culture and the intellectual tools and the social conditions that contributed (and still contribute) to its being. He concludes that a metaphysics and a realistic epistemology—based on an ancient Greek confidence in the human intellect, in its ability to reason to truths that acknowledge the immaterial character of human intellection—is required for the West to (...) retain its identity and develop its own culture. (shrink)

About seventy-five years ago, philosophers and literary intellectuals as diverse as Edmund Husserl, George Santayana, and Paul Valéry, aware of the declining influence of Christianity on Western culture, spoke of “the crisis of Western civilization.” Santayana observed: “The present age is a critical one and interesting to live in. The civilization characteristic of Christendom has not disappeared, yet another civilization has begun to take its place. We still understand the value of religious faith.... On the other hand, the shell (...) of Christendom is broken.” All three pinned their hopes for the future of the West, not so much on a revived influence of a divided Christendom, but on the revival of the classical sources of Western culture, and Valéry insisted on an acknowledgment of the West’s debt to Roman law and Roman Catholicism. (shrink)

This is a small but rewarding volume consisting of four essays, two each by Alasdair MacIntyre and Paul Ricoeur, essays which were originally delivered as lectures at Columbia University in the late 1960s. The profundity and breadth of learning in both authors is evident as they consider the intellectual and moral role of religion in society.

Western Creed, Western Identity: such was the title of a volume of collected essays by Jude P. Dougherty published in 2000; most of these essays are now made available in this German translation. Since the author is well known to the readership of the Review of Metaphysics, which he has served as editor for thirty years, his thought need not to be introduced by way of a book review; rather, it will be of interest to emphasize the timeliness of (...) these studies for the German audience. (shrink)

Qu'y a-t-il de commun entre le personnage du Marchand de Venise de Shakespeare, Portia, le philosophe de la démocratie moderne, Spinoza, et le penseur de l'inconscient, Freud? Ils inventent tous les trois une manière " marrane " d'être juif, en jouant la comédie de l'universalité pour laquelle ils cryptent ce qu'ils cherchent. Persécutés par l'inquisition, obligés de mimer la vie chrétienne, les Marranes portent en eux et au-delà un double jeu, une comédie judéo-chrétienne. Il ne s'agit pas pour eux d'une (...) nouvelle religion, mais d'un secret et de nouvelles Lumières qui constituent peut-être un signe adressé aux temps à venir. La scène judéo-chrétienne, habitée par les Marranes, est comme l'inconscient de la démocratie européenne, elle a été enterrée par l'histoire et on a tenté d'effacer les traces. Les Marranes déjouent le trait d'union judéo-chrétien, en rejouant les équivoques des épîtres de Saint Paul. Ils nous invitent à repenser et à subvertir le théâtre qui commande, depuis ces épîtres, la pensée politique (notamment celle du sacrifice et de la guerre) et à libérer une tout autre idée de la démocratie : une vie libérée de la politique religieuse et de la religion politique (qui se développent, aujourd'hui, sur l'économie abyssale de la dette, de la pauvreté et de la misère). Les Marranes nous obligent aussi à interroger la philosophie contemporaine qui oscille entre l'anamnèse et l'amnésie du théâtre judéo-chrétien de la pensée politique. (shrink)

The system GLS, which is a modal sequent calculus system for the provability logic GL, was introduced by G. Sambin and S. Valentini in Journal of Philosophical Logic, 11, 311–342,, and in 12, 471–476,, the second author presented a syntactic cut-elimination proof for GLS. In this paper, we will use regress trees in order to present a simpler and more intuitive syntactic cut derivability proof for GLS1, which is a variant of GLS without the cut rule.

How holographic patterns of information underlie our physical reality.

Structural Injustice has become a hugely important concept in the field of political theory with the work of Iris Marion Young central to debates on what it is, what motivates it and how it should be addressed. In this article, I focus on a particular thread in Young’s account of structural injustice which I argue is all too often overlooked - the untraceability of structural injustice. This is not only a constant theme in Young’s account of structural injustice, it is, (...) in fact, a defining feature. By ‘untraceable’, Young means that structural injustice is distinct from other sorts of injustices for which there is a traceable agent at fault – these sorts of faut-based injustices fall under what Young calls the ‘liability model of injustice’. For the purposes of exploring the concept of structural injustice, I follow the logic of the claim that structural injustice is untraceable to see where it takes us in conversation with Young’s critics. I conclude that Young’s account is not only defensible with some clarification and development but vital politically. That said, I also find Young’s account of political responsibility for structural injustice wanting and accordingly I propose a way of understanding what I see as a dynamic transition from structural to fault-based injustices which I argue Young’s more ‘static’ account fails to accommodate. This is important, I suggest, for thinking about the ways in which responsibility for different forms of injustice operate and change. _Contemporary Political Theory_ (2023). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-023-00634-4. (shrink)

Nonverbal signals color the meanings of interpersonal relationships. Humans rely on facial, head, postural, and vocal signals to express relational messages along continua. Three of relevance are dominance-submission, composure-nervousness and trust-distrust. Machine learning and new automated analysis tools are making possible a deeper understanding of the dynamics of relational communication. These are explored in the context of group interactions during a game entailing deception. The “messiness” of studying communication under naturalistic conditions creates many measurement and design obstacles that are discussed (...) here. Possibilities for their mitigation are considered. (shrink)

Noam Chomsky and Frances Egan argue that David Marr’s computational theory of vision is not intentional, claiming that the formal scientific theory does not include description of visual content. They also argue that the theory is internalist in the sense of not describing things physically external to the perceiver. They argue that these claims hold for computational theories of vision in general. Beyond theories of vision, they argue that representational content does not figure as a topic within formal computational theories (...) in cognitive science. I demonstrate that Chomsky’s and Egan’s claims about Marr’s theory are false. Marr’s computational theory contains a mathematical theory of visual content, based on empirical psychophysical evidence. It also contains mathematical descriptions of distal physical surfaces and objects, and of their optic projection to the perceiver. Much computational research on vision contains these types of intentional and externalist components within the formal, mathematical, theories. Chomsky’s and Egan’s claims demonstrate inadequate study and understanding of Marr’s work and other research in this area. Computational theories of vision, by containing empirically based mathematical theories of visual content, to this extent present naturalizations of semantics. (shrink)

Publication date: 11 June 2018 Source: Author: Jude Nwafor Eze, Umar Aliyu, Abdulmalik Alhaji-Baba, Muhammad Alfa This research evaluates the farmers’ vulnerability to climate change in Niger State. Strategies for reducing the effect of climate change have regularly been made without experimental foundations and adequate information on farmers’ vulnerability to climate change in the study area. Thus, integrated farmers’ vulnerability assessment approach was employed by classifying socioeconomic and biophysical indicators of vulnerability into adaptive capacity, sensitivity and exposure to determine (...) the farmers’ vulnerability to climate change. This is based on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s definition of vulnerability. The study adopted a survey design and the method utilized for the study was questionnaire administered to 400 households in the study area. The results indicate that the farmers’ vulnerability was low in zone A with a mean index of 2.86, very low in zone B with a mean index of 3.74, and high in zone C with a mean index of 1.95. It is recommended that measures should be taken to integrate climate change adaptation into Niger State development process. These measures should include improvement in adoption of good agricultural practices. (shrink)

Focusing on the debate between resource egalitarians and capability theorists, with particular attention to gender equality, this article rejects the prevailing assumption that the ‘capability approach’ to equality, as outlined by Amartya Sen, is better able to respond to important empirically identifiable inequalities than its resource egalitarian alternative, as developed by Ronald Dworkin. Developing and expanding upon the often overlooked Dworkinian ‘principle of independence’, the article contends that resource egalitarianism is capable of identifying and responding to a complex set of (...) structural inequalities that remain outside the purview of the capability approach. Key Words: capability approach • Dworkin • egalitarianism • equality • gender inequalities • Sen. (shrink)

We are witnessing increasing use of the Internet, particular social media, to criticize (perceived or actual) moral failings and misdemeanors. This phenomenon of so-called ‘online public shaming’ could provide a powerful tool for reinforcing valuable social norms. But it also threatens unwarranted and severe punishments meted out by online mobs. This paper analyses the dangers associated with the informal enforcement of norms, drawing on Locke, but also highlights its promise, drawing on recent discussions of social norms. We then consider two (...) crucial conditions that online public shaming must meet in order to be justifiable: proportionality and accountability. We argue that these requirements are in fact frequently violated, rendering most cases of online public shaming unjustified. While the use of online public shaming against others’ vices has some apparent virtues, it is currently rarely justified, given its own vices. (shrink)

How should we make choices when we know so little about our futures? L. A. Paul argues that we must view life decisions as choices to make discoveries about the nature of experience. Her account of transformative experience holds that part of the value of living authentically is to experience our lives and preferences in whatever ways they evolve.

Social relationships are constructed by and through the relational communication that people exchange. Relational messages are implicit nonverbal and verbal messages that signal how people regard one another and define their interpersonal relationships—equal or unequal, affectionate or hostile, inclusive or exclusive, similar or dissimilar, and so forth. Such signals can be measured automatically by the latest machine learning software tools and combined into meaningful factors that represent the socioemotional expressions that constitute relational messages between people. Relational messages operate continuously on (...) a parallel track with verbal communication, implicitly telling interactants the current state of their relationship and how to interpret the verbal messages being exchanged. We report an investigation that explored how group members signal these implicit messages through multimodal behaviors measured by sensor data and linked to the socioemotional cognitions interpreted as relational messages. By use of a modified Brunswikian lens model, we predicted perceived relational messages of dominance, affection, involvement, composure, similarity and trust from automatically measured kinesic, vocalic and linguistic indicators. The relational messages in turn predicted the veracity of group members. The Brunswikian Lens Model offers a way to connect objective behaviors exhibited by social actors to the emotions and cognitions being perceived by other interactants and linking those perceptions to social outcomes. This method can be used to ascertain what behaviors and/or perceptions are associated with judgments of an actor’s veracity. Computerized measurements of behaviors and perceptions can replace manual measurements, significantly expediting analysis and drilling down to micro-level measurement in a previously unavailable manner. (shrink)

This paper defends a normative basis for entrepreneurial ventures, and draws the conclusion that any enterprise, insofar as it is reasonable, has in final analysis to be a (free) gift to promote good. Building on Herbert Simon's idea of "satisficing" and developing it in line with axiological insights of the new classical natural law theory, this paper makes the argument that a choice to proceed reasonably in any entrepreneurial venture will be guided by rationality that is bounded. Bounded rationality entails (...) that the various end-values or goals of the venture will be incommensurable, and this implies that (1) the enterprise need not be locked in on promoting merely one value, such as profits, and (2) a choice to aim at one or more goals will be a personal (free) gift, which is ethically valuable. This paper has appeared in Spanish translation as El don personal en las empresas sanas: racionalidad limitada, valores incommensurables y agencia economica in Revista Empresa y Humanismo, Vol. XI no. 1 (2008), pp. 67-88, published by the Institute for Business and Humanism, University of Navarra, Spain. Permission granted to reproduce/publish the original English version here and elsewhere. (shrink)

Publication date: 15 October 2018 Source: Author: Jude Nwafor Eze, Coleen Vogel, Philip Audu Ibrahim Flood is known to cause devastating livelihood impacts, suffering and economic damages. To reduce the impact of floods, it is very important to identify and understand the socio-economic factors that determine people’s ability to cope with stress or change. Consequently, the study assesses the social vulnerability of the households to floods in Niger State, in order to provide the empirical evidence necessary for flood adaptation (...) policies and strategies in the state. The data for the research were obtained from the household survey and Dartmouth Flood Observatory. The data obtained were analysed using descriptive and statistical analysis. The results show that flood events in the study area were caused by heavy rainfall, compounded by the opening of the Shiroro dam gate to release the excess flood in the reservoir. Moreover, results of Student “t” test and One-Way Analysis of Variance on socio-economic characteristics show that households’ major economic activities, educational status, household size, income distribution, and membership of cooperative society were significant at p 10, do not belong to cooperative society and earn less that N21000 per month have higher mean frequency, thus, the predominant households were, therefore, farmers, illiterate, have large family size, poor, and have no access to loan. Thus, the socio-economic characteristics of the households in the study area contribute to their vulnerability to floods by reducing their coping capacity. Based on the results of the assessment, it is recommended that measures are taken to mainstream flood adaptation into the development process. (shrink)

Dialogue is promoted by its supporters as a pluralising force capable of accommodating the moral disagreement inevitable in every sphere of human society, but this promise is widely and vehemently challenged. How are we to determine the principles upon which the dialogical exchange should take place? How should we think of ourselves as interlocutors? Should we associate dialogue with the desire for consensus? How should we determine decision-making? What are the gender dynamics of dialogical politics and how much do they (...) matter? This book brings together internationally recognised expert authors from the fields of political and social theory, political philosophy and international relations to consider these controversial questions anew from a range of theoretical positions. The differences of opinions and clashes of views make for a fascinating and highly informative read. (shrink)