Introduction 1. Alexander in Modern Scholarship; The Present Translation The anti-Manichaean treatise of Alexander of Lycopolis has for a long time been...

This contribution aims at deconstructing a Christian master narrative that interprets Josephus as crucial support for the New Testament message that the Temple had to become a ruin, in line with the will of God. It argues for an alternative interpretation, namely that both Jesus of Nazareth and Josephus considered the Temple to be still relevant, albeit in different ways. For Jesus the Temple was the self-evident cultic centre of Judaism and a special place to experience his relationship with God. (...) None of Jesus’ statements about the Temple in their original context necessarily implies that Jesus assumed that the institution of the Temple would stop functioning in the near future or at the end of time. Josephus’s perspective on the Temple changes in his works. The elaborate description of Jerusalem and the Temple in War 5 reads as a written monument of the past, but several passages in Josephus’s Antiquities and Against Apion imply that the Temple was still important after 70 CE. Josephus may have reckoned with the possibility that the Temple was going to be rebuilt if the Romans allowed for it.This contribution is dedicated to Pieter G.R. de Villiers, a modest but sophisticated scholar and a good friend. (shrink)

"The fact that religions show internal variation and develop over time is not only a problem for believers, but has also long engaged scholars. This is especially true for the religions of the ancient world, where the mere idea of innovation in religious matters evoked notions of revolution and destruction. The present volume brings together articles that study this transformation, ranging from broad overviews to detailed case-studies."--BOOK JACKET.

Met als hoofdgedachte dat begrip voor het gevoel en het lijden van de mens centraal moet staan, geeft een psychiater zijn inzichten over de wetenschappelijke basis van de psycho-analyse en over de bestaande psychoanalytische theorieën.

Through a close reading of the opening pages of Occidental Eschatology, this paper analyzes how Jacob Taubes relied on Martin Heidegger’s philosophy to understand the nature of eschatology. Taubes implemented Heidegger’s notions of truth, error, and history from his seminal essay “On the Essence of Truth,” (mis)interpreting the essay by ascribing an eschatological meaning to it. This surprisingly allowed him to find in Heidegger a model to come to terms with the Jewish experience of history. In order to fully understand (...) this untimely use of Heidegger’s work, the paper turns its attention to the correspondence of Jacob Taubes with his first wife, Susan Taubes. The conclusion asks to what extent Jacob Taubes’s uncritical use of Heidegger’s thinking plays into the latter’s notorious antisemitism. (shrink)

In this article, I discuss manuscript material written by Petrus van Musschenbroek related to his first experiments with the Leiden jar. Despite the importance of the discovery of the Leiden jar for the history of electricity and the questions that still surround its discovery, a detailed treatment of this manuscript material is lacking in the literature. The main aim of this paper is to provide an outline of the manuscript material and to contextualize van Musschenbroek’s first experiments with the Leiden (...) jar. I show how the experiment fits within his research program on electricity and I discuss van Musschenbroek’s initial reactions to and analysis of the phenomenon. Before doing so, I first provide a short overview of the treatment of the early history of the Leiden jar in the secondary literature. After that, I discuss van Musschenbroek’s treatment of the topic of electricity in the textbooks he published in the years before the discovery of the device. Van Musschenbroek repeatedly emphasized that not enough experimental results were available for an informed theoretical treatment of the phenomenon of electricity to be possible. I then turn to the manuscript material, where I give a general description of the contents of the manuscript and van Musschenbroek’s experimental practice. The manuscript material further confirms recent work on the Leiden jar by Silva and Heering, and provides new insights into the way van Musschenbroek himself reacted to the discovery. (shrink)

Vladimir Putin’s legitimation of Russia’s brutal war of aggression against Ukraine raises questions about traditional understandings of nation and empire. Should we contrast the two in terms of values and practices? In this case, Putin uses both nationalist and Imperialist rhetoric to justify his actions. My essay questions how we understand nation and empire using the example of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. How did this empire develop laws, institutions and administrative practices to manage conflicts and claims around language use and nationalism? (...) How did Austria’s governments rule a multi-lingual, multi-confessional society effectively, without resorting to brutal policies of nationalization? When nationalist conflicts arose in different settings, how and why did they originate? I conclude that in European terms, Imperial Austria and even nationalist Hungary apparently managed daily-life issues around diverse language use and religious practice far more humanely and effectively than did the successor nation states after 1918. (shrink)

A concise yet rigorous introduction to logic and discrete mathematics. This book features a unique combination of comprehensive coverage of logic with a solid exposition of the most important fields of discrete mathematics, presenting material that has been tested and refined by the authors in university courses taught over more than a decade. The chapters on logic - propositional and first-order - provide a robust toolkit for logical reasoning, emphasizing the conceptual understanding of the language and the semantics of classical (...) logic as well as practical applications through the easy to understand and use deductive systems of Semantic Tableaux and Resolution. The chapters on set theory, number theory, combinatorics and graph theory combine the necessary minimum of theory with numerous examples and selected applications. Written in a clear and reader-friendly style, each section ends with an extensive set of exercises, most of them provided with complete solutions which are available in the accompanying solutions manual. Key Features: Suitable for a variety of courses for students in both Mathematics and Computer Science. Extensive, in-depth coverage of classical logic, combined with a solid exposition of a selection of the most important fields of discrete mathematics Concise, clear and uncluttered presentation with numerous examples. Covers some applications including cryptographic systems, discrete probability and network algorithms. Logic and Discrete Mathematics: A Concise Introduction is aimed mainly at undergraduate courses for students in mathematics and computer science, but the book will also be a valuable resource for graduate modules and for self-study. (shrink)

This article considers Ruth Millikan's relationship to Robert Brandom and most especially their common influence, Wilfrid Sellars.

William of Moerbeke was a prolific medieval translator of Aristotle and other ancient philosophical and scientific authors from Greek into Latin, and he played a decisive role in the acceptance of Aristotelian philosophy in the Latin world. He is often criticized for an allegedly deficient translation method. However, this book argues that his approach was a deliberate attempt to allow readers to reach the correct understanding of the source texts in accordance with the medieval view of the role of the (...) translator. William's project to make all genuine works of Aristotle - and also of other important authors from Antiquity - available in Latin is framed against the background of intellectual life in the 13th century, the deliberate policy of his Dominican order to reconcile Christian doctrine with worldly knowledge, and new trends in book production that influenced the spread of the new translations. William of Moerbeke's seemingly modest acts of translation started an intellectual revolution, the impact of which extended from the Middle Ages into the early modern era. The Friar and the Philosopher will appeal to researchers and students alike interested in Medieval perceptions of Aristotle, as well as other works from Antiquity. (shrink)

Essays on key moments in the intellectual history of the West This book forms a major contribution to the discussion on fate, providence and moral responsibility in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and Early Modern times. Through 37 original papers, renowned scholars from many different countries, as well as a number of young and promising researchers, write the history of the philosophical problems of freedom and determinism since its origins in pre-socratic philosophy up to the seventeenth century. The main focus points (...) are classic Antiquity (Plato and Aristotle), the Neoplatonic synthesis of late Antiquity (Plotinus, Proclus, Simplicius), and thirteenth-century scholasticism (Thomas Aquinas, Henry of Ghent). They do not only represent key moments in the intellectual history of the West, but are also the central figures and periods to which Carlos Steel, the dedicatary of this volume, has devoted his philosophical career. (shrink)

Preparing words in speech production is normally a fast and accurate process. We generate them two or three per second in fluent conversation; and overtly naming a clear picture of an object can easily be initiated within 600 msec after picture onset. The underlying process, however, is exceedingly complex. The theory reviewed in this target article analyzes this process as staged and feedforward. After a first stage of conceptual preparation, word generation proceeds through lexical selection, morphological and phonological encoding, phonetic (...) encoding, and articulation itself. In addition, the speaker exerts some degree of output control, by monitoring of self-produced internal and overt speech. The core of the theory, ranging from lexical selection to the initiation of phonetic encoding, is captured in a computational model, called WEAVER++. Both the theory and the computational model have been developed in interaction with reaction time experiments, particularly in picture naming or related word production paradigms, with the aim of accounting for the real-time processing in normal word production. A comprehensive review of theory, model, and experiments is presented. The model can handle some of the main observations in the domain of speech errors (the major empirical domain for most other theories of lexical access), and the theory opens new ways of approaching the cerebral organization of speech production by way of high-temporal-resolution imaging. (shrink)

Throughout more than two millennia philosophers adhered massively to ideal standards of scientific rationality going back ultimately to Aristotle’s Analytica posteriora. These standards got progressively shaped by and adapted to new scientific needs and tendencies. Nevertheless, a core of conditions capturing the fundamentals of what a proper science should look like remained remarkably constant all along. Call this cluster of conditions the Classical Model of Science. In this paper we will do two things. First of all, we will propose a (...) general and systematized account of the Classical Model of Science. Secondly, we will offer an analysis of the philosophical significance of this model at different historical junctures by giving an overview of the connections it has had with a number of important topics. The latter include the analytic-synthetic distinction, the axiomatic method, the hierarchical order of sciences and the status of logic as a science. Our claim is that particularly fruitful insights are gained by seeing themes such as these against the background of the Classical Model of Science. In an appendix we deal with the historiographical background of this model by considering the systematizations of Aristotle’s theory of science offered by Heinrich Scholz, and in his footsteps by Evert W. Beth. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Quine, the Dogmas, and Sellars The Transcendental Argument for Sense Impressions Are Sense Impressions Casually Idle? A Sideways‐On View from Nowhere Sensation and the Phenomenology of Perception Concluding Remarks Notes References.

Twaalf inheemse en religieuze leiders uit verschillende werelddelen spreken zich in dit boek uit over de heiligheid van de natuur. Hun eeuwenoude wijsheden inspireren ons om anders te gaan denken over onze omgang met alles wat leeft. Aan het woord komen de Groenlandse sjamaan Angakkorsuaq, de Amerikaanse indianenleider Chief Lane Jr., masaileider Mwarabu, de boeddhistische geestelijke Shih, de dichtende islamgeleerde Ur Rehman Chishti, orthodox rabbijn Slifkin, Maya-priester Sac Coyoy, hindoe-prins Jhala, Aztekenleider Sanchez, leider van de Canadese Bear Clan Wawatie, bisschop (...) Smeets van Roermond en theoloog Valerio van Rochester Cathedral. 0Oeroude natuurwijsheden uit alle streken! (shrink)

Throughout the twentieth century, German writers, philosophers, theologians, and historians turned to Gnosticism to make sense of the modern condition. While some saw this ancient Christian heresy as a way to rethink modernity, most German intellectuals questioned Gnosticism's return in a contemporary setting. In No Spiritual Investment in the World, Willem Styfhals explores the Gnostic worldview's enigmatic place in these discourses on modernity, presenting a comprehensive intellectual history of Gnosticism's role in postwar German thought. Establishing the German-Jewish philosopher Jacob (...) Taubes at the nexus of the debate, Styfhals traces how such figures as Hans Blumenberg, Hans Jonas, Eric Voegelin, Odo Marquard, and Gershom Scholem contended with Gnosticism and its tenets on evil and divine absence as metaphorical detours to address issues of cultural crisis, nihilism, and the legitimacy of the modern world. These concerns, he argues, centered on the difficulty of spiritual engagement in a world from which the divine has withdrawn. Reading Gnosticism against the backdrop of postwar German debates about secularization, political theology, and post-secularism, No Spiritual Investment in the World sheds new light on the historical contours of postwar German philosophy. (shrink)

Hassin recently proposed the “Yes It Can” (YIC) principle to describe the division of labor between conscious and unconscious processes in human cognition. According to this principle, unconscious processes can carry out every fundamental high-level cognitive function that conscious processes can perform. In our commentary, we argue that the author presents an overly idealized review of the literature in support of the YIC principle. Furthermore, we point out that the dissimilar trends observed in social and cognitive psychology, with respect to (...) published evidence of strong unconscious effects, can better be explained by the way how awareness is defined and measured in both research fields. Finally, we show that the experimental paradigm chosen by Hassin to rule out remaining objections against the YIC principle is unsuited to verify the new default notion that all high-level cognitive functions can unfold unconsciously. (shrink)

Joseph Butler als zedekundige beschouwd en gewaardeerd by Willem Hendrik Weeda. This book is a reproduction of the original book published in 1899 and may have some imperfections such as marks or hand-written notes.

This article has two general aims. It first of all critically reconsiders the empirical turn’s dismissal of transcendentalism in the philosophy of technology, in particular through the work of Ihde and Verbeek, and defends the continuing relevance of the notion of the transcencental in thinking about technology today, illustrating this mainly through a reading of Stiegler’s understanding of the human condition as a technical condition and his view of human (noetic) evolution as proceeding from a process of technical exteriorization. The (...) crucial issue that is missed by postphenomenology and the empirical turn is that technology itself in its empiricity occupies the (periodically changing) place of the transcendental. It thus fails to consider the transcendental operativity of technical artifacts within its own empiricist stance. Secondly, it argues for the continuing importance and usefulness of the idea of Technology with a capital T, equally discarded by the representatives of the empirical turn, in particular against the emerging backdrop of the Anthropocene as the age of decisive anthropogenic forcing of the planet and the growing dominance of what has recently been called the technosphere in Earth system science. With Stiegler I show that a proper, inherent dynamic of technology must be acknowledged historically, anthropologically, techno-evolutionarily as well as (techno)phenomenologically. I conclude by demonstrating that our time of planetary crisis summons us to redirect our attention to technology from the empirical to the transcendental, and from the micro-level to the macro-level again. (shrink)

Freedom is modernity's most important promise, but also its most controversial promise. No other concept has led to so many expectations, disappointments, changes, and destruction. This book examines German theologian and ethicist Wolfgang Huber's concept of "communicative freedom," which is proposed as a contribution to the debate on freedom within modernity. It is argued that communicative freedom integrates radically different understandings of freedom into one comprehensive concept. This concept allows for a constructive and critical affirmation of modernity. (Series: Theology in (...) the Public Square/Theologie in der Offentlichkeit - Vol. 3). (shrink)

Teaching is an important aspect of scientific practice. However, it has only recently become the subject of detailed historical and philosophical analyses. In this paper, I argue that Joseph Rouse’s philosophy of scientific practice has important implications for the study of scientific education. Rouse’s dynamic conception of scientific knowledge entails that education should occupy a central place in our analyses of scientific practices, as it is crucial in guaranteeing their temporal extension and sustenance. However, Rouse’s reconceptualization of scientific knowledge also (...) has implications for our understanding of scientific education itself. I will work out these implications, focussing on Rouse’s non-subject-centered account of scientific practices. More generally, I show how Rouse’s philosophy of science entails that the study of scientific education should take the form of an integrated history and philosophy of scientific education. (shrink)

While the concept of secularization is traditionally used to define the nature of modern culture, and sometimes to uncover the theological origins of secular modernity, its validity is being questioned ever more radically today. Genealogies of the Secular returns to the historical, intellectual, and philosophical roots of this concept in the twentieth-century German debates on religion and modernity, and presents a wide range of strategies that German thinkers have applied to apprehend the connection between religion and secularism. In fundamentally heterogeneous (...) ways, these strategies all developed "genealogies of the secular" by tracing modern phenomena back to their religious or theological roots. This book aims to disclose the complex prehistory of the contemporary debates on political theology and postsecularism, and to show how prominent thinkers continue this German tradition today. It explores and assesses the classic theories of secularization that are epitomized in Carl Schmitt's writings on political theology, but also addresses German philosophers whose work has been rarely associated with secularization, including Walter Benjamin, Ernst Cassirer, Martin Heidegger, Immanuel Kant, and Hannah Arendt. Attention is also paid to two thinkers whose role in these discourses has not been fully explored yet: Jacob Taubes and Jan Assmann. By introducing their thinking on religion, politics, and secularization, the book also makes two of their own key texts available to an English-language readership. (shrink)

Divided into eight sections, each with introductory essays, the selections offer rich and detailed insights into a diverse multinational philosophical landscape. Revealed in this pathbreaking work is the way in which traditional philosophical issues related to ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology, for instance, take on specific forms in Africa's postcolonial struggles. Much of its moral, political, and social philosophy is concerned with the turbulent processes of embracing modern identities while protecting ancient cultures.