The question of the origins of the cult of the fourth century martyr, Demetrius of Thessalonica has been the focal point of hagiographical research since the first publication of his passions by the Bollandists in 1780. Since then there were the most divergent hypotheses put forward to explain the obscure beginnings of his Thessalonican basilica and his alleged connection to Sirmium and its martyred deacon, Demetrius. Different ideas and assumptions were proposed based on various arthistorical, archaeological and literary observations, or (...) sometimes relying only on national ideologies or even pure fantasy. However, there were no attempts made to put the whole problem into the wider context of the Illyrian hagiographic tradition and to make a detailed comparison between St Demetrius' cult and the afterlife of other Pannonian and Illyrian martyrs. In the present paper, then, after a critical analysis of the problem and its proposed solutions, a number of comparative case-studies will be carried out aiming to map the basic tendences of the afterlife of the martyrs of Late Antique Illyricum which presumably will help us to have a better view of the whole problem of the migration of the Illyrian martyrs and to provide a fresh solution for the origin and development of St Demetrius' cult. (shrink)

According to most medieval thinkers, whenever something causally acts on another thing, God also acts with it. Durand of St.-Pourçain, an early fourteenth-century Dominican philosopher, disagrees. This paper is about a fourteenth-century objection to Durand’s view, which I will call the Fiery Furnace Objection, as formulated by Durand’s contemporary, Peter of Palude. Although Peter of Palude is not usu- ally regarded as a particularly original thinker, this paper calls attention to one of his more interesting controversies with his fellow friar, (...) while it also clarifies how some medieval thinkers understood the broadly speaking Aristotelian conviction that causes and effects are necessarily related. (shrink)

The present text contains a critical edition of Peter of Palude’s question of divine concurrence, found in his Sentences commentary, book II, d. 1, q. 4. The question concerns whether God is immediately active in every action of a creature, and if yes, how we should understand this divine concurrence. Peter, just as elsewhere in his commentary, considers at length the opinions of other thinkers — especially those of Giles of Rome, Durand of St.-Pourçain, and Thomas Aquinas — and develops (...) his own answer as a response to theirs. Thus, while Giles maintained that God acts uniformly in every instance of natural causation just as the sun acts uniformly by giving the same light to everything, Peter (following Durand) argues that this is incompatible with the divine creation of multiple things. Second, while Durand maintained that God is only mediately active in the actions of creatures, Peter rejects this opinion because it cannot account for miracles contra naturam (such as the three young men in Nebuchadnezzar’s fire), and because he thinks that God’s immediate action follows from his immediate conservation of creatures. Third, Peter presents Aquinas’s position in detail, and defends it against Durand’s objections; according to this position, God immediately conserves and concurs with every creature, with an action that is numerically distinct from that of the secondary agent. Although as a result of his extensive borrowing, Peter’s text might not be regarded as immensely original, it provides an interesting case study of the Dominican reaction against Durand in the early 1300’s. (shrink)

According to theological consensus at least from the thirteenth century, at the End of Times our body will be resurrected and reunited with our soul. The resurrected body, although numerically identical to our present one, will be quite different: it will possess clarity, agility, subtility, and the inability to suffer. It is the last of these characteristics that will be of most concern in the present article. There are two reasons why impassibility presents a problem in the medieval framework. The (...) first has to do with how to characterize impassibility more precisely; the second arises because at first it may seem that impassibility is not metaphysically possible at all. The article will look at three attempts to tackle these problems: those of Thomas Aquinas, Durand of St.-Pourçain, and Peter of Palude. As the article aims to show, looking at how causal powers work on the New Earth may shed some light on how medieval thinkers thought they worked on the present one. (shrink)

For theological reasons, medieval thinkers maintained that sacraments “effect what they figure”—that is, they are more than mere signs of grace; and yet, they also maintained that they are not proper causes of grace in the way fire is the proper cause of heat. One way to reconcile these requirements is to explicate sacramental causation in terms of sine qua non causes, which were distinguished from accidental causes on the one hand, and from proper efficient causes on the other hand. (...) This article traces the development of this concept, as discussed in the context of the sacraments, from Scotus and Auriol, via Ockham and Peter of Ailly, to Gabriel Biel. It shows how the discussion, in its later stages, opened up concerns about occasionalism, offering thereby a case study of how particular theological issues led to metaphysical ones in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. (shrink)

In public debate GMPs are oftenreferred to as being unnatural or a violationof nature. Some people have serious moralconcerns about departures from what is natural.Others are concerned about potential risks tothe environment arising from the combination ofhereditary material moving across naturalboundaries and the limits of scientificforesight of long-term consequences. To addresssome of these concerns we propose that anadditional element in risk assessment based onthe concept of familiarity should beintroduced. The objective is to facilitatetransparency about uncertainties inherent inthe risk assessment of (...) the GMP. Familiarityconventionally involves data and experiencerelating to the plant species and the ecosystemin question. We would like to extend thisconcept to the molecular level of plantbreeding and suggest that GMP characteristicsshould be compared to a reference baselinedetermined by conventional breeding techniques.Three GMPs are ranked according to familiarityat the plant and ecosystem level and themolecular level. The approach may help tointegrate discussion of the scientificarguments and moral questions raised in thedebate about GMOs by providing an operationalscheme within which moral concerns are broughtwithin the framework of science-based riskassessment. (shrink)

It is argued that causal understanding originates in experiences of acting on objects. Such experiences have consistent features that can be used as clues to causal identification and judgment. These are singular clues, meaning that they can be detected in single instances. A catalog of 14 singular clues is proposed. The clues function as heuristics for generating causal judgments under uncertainty and are a pervasive source of bias in causal judgment. More sophisticated clues such as mechanism clues and repeated interventions (...) are derived from the 14. Research on the use of empirical information and conditional probabilities to identify causes has used scenarios in which several of the clues are present, and the use of empirical association information for causal judgment depends on the presence of singular clues. It is the singular clues and their origin that are basic to causal understanding, not multiple instance clues such as empirical association, contingency, and conditional probabilities. (shrink)

Berkeley’s likeness principle is the claim that “an idea can be like nothing but an idea”. The likeness principle is intended to undermine representationalism: the view (that Berkeley attributes to thinkers like Descartes and Locke) that all human knowledge is mediated by ideas in the mind which represent material objects. Yet, Berkeley appears to leave the likeness principle unargued for. This has led to several attempts to explain why Berkeley accepts it. In contrast to ‘metaphysical’ and ‘epistemological’ interpretations available in (...) the literature, in this paper I defend a ‘conceptual’ interpretation. I argue that Berkeley accepts the likeness principle on the basis of (i) his commitment to the transparency of ideas, and (ii) his account of resemblance which he sets out in his works on vision. Thus, I provide an explanation for Berkeley’s reasons for accepting the likeness principle which, appropriately, focuses on his views concerning ideas and likeness. (shrink)

This empirical paper examines individual-level cognitive factors associated with developing an orientation to sustainable development issues among a population of business practitioners from France. Across two studies, we survey 180 financial managers and 83 finance students, as well as 144 managers from other business disciplines and 117 non-finance business students. We consider ability and motivation variables integrated and adapted into a cognitive elaboration model for sustainable decision making. Specifically, we examine the degree of influence of two factors on the ethical (...) sensitivity to sustainability: the moral maturity of the individual, and the perceived moral intensity of a sustainability issue. Our investigation offers insights into how financial managers perceive the importance of sustainability for corporate strategy. (shrink)

In this important new book in the IPPP series, a group of leading thinkers in psychiatry, psychology, and philosophy offer alternative perspectives that address both the scientific and clinical aspects of psychiatric validation, emphasizing throughout their philosophical and historical considerations.

For thirty years, Peter Singer's Practical Ethics has been the classic introduction to applied ethics. For this third edition, the author has revised and updated all the chapters and added a new chapter addressing climate change, one of the most important ethical challenges of our generation. Some of the questions discussed in this book concern our daily lives. Is it ethical to buy luxuries when others do not have enough to eat? Should we buy meat from intensively reared animals? Am (...) I doing something wrong if my carbon footprint is above the global average? Other questions confront us as concerned citizens: equality and discrimination on the grounds of race or sex; abortion, the use of embryos for research and euthanasia; political violence and terrorism; and the preservation of our planet's environment. This book's lucid style and provocative arguments make it an ideal text for university courses and for anyone willing to think about how she or he ought to live. (shrink)

In September 2008, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) scientists successfully switched on the historic biggest physics device, the Large ...

In my contribution to this Concise Collection on Margaret Cavendish, I focus on teaching Cavendish’s work in the context of philosophy (and, more specifically, Early Modern Philosophy). I have three aims. First, to explain why teaching women from philosophy’s history is crucially important to the discipline. Second, to outline my own reflections on teaching Cavendish’s philosophy. Third, to defend a specific claim about the benefits of teaching Cavendish to philosophy students; namely, that introducing biographical detail alongside philosophical ideas enriches the (...) learning experience. (shrink)

Margaret Macdonald was at the institutional heart of analytic philosophy in Britain in the mid-twentieth century. Yet, her views on the nature of philosophical theories diverge quite considerably from those of many of her contemporaries. In this paper, I focus on her 1953 article ‘Linguistic Philosophy and Perception’, a provocative paper in which Macdonald argues that the value of philosophical theories is more akin to that of poetry or art than science or mathematics. I do so for two reasons. First, (...) because it reveals just how far Macdonald’s meta- philosophical views diverged from those of many of her contemporaries. Second, because the discussion in LPP pre-empts recent literature on the nature of philosophical inquiry and the efficacy of philosophical arguments. Indeed, Macdonald’s paper is just as likely to provoke discussion today as it was in the 1950s. (shrink)

This paper provides a philosophical evaluation of the concept of handedness prevalent but largely unspoken in the scientific literature. This literature defines handedness as the preference or ability to use one hand rather than the other across a range of common activities. Using the philosophical discipline of phenomenology, I articulate and critique this conceptualization of handedness. Phenomenology shows defining a concept of handedness by focusing on hand use leads to a right hand biased concept. I argue further that a phenomenological (...) model based in spatial orientation rather than hand use provides a more inclusive concept of handedness. (shrink)

William Molyneux was born in Dublin, studied in Trinity College Dublin, and was a founding member of the Dublin Philosophical Society (DPS), Ireland’s counterpart to the Royal Society in London. He was a central figure in the Irish intellectual milieu during the Early Modern period and – along with George Berkeley and Edmund Burke – is one of the best-known thinkers to have come out of that context and out of Irish thought more generally. In 1688, when Molyneux wrote the (...) letter to Locke in which he posed the now famous question about a man born blind made to see, he was an active member of the DPS and was on familiar terms with several other key figures in Irish philosophy at the time. For the most part, Irish thinkers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries answered “no” to Molyneux’s question of whether a blind man made to see could distinguish, by sight alone, between a cube and a sphere. (shrink)

Prospect Theory: For Risk and Ambiguity, provides a comprehensive and accessible textbook treatment of the way decisions are made both when we have the statistical probabilities associated with uncertain future events and when we lack them. The book presents models, primarily prospect theory, that are both tractable and psychologically realistic. A method of presentation is chosen that makes the empirical meaning of each theoretical model completely transparent. Prospect theory has many applications in a wide variety of disciplines. The material in (...) the book has been carefully organized to allow readers to select pathways through the book relevant to their own interests. With numerous exercises and worked examples, the book is ideally suited to the needs of students taking courses in decision theory in economics, mathematics, finance, psychology, management science, health, computer science, Bayesian statistics, and engineering. (shrink)

Through a detailed account of the history of online chat devices, this article shows the emergence, over time, of two distinct interactional formats underlying these social media. They may be captured by two generic metaphors of synchrony: conference (a gathering in a virtual place where unfocused interactions and group sociability occur) and copresence (where practices are centered on the sustainment of contact between individuals who know each other). Internet Relay Chat (IRC) appears as the archetype of the conference format. This (...) notion of chat involves the existence of a relatively persistent shared space—conjured up by various specific metaphors: room, channel, and so on—inside which users get together and through which they are able to find other users, with whom they may weave electronic social ties that may possibly lead to offline relationships. The other format is associated with instant messaging (IM) devices, on the model of “ICQ” software. Although there seems to be a decline in interest for devices based on the former format, those based on the latter benefit from a growing popularity, possibly indicating deeper sociological implications. (shrink)

It is said that all philosophy is nothing other than a commentary on Plato.Maybe.But was not Plato himself a commentary on Parmenides, Heraclitus, the Pythagoreans, and the Sophists, not to mention Socrates?And conversely, too, the Commentary on Aristotle composed by St Thomas was not the personal philosophy of Thomas Aquinas? Or then again, do Proclus’ Commentarii in primum Euclidis Elementorum librum not embody a new and original neoplatonic philosophy of mathematics?

In his collection of anecdotes, Lives, Opinions, and Remarkable Sayings of the Most Famous Ancient Philosophers, Diogenes Laertius devotes a chapter to the life of Zeno of Elea. Zeno's reputation is based on his celebrated paradoxes, amply discussed by Aristotle: a moving body will never reach its (pre-defined) telos, since it first has to cover half (or more than half) the remaining distance; the faster will never catch up with the slower, since it first has to get to the point (...) from which the slower has just left. Zeno's style is laconic, like that of an Aesop fable. Maxima e minimis: there is no superfluous word. Everything needed to arrive at the conclusion is explicitly stated. (shrink)

In der genannten Epoche werden Grundentscheidungen gefällt, welche die Fundamentalfrage der Philosophie, die Seinsfrage, in die Krisis führen, in den Nihilismus unter ontologischem, metaphysischem, epistemologischem, axiologischem Aspekt. Den Extrempositionen der Systemdenker Hegel, Schopenhauer und Schelling erwachsen in den Hegelkritikern Feuerbach, Br. Bauer, Marx und Stirner Kontrapositionen, die das Wahrheitsproblem der Beliebigkeit unterstellen. Kierkegaard klagt unter existentiellem Aspekt das Problem der Wahrheit ein. Nietzsche überholt durch Abschaffung der Wahrheit alle Positionen,was seinen Standort in der europäischen Denkgeschichte ausmacht und als Ergebnis der (...) problemgeschichtlichen Analysen zu charakterisieren ist. Die Rückgewinnung des Vernunfthorizontes setzen erst die Problemdenker N. Hartmann und M. Heidegger ins Werk durch kritische Erneuerung der Seinsfrage. (shrink)

"This book is an augmented and updated translation by the author of Theorie des Subjekts: Subjectiviteat und Identiteat zwischen Moderne und Postmoderne, Teubingen, Francke-UTB, 2010 (3rd ed.)"--Title page verso.

In The Metaphysics of Margaret Cavendish and Anne Conway, Marcy P. Lascano holds up the metaphysical views of two early modern women philosophers alongside one another in order to demonstrate that...

For deliberations on the ethical and meta-ethical implications of Alfred North Whitehead's process philosophy, here are abstracts and papers from the Ethics Section of the 6th International Whitehead Conference held at the University of Salzburg in Salzburg, Austria in July 2006. In accordance with the conference schedule, there are three subsections. The subsection on "Metaphysics of Morals and Moral Theory" includes contributions from Franklin I. Gamwell (Does Morality Presuppose God?), John W. Lango (abstract only), Duane Voskuil ("Ethics' Dipolar Necessities and (...) Theistic Implications), and Theodore Walker Jr. ("Neoclassical Cosmology and Matthew 22:36-40). The subsection on "Evaluating Moral Practices" includes contributions from Frederick Ferrè (abstract only), Seung Gap Lee (Hope for the Earth: A Process Eschatological Eco-ethics for South Korea), Mary Elizabeth Mullino Moore (Compassion, Creativity, and Form: The Ethics of Institutions), and George W. Shields (Ruse, Altruism, and Process Philosophy). The subsection on "Ethics and Aesthetic Values" includes contributions from Stephen T. Franklin (abstract only), Brian G. Henning (Is There an Ethics of Creativity?), Mihàly Tòth (Art of Life and the Ethics of Life Forming), and Guorong Yang (Problems and Perspectives in the Emerging of Global Society). (shrink)

Pride is a status-related self-conscious emotion. The present study aimed to investigate the nature of status behind pridein four studies with using the two-facet model of pride, status maintenance strategies and with differentiating subjective social status (SSS) and objective social status (OSS). In Study 1 and 2 we used questionnaire methods with structural equation modeling (SEM) in order to identify the relationship patterns between SSS, OSS, status maintenance strategies and pride. In Study 3 and 4 we used vignette methods and (...) SEM to identify these links. All four studies gave evidence for the SSS  prestige status maintenance strategy  authentic pride relationship pattern. Similarly consistent result was found regarding the dominance status maintenance strategy  hubristic pride link. Depending on the assessment method (questionnaire vs. vignette) and the evaluative frame of reference (self vs. other), OSS was related to either authentic and hubristic pride, only hubristic pride, or neither of them. Based on these results, one thing can be taken for granted: pride is a subjective status-related emotion. However, the present results suggest that it is not necessarily true for objective social status. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The underlying cause of the financial meltdown was much more mundane than a “crisis of capitalism”: The real origins lay in mostly obscure housing, tax, and regulatory policies of the U.S. government. The Community Reinvestment Act, the affordable‐housing “mission” of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, penalty‐free refinancing of home loans, penalty‐free defaults on home loans, tax preferences for home‐equity borrowing, and reduced capital requirements for banks that held mortgages and mortgage‐backed securities combined with each other to create the incentives (...) for both subprime lending and the housing bubble that eventually led to the financial collapse. (shrink)