This collection pays tribute to Jerome E. Bickenbach’s work that spans from philosophical and sociological issues to international legislation designed to support the rights of people with disabilities. Eight essays critically engage with Bickenbach’s work to further advance the discussions he has initiated throughout his career.

It has long been appreciated that the brain is oscillatory 1. Early measurements of brain electrophysiology revealed rhythmic synchronization unifying large swaths of the brain. The study of neural oscillation has enveloped cognitive neuroscience and neural systems. The traditional belief that oscillations are epiphenomenal of neuron spiking is being challenged by intracellular oscillations and the theoretical backing that oscillatory activity is fundamental to physics. Subjective experience oscillates at three particular frequency bands in a cognitive triad: perception at 5 Hz, (...) action at 2 Hz, and attention at 0.1 Hz. This triad functions as a means of information flow across scales of magnitude in a biological fractal. The _Homunculus Solution _is proposed in which mental experience occurs at fixed scales of biology. The mind is composed of minds, perceived as "the voices in your head." Each voice has voices inside its head to increasingly microscopic scales, forming an interactive fractal of subjective experience. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE. (shrink)

In this book, authors working with Deleuzean theories in educational research in Australia and the United Kingdom grapple with how the academic-writing machine might become less contained and bounded, and instead be used to free impulses to generate different creations and connections. The authors experiment with forms of writing that challenge the boundaries of academic language, moving beyond the strictures of the scientific method that governs and controls what works and what counts to make language vibrate with a new (...) intensity. The authors construct monstrous creations, full of vitality and fervor, hybrid texts, part academic part creative assemblages, almost-but-perhaps-not-quite recognisable as research. Stories that blur the lines between true and untrue, re-presentation and invention. The contributors to this book hope that something might happen in its reading; that some new connections might be made, but also acknowledge the contingency of the encounter between text and reader, and the impossibility of presuming to know what may be. (shrink)

Abstract:Although best known to English-speaking readers as the general editor of the Dictionary of Untranslatables, the work of French philologist and philosopher Barbara Cassin is eclectic, encompassing literary studies, ancient philosophy, rhetoric, translation theory, psychoanalysis, politics, and more. From Presocratic philosophy to more recent reflections on Big Tech and democracy, Cassin's work is rooted in "sophistics," an approach that emphasizes the primacy of language in shaping our interactions with the world. Situating this sophistical approach vis-à-vis classical philology (Bollack) and the (...) philosophical tradition (Heidegger, Derrida), this essay explores the contribution of "sophistical reading" to our understanding of philosophical and literary texts. Showing how Cassin uses rhetorical theory to problematize any simple opposition of the latter, the essay concludes with a critical evaluation of Cassin's reading of Helen, Euripides' most sophistical play. (shrink)

This book offers a detailed account of the importance of psychoanalysis in Derrida's thought. Based on close readings of texts from the whole of his career, including less well-known and previously unpublished material, it sheds new light on the crucial role of psychoanalysis in shaping Derrida's response to a number of key questions. These questions range from the psyche's relationship to technology to the role of fiction and metaphor in scientific discourse, from the relationship between memory and the archive to (...) the status of the political in deconstruction. Focusing on Freud but proposing new readings of texts by Lacan, Torok and Abraham, Laplanche and Pontalis, amongst other seminal figures in contemporary French thought, the book argues that Derrida's writings on psychoanalysis can also provide an important bridge between deconstruction and the recent materialist turn in the humanities. Challenging a still prevalent 'textualist' reading of Derrida's work, it explores the ongoing contribution of deconstruction and psychoanalysis to pressing issues in critical thought today, from the localizing models of the neurosciences and the omnipresence of digital technology to the politics of affect in an age of terror. (shrink)

Religion and science dialogues that orbit around rational method, knowledge, and truth are often, though not always, contentious. In this article, I suggest a different cluster of gravitational points around which religion and science dialogues might usefully travel: philosophical anthropology, ethics, and love. I propose seeing morality as a natural outgrowth of the human desire to establish and maintain social bonds so as not to experience the condition of being alone. Humans, of all animals, need to feel loved—defined as a (...) compassionate present-with in dynamic dyadic relation such that one experiences the sense of mattering—but that need has an equally natural tendency to be met by creating biased us-and-them distinctions. A “critical” natural ethics, then, is one in which we become aware of and work to undermine our tendency to reify in-group distinctions between “us” and “them.” Religious communities that work intentionally on this can be seen, to some extent, as laboratories of love—or as sites for co-creating knowledge in perilous times. (shrink)

Until recent times, the collection of Salomon Maimons early works written in Hebrew, Hesheq Shelomo, was not included into the scientific circulation. An article of professor Gideon Freudenthal on the formation of the young Maimon, filled this lacuna, proving the importance of the analysis of philosophers early works for the comprehension of his literary heritage in general. Freudenthal had studied and published Maimons introduction to Hesheq Shelomo, and then one of the collections treatises, Maаse Livnat (...) ha-Sаppir, consecrated to the ideas and notions of kabbalah. In his analysis Freudenthal had focused on Maimons rational interpretation of kabbalah. The present article represents an attempt to expand Freudenthals research, adding an analysis of another aspect of young Maimons thought. We will try to show that kabbalah, generally understood by early Maimon as ancient Jewish knowledge, had, according to the thinker, to complete philosophy and mitigate arising in it problems. In his early works Maimon was not only criticizing widely occurring profane kabbalah, but also Maimonides philosophy. According to Maimon, it is not possible to understand the true kabbalah without philosophy, but philosophical knowledge is not complete and often erroneous without kabbalah: the true kabbalah rectifies and adjusts it. The critic of Aristotelianism and its derivate, proposed by Maimon in his early works, can add clarity to the understanding of the development of his philosophical thought in the late period. (shrink)

This paper compares the associative system of early-learned verbs and body parts in Hebrew with previously published data on American English (Maouene, Josita, Shohei Hidaka & Linda B. Smith. 2008. Body parts and early-learned verbs. Cognitive Science 32(7). 1200–1216). Following the methodology of the former study, 51 Hebrew-speaking college students gave the first body part that came to mind for each of 103 early-learned Hebrew verbs, 81 of which were translational equivalents. Rate of convergence (...) and divergence and underlying patterns were used to make inferences about the constraints at work. Overall convergence (92.3% of the Hebrew data and 93.7% of the English data) reveal similar entropy levels, comparable semantic field shapes of verbs organized by body parts and similar general cluster patterns of verbs by body parts. Most divergence lies in the infrequent responses (offered fewer than 1% of the time) which arise around body parts that are internal, very detailed, very general categorically, used in figurative language, uniquely provided and tend to be subject to cultural taboos. This is a new contribution, as previous work has not quantified the relative proportion of convergent to divergent associations. We discuss how these findings support neural and developmental continuity and stability in the verbal system with respect to the categorization of verbs by body parts cross-culturally. (shrink)

This article presents evidence supporting the claim that ethical reasoning is a skill that can be taught and assessed. We propose a working definition of ethical reasoning as 1) the ability to identify, analyze, and weigh moral aspects of a particular situation, and 2) to make decisions that are informed and warranted by the moral investigation. The evidence consists of a description of an ethical reasoning education program—Ethical Reasoning in Action —designed to increase ethical reasoning skills in a variety of (...) situations and areas of life. ERiA is housed at a public, major comprehensive U.S. university—James Madison University—and assessment of the program focuses on interventions delivered prior to and during orientation for incoming first-year students. Findings indicate that the interventions measurably enhance the ability of undergraduate students to reason ethically. ERiA’s competency-targeted program and positive student learning outcomes offers a promising model for higher education ethics programs seeking to connect classroom learning in ethics to decision-making in everyday life. (shrink)

Background While it is generally acknowledged that self-prescribing among physicians poses some risk, research finds such behaviour to be common and in certain cases accepted by the medical community. Largely absent from the literature is knowledge about other activities doctors perform for their own medical care or for the informal treatment of family and friends. This study examined the variety, frequency and association of behaviours doctors report providing informally. Informal care included prescriptions, as well as any other type of personal (...) medical treatment (eg, monitoring chronic or serious conditions). Method A survey was sent to 2500 randomly-selected physicians in Colorado, 600 individuals returned questionnaires with usable data. The authors hypothesised: (1) physicians would prescribe the same types of treatment at home as they prescribed professionally; and (2) physicians who informally prescribed addictive medications would be more likely to engage in other types of informal medical care. Results Physicians who wrote prescriptions for antibiotics, psychotropics and opioids at work were more likely to prescribe these medications at home. Those prescribing addictive drugs outside of the office treated more serious illnesses in emergency situations, more chronic conditions and more major medical/surgical conditions informally than did those not routinely prescribing addictive medications. Physicians reported a variety of informal care behaviour and high frequency of informal care to family and friends. Discussion The frequency and variety of informal care reported in this study strongly argues for profession-wide discussion about ethical and guideline considerations for such behaviour. These areas are discussed in the paper. (shrink)

Can we talk meaningfully about God? The theological movement known as Grammatical Thomism affirms that religious language is nonsensical, because the reality of God is beyond our capacity for expression. Stephen Mulhall critically evaluates the claims of this movement to be a legitimate inheritor of Wittgenstein's philosophical methods as well as Aquinas's theological project. The major obstacle to this claim is that Grammatical Thomism makes the nonsensicality of religious language when applied to God a touchstone of Thomist insight, whereas 'nonsense' (...) is standardly taken to be solely a term of criticism in Wittgenstein's work. Mulhall argues that a place can be found in both his early work and his later writings for a more positive role to be assigned to nonsensical utterances--one which depends on exploiting an analogy between religious language and riddles. This allows us to see various ways in which his later work has a perfectionist dimension, and results in a radical reconception of the role of analogous usage in language, and in the relation between philosophy and theology. (shrink)

Can we talk meaningfully about God? The theological movement known as Grammatical Thomism affirms that religious language is nonsensical, because the reality of God is beyond our capacity for expression. Stephen Mulhall critically evaluates the claims of this movement (as exemplified in the work of Herbert McCabe and David Burrell) to be a legitimate inheritor of Wittgenstein's philosophical methods as well as Aquinas's theological project. The major obstacle to this claim is that Grammatical Thomism makes the nonsensicality of religious language (...) when applied to God a touchstone of Thomist insight, whereas 'nonsense' is standardly taken to be solely a term of criticism in Wittgenstein's work. Mulhall argues that, if Wittgenstein is read in the terms provided by the work of Cora Diamond and Stanley Cavell, then a place can be found in both his early work and his later writings for a more positive role to be assigned to nonsensical utterances--one which depends on exploiting an analogy between religious language and riddles. And once this alignment between Wittgenstein and Aquinas is established, it also allows us to see various ways in which his later work has a perfectionist dimension--in that it overlaps with the concerns of moral perfectionism, and in that it attributes great philosophical significance to what theology and philosophy have traditionally called 'perfections' and 'transcendentals', particularly concepts such as Being, Truth, and Unity or Oneness. This results in a radical reconception of the role of analogous usage in language, and so in the relation between philosophy and theology. (shrink)

This Article discusses the first steps of Israeli copyright law, dating it back to Ottoman times, which is earlier than thus far discussed in the literature. The account provides an early case of legal globalization through colonialism. The imposition of copyright law in Palestine enables us to observe the difficulties of applying an uninvited legal transplant and to trace its dynamics. The discussion queries the fate of copyright law in Mandate Palestine from two perspectives. First, the Colonial-Imperial point of (...) view: I ask why the British government imposed copyright law in the newly administered territory only a month after the establishment of the civil administration in 1920 and then replaced it in 1924. The answers are to be found in the general imperial agenda, its Palestine agenda, as well as the nature of copyright and the personal background of those involved. Second, from the local point of view, I trace the first steps of copyright law within the Hebrew community and especially within the literary circle in the 1920s. The local needs of the literary field concerned the author-publisher relationship, attribution, the integrity of the work and international transactions. However, the answers to these problems were not found in the law but rather in private ordering, namely contracts and social norms. (shrink)

Paul Russell begins his book by rightly noting, “almost all commentators over the past two and a half centuries have agreed that Hume’s intentions in the Treatise should be interpreted in terms of two general themes: skepticism and naturalism” (vii). The skeptical reading interprets Hume’s principal aim as showing that “our ‘common sense beliefs’ (e.g. belief in causality, independent existence of bodies, in the self, etc.) lack any foundation in reason” (4). The naturalist reading interprets Hume’s aims according to the (...) “science of man,” derived from experience and observation. As described in the Introduction to the Treatise, this science is meant to explain the “principles of human nature” and thereby put the other sciences “on a foundation entirely new, and the only one upon which they can stand with any security.” The “riddle” of the Treatise is how to understand the relationship between the skeptical and naturalistic dimensions of the work—dimensions that “seem to be equally essential to what [Hume] is trying to achieve,” but which nevertheless appear “inherently opposed and irreconcilable” (7). Russell puts forward a novel and challenging solution. He argues that the relationship of the skepticism and naturalism in the Treatise can be made intelligible when we see that “it is problems of religion broadly conceived, that hold the contents of the Treatise together as a unified work” (viii). “More specifically,” he goes on, “the direction and structure of Hume’s thought in the Treatise is shaped on one side by his attack on the Christian metaphysics and morals and on the other by his efforts to construct in its place a secular, scientific account of morality.” ...It is difficult to do justice in such a short review to the sophistication of Russell’s analyses. To take one of many examples, Russell explains how Hume’s theory of ideas, rather than something simply adopted from Locke and Berkeley, instead follows Hobbes and expresses irreligious intentions by defending skepticism about our knowledge of God. Russell shows how religious thinkers tried to respond to the claim made by Hobbes that we have no idea of God. Either they insisted that we have knowledge of God through reason rather than through the senses, or they defended the view that our idea of God comes from analogy with ideas of ourselves and of nature. Hume is largely silent about our idea of God, but it is clear, as Russell argues, that he is aware of these debates and that his theory knowingly undermines claims by religious thinkers to possess knowledge of God. We have no simple impressions from which we can derive the idea of God, nor do we have ideas of the divine attributes (power, unity, intelligence, etc.) sufficient to provide us with a clear idea of the divinity. ..... Any criticisms of The Riddle of Hume’s Treatise, however, must be placed within the broader take-away: this book is a triumph and a model for work in the history of philosophy. It offers a powerful reading of the Treatise and of Hume’s intentions in writing it, while also correct- ing common misunderstandings about Hume’s place in early modern thought. It deserves to be read by anyone interested in Hume or in early modern philosophy. (shrink)

During the excavations of 1924–5 at Karanis a papyrus of the second or early third century A.D. was discovered, and subsequently published by J. G. Winter , which under its single column has a subscribed title which should almost certainly be restored as ‘Alcidamas, On Homer’. The first fourteen lines of the papyrus give most of the story of Homer's death and the riddle that caused it, which is common to all the extant Lives of Homer; the remainder is (...) a general eulogy of Homer and a profession of transmitting his works to posterity. The interest of the discovery lies in the knowledge that it gives of a hitherto unrecorded work by Alcidamas, the rhetorician and contemporary of Isocrates, and the new fuel that it provides for an old controversy about the origins of the work known as the Certamen. The first part of this article aims at both re-examining the value of the papyrus and reopening some of the old questions on the Certamen. (shrink)

Volume 4 of’ “The Early Works” series covers the period of Dewey’s last year and one-half at the University of Michigan and his first half-year at the University of Chicago. In addition to sixteen articles the present volume contains Dewey’s reviews of six books and three articles, verbatim reports of three oral statements made by Dewey, and a full-length book, The Study of Ethics. Like its predecessors in this series, this volume presents a “clear text,” free of interpretive (...) or reference material. Apparatus, including references, corrections, and emendations, is confined to appendix material. Fredson Bowers, the Consulting Textual Editor, has provided an essay on the textual principles and procedures, and Wayne A. R. Leys, Professor of Philosophy at Southern Illinois University, has written an Introduction discussing the relationship between Dewey’s writings of this period and his later work. That Dewey’s scholarship and writing was at an especially high level during 1893 and 1894 may be considered an index to the significance of this two-year period. (shrink)

During the excavations of 1924–5 at Karanis a papyrus of the second or early third century A.D. was discovered, and subsequently published by J. G. Winter, which under its single column has a subscribed title which should almost certainly be restored as ‘Alcidamas, On Homer’. The first fourteen lines of the papyrus give most of the story of Homer's death and the riddle that caused it, which is common to all the extant Lives of Homer; the remainder is a (...) general eulogy of Homer and a profession of transmitting his works to posterity. The interest of the discovery lies in the knowledge that it gives of a hitherto unrecorded work by Alcidamas, the rhetorician and contemporary of Isocrates, and the new fuel that it provides for an old controversy about the origins of the work known as the Certamen. The first part of this article aims at both re-examining the value of the papyrus and reopening some of the old questions on the Certamen. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.2 (2003) 269-270 [Access article in PDF] Steven Harvey, editor. The Medieval Hebrew Encyclopedias of Science and Philosophy: Proceedings of the Bar-Ilan University Conference. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2000. Pp. xi + 547. Cloth, $239.00. This fine volume, covering the proceedings of a conference at Bar-Ilan University (January, 1998), is the first book devoted to the medieval Hebrew encyclopedias of science and philosophy. (...) According to the editor, the talks at the conference "were arranged to fit together like a jigsaw puzzle," and that intention is also reflected in the current volume: It is extremely well-organized, the earlier essays provide useful background for the later ones, and the various parts of the book complement each other quite well. Though they contain much that is highly technical, the editor has succeeded in making the essays comprehensible to the non-specialist, as was his declared intention. [End Page 269]The editor's introductory essay draws the book together and makes it a coherent whole. The most important part of that essay raises the conceptual problem underlying the entire book, namely: what defines a medieval encyclopedia? The contributors do not always agree on how to answer this question, nor should we expect such agreement. Some of their criteria are: an encyclopedia must treat a subject comprehensively; it must be well-enough organized to facilitate retrieval; it is meant to be consulted, not read cover-to-cover; it is usually an eclectic collection of previously extant material, not an original composition, and certainly not a major source for new ideas. Finally, an important goal of the encyclopedist is popular enlightenment.The book's first two sections deal with the predecessors of the medieval Hebrew encyclopedias, the medieval Latin and Arabic works. Only the latter had heavy influence on the structure and content of later Hebrew works. Nevertherless, the Islamic author who had the greatest influence by far on Jews during the age of the encyclopedias under discussion, namely Averroes, is judged by Butterworth (as well as by Biesterfeldt) not to be an encyclopedist at all. The basis for this judgment is that Averroes had no interest whatsoever in popular enlightenment; his books are not introductory, and nowhere does he address himself to anyone but the expert.Nevertheless, when it comes to Averroes, it would be prudent to honor the editor's admonition that we not be too demanding with our criteria for what constitutes a medieval encyclopedia. Perhaps the corpus of Averroes's works does not make him an encyclopedist, as the essays contend. But we should not lose sight of how his works were actually used by later Hebrew writers: their Hebrew translations were copied and paraphrased extensively as state-of-the-art presentations of science on nearly every important topic. In other words, even if Averroes himself did not have the intentions of an encyclopedist for his works, later authors mined them for informative essays as if they were encyclopedias.Part 3 deals with Early Hebrew Encyclopedias. Despite the volume's otherwise outstanding organization, Woolf's fine article on Maimonides' Mishneh Torah seems out of place here, since it is by no means an encyclopedia of science and philosophy.Part 4 deals with the structure and organization of the three thirteenth-century encyclopedias that are the focus of the volume: Judah ben Solomon ha-Cohen's Midrash ha-Hokhmah; Shem-Tov ibn Falaquera's De'ot ha-Filosofim; and Gershom ben Solomon's Sha'ar ha-Shamayim. The descriptive essays are extremely useful for getting a balanced picture of these books, but perhaps of even greater value are the content outlines, which include pagination from the manuscripts to make them easier to consult.The most fascinating section of the book by far, and the most likely to become a productive model for future research, is part 5, which analyzes specific topics within the encyclopedias. These essays trace scientific problems from Aristotle to the medieval Aristotelians, especially Averroes, and then examine how they are dealt with in the Hebrew... (shrink)

Volume 1 of The Early Works of John Dewey, 1882-1898 is entitled Early Essays and Leibniz's New Essays Concerning the Human Understanding, 1882-1888. Included here are all Dewey's earliest writings, from his first published article through his book on Leibniz. The materials in this volume provide a chronological record of Dewey's early development--beginning with the article he sent to the Journal of Speculative Philosophy in 1881 while he was a high-school teacher in Oil City, Pennsylvania, and (...) closing with his widely-acclaimed work on Leibniz in the Grigg's Series of German Philosophical Classics, written when he was an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan. During these years be-tween 1882 and 1888, Dewey's life course was established: he decided to follow a career in philosophy, completed doctoral studies at Johns Hopkins University, became an Instructor at the University of Michigan, was promoted to Assistant Professor, and accepted a position as Chairman of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota. With the publication of Psychology, he became well known among scholars in this country; a series of articles in the British journal Mind brought him prominence in British philosophical circles. His articles were abstracted in the Revue philosophique. None of the articles collected in this volume was reprinted during the author's lifetime. For the first time, it is now possible for Dewey scholars to study consecutively in one publication all the essays which originally appeared in many periodicals. (shrink)

This third volume in the definitive edition of Dewey's early work opens with his tribute to George Sylvester Morris, the former teacher who had brought Dewey to the University of Michigan. Morris's death in 1889 left vacant the Department of Philosophy chairmanship and led to Dewey's returning to fill that post after a year's stay at Minnesota. Appearing here, among all his writings from 1889 through 1892, are Dewey's earliest comprehensive statements on logic and his first book on ethics. (...) Dewey's marked copy of the galley-proof for his important article The Present Position of Logical Theory, recently discovered among the papers of the Open Court Publishing Company, is used as the basis for the text, making available for the first time his final changes and corrections. The textual studies that make The Early Works unique among American philosophical editions are reported in detail. One of these, A Note on Applied Psychology, documents the fact that Dewey did not co-author this book frequently attributed to him. Six brief unsigned articles written in 1891 for a University of Michigan student publication, the Inlander, have been identified as Dewey's and are also included in this volume. In both style and content, these articles reflect Dewey's conviction that philosophy should be used as a means of illuminating the contemporary scene; thus they add a new dimension to present knowledge of his early writing. (shrink)

This third volume in the definitive edition of Dewey's early work opens with his tribute to George Sylvester Morris, the former teacher who had brought Dewey to the University of Michigan.

This third volume in the definitive edition of Dewey's early work opens with his tribute to George Sylvester Morris, the former teacher who had brought Dewey to the University of Michigan. Morris's death in 1889 left vacant the Department of Philosophy chairmanship and led to Dewey's returning to fill that post after a year's stay at Minnesota. Appearing here, among all his writings from 1889 through 1892, are Dewey's earliest comprehensive statements on logic and his first book on ethics. (...) Dewey's marked copy of the galley-proof for his important article The Present Position of Logical Theory, recently discovered among the papers of the Open Court Publishing Company, is used as the basis for the text, making available for the first time his final changes and corrections. The textual studies that make The Early Works unique among American philosophical editions are reported in detail. One of these, A Note on Applied Psychology, documents the fact that Dewey did not co-author this book frequently attributed to him. Six brief unsigned articles written in 1891 for a University of Michigan student publication, the Inlander, have been identified as Dewey's and are also included in this volume. In both style and content, these articles reflect Dewey's conviction that philosophy should be used as a means of illuminating the contemporary scene; thus they add a new dimension to present knowledge of his early writing. (shrink)

This third volume in the definitive edition of Dewey's early work opens with his tribute to George Sylvester Morris, the former teacher who had brought Dewey to the University of Michigan. Morris's death in 1889 left vacant the Department of Philosophy chairmanship and led to Dewey's returning to fill that post after a year's stay at Minnesota. Appearing here, among all his writings from 1889 through 1892, are Dewey's earliest comprehensive statements on logic and his first book on ethics. (...) Dewey's marked copy of the galley-proof for his important article The Present Position of Logical Theory, recently discovered among the papers of the Open Court Publishing Company, is used as the basis for the text, making available for the first time his final changes and corrections. The textual studies that make The Early Works unique among American philosophical editions are reported in detail. One of these, A Note on Applied Psychology, documents the fact that Dewey did not co-author this book frequently attributed to him. Six brief unsigned articles written in 1891 for a University of Michigan student publication, the Inlander, have been identified as Dewey's and are also included in this volume. In both style and content, these articles reflect Dewey's conviction that philosophy should be used as a means of illuminating the contemporary scene; thus they add a new dimension to present knowledge of his early writing. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Naharaim Jahrgang: 9 Heft: 1-2 Seiten: 151-178.

The objective of this work is to investigate the philosophical anthropology that underpins the anthropology of the Early Christians. It is curious to know why Christian anthropology is intellectually and practically inclined towards the philosophical anthropology of the Platonic tradition rather than the theological-philosophical tradition of the biblical Hebrew people in the Old Testament. Today the emphasis on Christian anthropology is that the human person is an integration of body and soul. Contrary to this position, the writer maintains (...) that the Christian anthropology, especially during the period of the early Christians (here understood as the period within the first five centuries C.E.), fundamentally conceives the human person as a composite of soul and body, which is a conscious employment of Platonic anthropology. This article observes that, as regards the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead, there is a dichotomy between theological coherency and the actual Christian practice on the Christian conception of the human person. Hence, this work argues that the Platonic influence on the philosophical anthropology of the Early Christian was a deliberate act to give a more rational foundation to the theological problematic on the resurrection of the dead and on the resurrected body. It explains why Aquinas’s theological cum philosophical thinking, though overwhelmingly an Aristotelian ground, could not “Aristotelize” his philosophical anthropology. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper offers an account of the early career of Martha Kneale, née Hurst, and of the five papers she published between 1934 and 1950. One on metaphysical and logical necessity, from 1938, is particularly interesting. In it she considers the metaphysics of time and offers an explanation of ‘the necessity of the past’, which has some resemblance to Kripke’s ideas about metaphysical necessities, in that it assigns an important role to experience in how we come to know (...) them. But Kneale’s view is very different from Kripke’s, depending not on doctrines about rigid designation but rather on recognition of the failure of the atomist/empiricist account of ‘simple’ and ‘complex’ concepts. That account cannot deal with such things as the relations of the determinates of a determinable like colour. A plausible corollary of this, which Kneale exploits, is that some of our experience reveals to us that there are phenomena which are intrinsically complex in having multiple distinguishable aspects, but where those aspects are inseparable. Other of the papers show Kneale to have been pursuing interesting lines of thought about McTaggart’s argument against the reality of time and on the mind-body problem. (shrink)

The renowned Christian theologian Bernard Lonergan was also a professor, teaching courses on theological method at universities in Canada, the United States, and Italy. This volume records his lectures and teaching materials, thus preserving and elucidating his intellectual development between the publication of Insight in 1957 and Method in Theology in 1972. The present volume contains a record of the lectures delivered in 1962, 1964, and 1968. This is the most 'interactive' volume yet published in the Collected Works series. (...) The audio recordings of the 1962 and 1968 lectures are now available on the website www.bernardlonergan.com, as are PDF files of original papers from his 1964 institute at Georgetown. These lectures help to elucidate the development of Lonergan's ideas on such key notions as horizon, conversion, and meaning, as well as his evolving opinion on how best to divide theology into fields of specialization. (shrink)

In the latter part of the fifteenth century, a Jewish translator, working together with a Slavic amanuensis, translated into the East Slavic language of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania three medieval Hebrew translations of Arabic philosophical texts: the Logical Terminology, a short work on logic attributed to Maimonides (but probably by a different medieval Jewish author); and two sections of the Muslim theologian Al-Ghazali's famous Intentions of the Philosophers. Highlighting the unexpected role played by Jewish translators as agents of (...) cultural transmission in the heady messianic atmosphere leading up to the year 1492, these texts drew the attention of the Orthodox Church authorities as being in the possession of the enlightened heretical sect known as the Judaizers, which had emerged in Novgorod and spread to Moscow. Reflecting three and even four layers of translation, Prof. Moshe Taube's new triple-language critical edition of the Logika of the Judaizers displays the Slavic texts alongside the Hebrew translations on which they are based and accompanies them with a modern English translation. In his comprehensive introduction and commentary, Taube surveys earlier scholarly efforts to identify the provenance and purport of the translations, discusses the linguistic and textological issues raised by these early Ruthenian texts, puts forward the likely dissimilar motivations of the Jewish translator and the Christians who commissioned the work, and reveals the translator's probable identity. The present publication, a long-awaited desideratum, will be of interest not only to historians of the Great Duchy of Lithuania and of the principality of Muscovy, but also to scholars of Jewish history and of the history of philosophy and science, as well as to linguists studying the history of the Belorussian, Ukrainian and Russian languages. (shrink)

Freud is best remembered for two applied works on society, The Future of an Illusion and Civilization and its Discontents. Yet the works of the final period are routinely denigrated as merely supplemental to the earlier, more fundamental 'discoveries' of the unconscious and dream interpretation. In fact, the 'cultural Freud' is sometimes considered an embarrassment to psychoanalysis. Dufresne argues that the late Freud, as brilliant as ever, was actually revealing the true meaning of his life's work. And so (...) while The Future of an Illusion, Civilization and its Discontents, and his final work Moses and Monotheism may be embarrassing to some, they validate beliefs that Freud always held - including the psychobiology that provides the missing link between the individual psychology of the early period and the psychoanalysis of culture of the final period. The result is a lively, balanced, and scholarly defense of the late Freud that doubles as a major reassessment of psychoanalysis of interest to all readers of Freud. (shrink)

Avery’s et al. ’s 1944 paper provides the first direct evidence of DNA having gene-like properties and marks the beginning of a new phase in early molecular genetics (with a strong focus on chemistry and DNA). The study of its reception shows that on the whole, Avery’s results were immediately appreciated and motivated new research on transformation, the chemical nature of DNA’s biological specificity and bacteria genetics. It shows, too, that initial problems of transferring transformation to other systems and (...) prominent criticism of its results nurtured skepticism. Avery’s experiment was downplayed and neglected particularly by many of those scientists who worked in the new fields of biochemical and biophysical genetics, genetic phage, and TMV research. This was not due to the fact that the implications of the paper could not be connected to generally accepted knowledge. Contrary to a widespread belief, the assumed uniformity of DNA as opposed to proteins was not used as an argument against the validity of Avery’s et al.’s finding. The indifference rather reflected, among other things, the disciplinary gap between the chemically oriented microbiologists and the old and new geneticists who remained committed to genetic and physical methods (in particular x-ray studies) and clung to the assumption that proteins were the sole carriers of biological specificity. The responses to Avery’s et al.’s paper show how different research interests in the areas between microbiology, genetics, and biochemistry interacted with the prejudices, dogmas, individual farsightedness or short-sightedness, and scientific authority during a pivotal period of early molecular biology. (shrink)

In the past 250 years, David Hume probably had a greater impact on the field of philosophy of religion than any other single philosopher. He relentlessly attacked the standard proofs for God's existence, traditional notions of God's nature and divine governance, the connection between morality and religion, and the rationality of belief in miracles. He also advanced radical theories of the origin of religious ideas, grounding such notions in human psychology rather than in divine reality. In the last decade of (...) his life Hume wrote 'I cou'd cover the Floor of a large Room with Books and Pamphlets wrote against me'. Indeed, most of these targeted his writings on religion. This, the third part of the Early Responses to Hume series, and perhaps the most eagerly awaited, collects responses to Hume's writings on religion published during his life, namely, 'Of Miracles', 'Of a Particular Providence and a Future State', The Natural History of Religion , and the posthumously published works Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion , 'Of Suicide' and 'Of the Immortality of the Soul'. The set covers a wide range of the replies Hume's writings provoked, including contributions by Philip Skelton, William Adams, Thomas Rutherforth, William Warburton, Anthony Ellys, John Douglas, John Leland, Thomas Stona, Voltaire, George Campbell, Herman Andrew Pistorius, Duncan Shaw, William Samuel Powell, Thomas Hayter, Joseph Milner, William Paley, Charles Moore, Richard Joseph Sulivan, John Hey, Samuel Vince, Lord Brougham and Thomas De Quincey. (shrink)

The objective of this work is to investigate the philosophical anthropology that underpins the anthropology of the Early Christians. It is curious to know why Christian anthropology is intellectually and practically inclined towards the philosophical anthropology of the Platonic tradition rather than the theological-philosophical tradition of the biblical Hebrew people in the Old Testament. Today the emphasis on Christian anthropology is that the human person is an integration of body and soul. Contrary to this position, the writer maintains (...) that the Christian anthropology, especially during the period of the early Christians, fundamentally conceives the human person as a composite of soul and body, which is a conscious employment of Platonic anthropology. This article observes that, as regards the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead, there is a dichotomy between theological coherency and the actual Christian practice on the Christian conception of the human person. Hence, this work argues that the Platonic influence on the philosophical anthropology of the Early Christian was a deliberate act to give a more rational foundation to the theological problematic on the resurrection of the dead and on the resurrected body. It explains why Aquinas’s theological cum philosophical thinking, though overwhelmingly an Aristotelian ground, could not “Aristotelize” his philosophical anthropology. (shrink)

At the end of the fifteenth century, the Castilian-Aragonian Eli Habilio wrote what is now the only extant, complete, and original Hebrew commentary on the entire Metaphysics of Aristotle. This commentary is short, about 15 folio pages long, and consists almost entirely of quotations from Averroes’ Middle Commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics in the early fourteenth-century translation of Qalonimos ben Qalonimos. Yet Habilio elsewhere expresses only disdain for Averroes and hopes that Jews will turn away from Averroes to read (...) Scotus’ metaphysical works instead. The author’s claim is that Habilio’s Commentary is intended to supplement his translation of Antonius Andreas’ questions on the Metaphysics and provide a Hebrew summary of the most read Hebrew version of the Metaphysics that would choose its words in such a way as not to contradict Scotus and in some cases even to encourage its readers to seek out a Scotist approach. (shrink)

Alain Badiou’s elaboration of a subject faithful to an event is commonly known today in the academic world and beyond. However, his first systematic account of the subject was already published in 1982 and did not mention the ‘event’ at all. Therefore, this article aims at tracing back both the structural and the historical conditions that directed Badiou’s elaboration of the subject in the early work up until the publication of L’Être et l’Événément in 1988. On the one hand, (...) it investigates to what extent the Badiouan subject can be considered an exceptional product of the formalist project of the Cahiers pour l’Analyse as instigated by psychoanalytical discourse and a certain Marxist discourse insofar as both were centered upon a theory of the subject. On the other hand, this article examines the radical political implications of this subject insofar as Badiou has directed his philosophical aims towards the political field as a direct consequence of the events of May ’68. (shrink)

The renowned Christian theologian Bernard Lonergan was also a professor, teaching courses on theological method at universities in Canada, the United States, and Italy. This volume records his lectures and teaching materials, thus preserving and elucidating his intellectual development between the publication of Insight in 1957 and Method in Theology in 1972. The present volume contains a record of the lectures delivered in 1962 (Regis College, Toronto), 1964 (Georgetown University), and 1968 (Boston College). This is the most 'interactive' volume yet (...) published in the Collected Works series. The audio recordings of the 1962 and 1968 lectures are now available on the website www.bernardlonergan.com, as are PDF files of original papers from his 1964 institute at Georgetown. These lectures help to elucidate the development of Lonergan's ideas on such key notions as horizon, conversion, and meaning, as well as his evolving opinion on how best to divide theology into fields of specialization. (shrink)

Because the paperback edition of Dewey’s early works places within easy reach those writings in which he was coming to terms with the foundational issues of his philosophical methodology, it should stimulate the much needed examination of the underpinnings of the later, more popular expressions of his thought. Dewey’s basic ideas grew and changed form many times over his long career, yet there are unifying themes and standpoints which are more rigorously expressed in the early works, (...) and without an understanding of which the reader of later Dewian [[sic]] epistemology is likely to be either hopelessly lost or think himself to be floating on a sea of ungrounded opinion. Two connecting themes which span the breadth of his writing career are worthy of special comment: the first since it helps to locate the center and tie together the periphery of Dewey’s many faceted work, and the second because it is a lingering and unexpressed presupposition of his later metaphysical work. (shrink)

Through reading the early work of Walter Benjamin—up to and including the Trauerspiel, author Monad Rrenban elicits a cohesive conception of the wild, inforgettable form, philosophy, as inherent in everything. This book, distinct in its analysis and depth of analysis, elaborates the wild, unforgettable form—philosophy in relation to language, the discipline and the practice of philosophy, criticism, and the politics of death.

Freud was interested in the problem of memory from the time of his very early works. The processes taking place in memory, imaging, remembering and forgetting images focused his attention and were one of the pillars of shaping his conception of the unconscious and mind as “the storehouse of total memory,” which in one of his works he compared to “the Eternal City of Rome”, which accumulate images-memories gathered throughout life. Shifts, changes, deformations, strong emotional components determine (...) the specificity of many processes of remembering and forgetting, a specific “coding” of information in the form of visual, acoustic and other images. Nowadays, there are indications of Freud’s views in various dimensions of scientific research on memory and the consciousness of the importance of these approaches in our culture and its discovery of the role of autobiographical memory. (shrink)

Through reading the early work of Walter Benjamin—up to and including the Trauerspiel, author Monad Rrenban elicits a cohesive conception of the wild, inforgettable form, philosophy, as inherent in everything. This book, distinct in its analysis and depth of analysis, elaborates the wild, unforgettable form—philosophy in relation to language, the discipline and the practice of philosophy, criticism, and the politics of death.

Samuel Alexander was a central figure of the new wave of realism that swept across the English-speaking world in the early twentieth century. His Space, Time, and Deity (1920a, 1920b) was taken to be the official statement of realism as a metaphysical system. But many historians of philosophy are quick to point out the idealist streak in Alexander’s thought. After all, as a student he was trained at Oxford in the late 1870s and early 1880s as British Idealism (...) was beginning to flourish. This naturally had some effect on his philosophical outlook and it is said that his early work is overtly idealist. In this paper I examine his neglected and understudied reactions to British Idealism in the 1880s. I argue that Alexander was not an idealist during this period and should not be considered as part of the British Idealist tradition, philosophically speaking. (shrink)

When discussing Wilfrid Sellars’s philosophy, very little work has been done to offer a developmental account of his systematic views. More often than not, Sellars’s complex views are presented in a systematic and holistic fashion that ignores any periodization of his work. I argue that there is a metaphilosophical shift in Sellars’s early philosophy that results in substantive changes to his conception of language, linguistic rules, and normativity. Specifically, I claim that Sellars’s shift from a formalist metaphilosophy to one (...) more closely aligned with psychology allows for the construction of a normative conception of language. My central claim is that without his abandonment of earlier metaphilosophical commitments, Sellars could not hold what I call an external conception of normativity. It is this move away from a formalist notion of philosophy that allows Sellars to construct a normative picture of language. I conclude that because this substantive shift in philosophical commitments results from changes in Sellars’s metaphilosophical views, there is insight to be found in a meticulous periodization of his work. (shrink)

The ArgumentIt is well known that theTractatusof Peter of Spain (later Pope John XXI) was one of the most popular logic textbooks in the Middle Ages and early Renaissance. Less known is theTractatus'sconsiderable reputation and diffusion among the Jews, as evidenced by five translations, two commentaries, and what appears to be anabbreviatio— if not of theTractatusitself, then of a similar work. The present article attempts to understand the phenomenon of theTractatus'spopularity and offers an analysis of the three translations whose (...) authors are known — those by Shemaryah ha-Ikriti (Greece, early to mid-fourteenth century), Abraham Abigdor (late fourteenth century), and Judah b. Samuel Shalom (either Italy or Spain, mid-fifteenth century) — and their subsequent fate. The more popular versions of Abraham Abidgor and Judah Shalom provided Jewish students, many of whom would likely become physicians, with a grounding in logic comparable to that of their Christian counterparts. (shrink)