The use of evidence in medicine is something we should continuously seek to improve. This book seeks to develop our understanding of evidence of mechanism in evaluating evidence in medicine, public health, and social care; and also offers tools to help implement improved assessment of evidence of mechanism in practice. In this way, the book offers a bridge between more theoretical and conceptual insights and worries about evidence of mechanism and practical means to fit the results into evidence assessment procedures.

We propose a multi-step evaluation schema designed to help procurement agencies and others to examine the ethical dimensions of autonomous systems to be applied in the security sector, including autonomous weapons systems.

In this article, we present results from a literature review of intrinsic, instrumental, and relational values of nature conducted for the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, as part of the Methodological Assessment of the Diverse Values and Valuations of Nature. We identify the most frequently recurring meanings in the heterogeneous use of different value types and their association with worldviews and other key concepts. From frequent uses, we determine a core meaning for each value type, which is (...) sufficiently inclusive to serve as an umbrella over different understandings in the literature and specific enough to help highlight its difference from the other types of values. Finally, we discuss convergences, overlapping areas, and fuzzy boundaries between different value types to facilitate dialogue, reduce misunderstandings, and improve the methods for valuation of nature's contributions to people, including ecosystem services, to inform policy and direct future research. © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Institute of Biological Sciences. (shrink)

L'articolo analizza alcune opere di Pietro Prini, noto studioso di Rosmini, sulla questione dell'essere.

The purpose of this article is twofold. First, on the basis of a re-examination of the sources and with new arguments, it discusses the meaning of a verse-fragment quoted anonymously by Servius ad Aen. 4.638 (Enn. Ann. Dub. Fr. V Sk. = Inc. 31 blänsdorf, p. 434 courtney), and supports the attribution of this fragment to Ennius’ “Annales”. Second, it demonstrates that this attribution is not undermined by the presence, in the fragment, of a parenthetical phrase that is “in apposition”, (...) a stylistic feature which, though commonly believed to date back to Virgil’s time, may, in fact, be also attested in another Ennian fragment from the “Annales” (Enn. Ann. 22 Sk.). (shrink)

Este artigo recorda os principais aspectos e motivações da Expedição Langsdorff, missão de reconhecimento do interior do Brasil iniciada em 1821, composta pelo cônsul russo barão Langsdorff, o pintor alemão Moritz Rugendas, Aimé-Adrien Taunay, Nicolas-Antoine Taunay, o polígrafo Hercules Florence e o especialista em mapas Néster G. Rubtsov. Busca diferenças entre esta expedição e iniciativas outras, a título de exemplo, as dos bandeirantes e jesuítas, bem como a expedição indigenista de Rondon, e propõe o aprofundamento das investiga­ções. Apresenta atributos (...) resgatados pela poesia brasileira contemporânea e elementos cons­titutivos da identidade cultural brasileira presentes na Expedição Langsdorff, os quais os auto­res sugerem ser relevantes para pesquisadores do tema e para a inserção do Brasil no contexto internacional político, diplomático e econômico nos tempos hodiernos. (shrink)

O artigo quer avaliar a presença das intuições religiosas de Dostoievski na escritura teológica do jovem Barth. Procuramos demonstrar os elementos fundamentais de sua trajetória teológica e, sobretudo, seu contato com Eduard Thurnysen, autor de uma obra sobre Dostoiévski, que exerceu uma influência determinante no horizonte hermenêutico que deu forma à postura teológica do Barth de Römerbrief, obra que instaurou uma negatividade desconstrutora de toda euforia religiosa do humanismo moderno. Partimos do pressuposto que Dostoievski determinou a intelligentsia religiosa do cristianismo (...) em proporções pouco explicitadas, e a obra do jovem Barth representou parte de uma reflexão teológica que encontrou no autor russo os fundamentos de um cristianismo trágico que emancipou-se das ilusões de uma auto-idolatria moderna e eclesiástica. Palavras-chave : Dostoiévski. Barth. Humanismo. Negatividade. Niilismo.This article aims to analizes the presence of Dostoievski's religious insights in the theological writing of the young Barth. We tried to demonstrate the key elements of his theological career and, especially, his contact with Eduardo Thurnysen, author of a book on Dostoievski, who exercised a decisive influence on the hermeneutical horizon that shaped the theological posture of Romerbrief' s Barth - a work that established a negativity that desconstructed all religious euphoria of modern humanism. We assumed that Dostoyevsky has determined a religious intelligenstsia of Christianity in proportions rarely made ​​explicit. The work of the young Barth represented part of a theological reflection which found in the Russian author the foundations of a tragic Christianity that has emancipated Barth from illusions of a modern and ecclesiastical self-idolatry Keywords : Dostoievsky. Barth. Humanism. Negativity. Nihilism. (shrink)

Introduzione: L'uomo alla scoperta di se stesso, di N. Fabro.--Realtà della condizione umana e valori morali; appunti per una antropologia attuale, di S. Misser.--Fede nella creazione ed evoluzionismo, di P. Smulders.--Il senso biologico della morale di San Paolo, di José-Maria Gonzalez-Ruiz.--Immagine umanistica dell'uomo, di J.P. van Praag.--L'etica della situazione, di E. Schillebeeckx.--Dossier Teilhard de Chardin: Introduzione, Teilhard de Chardin, o della fede nell'uomo, di F.V. Joannes. Destino cosmico e destino individuale dell'uomo, di A. Catemario. L'evoluzione spirituale del genere umano, di (...) P. Martini. La Persona nel fenomeno della socializzazione, di F. Russo. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Skeptical Selves: Empiricism and Modernity in the French NovelDaniel GordonSkeptical Selves: Empiricism and Modernity in the French Novel, by Elena Russo; 225 pp. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996, $35.00.Skeptical Selves explains how linguistic relativism has shaped French literature from the Enlightenment to the present. Elena Russo provides three cases: Prévost’s Histoire d’une Grecque moderne (1740), Constant’s Adolphe (1816), and des Forêts’s Le Bavard (1946). Her fascinating (...) scholarly goal is to portray the inexorable decline of the novel in a climate of ever growing doubt about the truthfulness of narration. Her remarkably ambitious philosophical goal is to save the novel by refuting skepticism!More precisely, Russo’s target is not every form of doubt but rather a specific current of French skeptical consciousness. In recent years, the representatives of this current have been Derrida and Blanchot. Its main feature is a denial of the correspondence notion of the language-truth relationship combined—paradoxically—with an intense nostalgia for a perfectly mimetic language that has allegedly been lost. The seemingly most radical critics of the sign, Russo claims, never overcome the perverse yearning for the very mimesis whose possibility they deny (p. 3).Russo is getting at an interesting distinction here, the distinction between epistemological modesty, which she upholds, and French skepticism, which she deplores. Epistemological modesty means the redefinition of truth according to some criterion other than perfect representation of the external world. French skepticism for her means the insistence on an absolute standard of mimetic reliability and a simultaneous denial that this standard can ever be reached. “Much of the language of negativity we have grown accustomed to in contemporary criticism rests upon the following syllogism: to know is to know directly and without mediation; this is not possible; therefore, the world is unknowable. Any conceptualization is ipso facto viewed as suspect, hence the flight towards nonverbal forms of expression, such as music and silence” (p. 13).After suggesting in her first chapter that French skepticism is a specific style of thought, not a final answer to our epistemological queries, Russo goes on to illustrate the impact of this skepticism on the novel. Prévost’s text, she observes, is one of the first novels built around the distorted point of view of a fallible [End Page 179] narrator. The narrator is the French ambassador to Constantinople who falls in love with a woman, Théophé, recently freed from a seraglio. Both his love and his comprehension are frustrated by the woman’s apparent simplicity and virtue. “Signs acquire a meaning opposite to their manifest one,” Russo notes. “It is precisely the discourse that should have made Théophé look credible that makes her appear suspicious. She is cunning and deceptive because she appears ‘naive’ and ‘innocent’; she is opaque because of her ‘simplicity’ and ‘openness’” (p. 42). The whole point of the novel is to show that we are imprisoned in subjectivity and there is no way out. For a time the narrator attempts to resolve his doubts regarding Théophé’s words by concentrating instead on her body. But here as well he can discover only ambiguity: nothing reveals clearly whether she is conquerable and whether she already has another lover.The novel ends with the unexplained death of Théophé, and Russo comments: “we are given the impression that, rather than ending his text, Prévost is ridding himself of an intractable problem” (p. 66). Artfully, the rest of the book helps us see that the tendency to thematize philosophical problems that have no solutions is intensified in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—to the point where not merely the ending of novels but novels themselves disappear. (Of course, Russo means not that people no longer write novels but that the genre has succeeded in diminishing its own stature by so frequently decrying the limits of language.)The chapter on Constant did not strike me as the strongest part of the book. The problem is due perhaps to the fact that Constant was a truly great thinker, a brilliant political theorist and philosopher of religion as well as a romantic novelist. One chapter does not... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:NECESSARY PROPOSITIONS AND THE SQUARE OF OPPOSITION MARK ROBERTS University of Rhode Island Kingston, Rhode Island IT IS COMMONPLACE to define contradictory, contrary, and subcontrary propositions in the following way: contradictory propositions cannot both be true and cannot both be false; contrary propositions cannot both be true but can both be false; and subcontrary propositions can both be true but cannot both be false. In his Introduction to Logic (...) 1 Irving Copi raises a problem with two of these definitions which he believes forces him to limit the range of propositions which can be used in the square of opposition. Since contrary propositions can both be false, but the falsity of a necessarily true proposition is not possible, a necessarily true proposition has no contrary. Therefore, only contingent propositions can be contraries. Subcontrary propositions can both be true, but the truth of a necessarily false proposition is not possible.2 This problem is rarely raised in other logic texts, but, it is interesting to note, it is mentioned by a number of neoscholastic philosophers, for example, P. Nicholas Russo,3 Rev. H. Grenier,4 1 Irving M. Copi, Introduction to Logic (New York: Macmillan, 1986), pp. 178-179. Copi first introduced this problem in the fifth edition of his work on the basis of an article by David H. Sanford entitled " Contraries and Subcontraries,'' Nous 2 (1968) : 95-96. Sanford argues that the most reasonable way to resolve the problem of necessary propositions is to assume that contingent propositions comprise the square of opposition. 2 Copi, pp. 178-179. 8 Nicholas Russo, Summa Philosophica (Boston: Apud Marlier et Socios, 1[;85), p. 23. 4 Henri Grenier, Thomistic Philosophy, Vol. I (Charlottetown, Canada: St. Dunstan's University, 1950), p. 69. 427 428 MARK ROBERTS G. Sanseverino,5 Jacques Maritain,6 F.-X. Maquart,7 P. Coffey,8 and others.9 (It is also mentioned by Bishop Whately.10 ) Each of these philosophers makes necessarily true or false propositions an exception to the definition of contrary and subcontrary propositions. The reason is they and Copi interpret the definitions of contrary and subcontrary propositions to mean that the falsity of each contrary proposition is possible and the truth of each subcontrary proposition is possible. It should be mentioned, however, that the position of the philosophers cited above is not entirely the same as Copi's. Copi reasons that these definitions imply that necessary propositions have no contrary or subcontrary. The other philosophers believe that necessary propositions can be contraries and subcontraries. Thus, in the case of necessary propositions contrary and subcontrary propositions are, instead, defined merely in terms of their quantity and quality, not by whether or not they can both be false or can both be true. In fact, Coffey and some of the other philosophers cited above assert that, when the propositions composing the square are necessary, one can infer the truth of the universal from the truth of 5 Gaietano Sanseverino, Philosophia Christiana, Vol. II (Neapoli: Vincentii Manfredi, 1862), pp. DCCXXXVIII ff. 6 J. Maritain, An Introduction to Logic (London: Sheed & Ward, 1937), p. 135, notes 1 & 2. 7 F.-X. Maquart, Elementa Philosophiae, Vol. I (Parisiis: Andreas Blot, 1937)' p. 126 ff. 8 P. Coffey, The Science of Logic, Vol. 1 (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1918), p. 225, 226. 9 Joseph Gredt, Elementa Philosophiae, Vol. I (Friburgi: Herder, 1929), p. 46, notes 1 & 2; Sylvester J. Hartman, A Textbook of Logic (New York: American Book Co., 1936), p. 162 ff; Roland Houde and Jerome J. Fischer, Handbook of Logic (Dubuque, Iowa: Wm. C. Brown Co., 1954), p. 61; Eduard Hugon, Cursus Philosophiae Thomisticae, Vol. I (Parisiis: P. Lethielleux n.d), p. 155; Dennis C. Kane, Logic: The Art of Predication and Inference (Providence: Providence College Press, 1978), p. 98 ff; Francis P. Siegfried, Essentialia Philosophiae (Philadelphia: Dolphin Press, 1927), p. 25; Francis Varvello, Minor Logic, trans. and supplemented Arthur D. Fearon (San Francisco: Univ. of San Francisco Press, 1933), p. 73 ff. 10 Richard Whately, Elements of Logic (Boston: James Munroe & Co., 1854), p. 77 ff. PROPOSITIONS AND THE SQUARE OF OPPOSITION 429 the particular and the falsity of the particular from the falsity of the universal.11 Maritain maintains that in the case... (shrink)

The radical changes deriving from the COVID-19 emergency have heavily upset some of the most familiar routines of daily work life. Abruptly, many workers have been forced to face the difficulties that come with switching to remote working. Basing on the theoretical framework proposed by the Job Demands-Resources model, the purpose of this paper was to explore the effect of work overload, on behavioral stress, meant as an outcome linked to the health impairment process. Furthermore, the aim of the study (...) was to explore the mediating role of job crafting, considered as a second-order construct consisting of two dimensions in the abovementioned relation. Participants were 530 workers experiencing remote working or work-from-home during the first COVID-19 lockdown in Italy. Hypotheses were explored by using three different latent variables, measured reflexively through indicators on a 5-point scale, extracted from validated questionnaires. Data analysis was performed through Structural Equation Modeling; to test the mediation, bootstrap validation was computed. Results showed that the mediation of job crafting was partial. More specifically, the direct effect between work overload and behavioral stress was positive; moreover, the indirect, negative effect through the mediation of job crafting was also significant. Therefore, results showed that job crafting can play a crucial role as a protective factor supporting the activation and adjustment of suitable resources; these resources can be useful to deal with the negative effects of work overload, particularly under the condition of heavy remote working and use of technologies, on individual outcomes. Starting from the current global scenario of the pandemic that has not yet ceased its effects, the study suggested decisive theoretical and practical implications. Accordingly, findings extended the current trends in occupational health psychology research, with special reference to the mainstream topic “work and COVID-19” in the Italian context. Finally, results can give suggestions to companies engaged in managing change, recommending that they build a collaborative workplace at the individual and collective level to implement job crafting interventions and enrich the personal and organizational resources of workers, which is useful cope with the current demands. (shrink)

P. F. Strawson here presents a selection of his shorter writings from the 1970s to the 1990s in the two areas of philosophy to which he has contributed most notably: philosophy of language and Kantian studies. One of these essays is published here for the first time, and one for the first time in English; several others have been difficult to find. A new introduction offers an overview of the essays, their topics, and their interrelations. This book represents some of (...) the most fascinating work of one of the foremost philosophers of the late twentieth century. (shrink)

This article addresses the contributions of the literature on the new mechanistic philosophy of science for the scientific practice of model building in ecology. This is reflected in a one-to-one interdisciplinary collaboration between an ecologist and a philosopher of science during science-in-the-making. We argue that the identification, reconstruction and understanding of mechanisms is context-sensitive, and for this case study mechanistic modeling did not present a normative role but a heuristic one. We expect our study to provides useful epistemic tools for (...) the improvement of empirically-riven work in the debates about mechanistic explanation of ecological phenomena. (shrink)

Originally published in 1936, this book presents the ancient Greek text of the paraphrases and quotations of Zeno's philosophical arguments, together with a facing-page English translation and editorial commentary. Detailed notes are incorporated throughout and a bibliography is also included. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in Zeno and ancient philosophy.

Explores mind-body philosophy from an Asian perspective.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Adoro Te Devote of St. Thomas AquinasSr. Lucia Marie of the Visitation Langford O.P.The Adoro te devote is perhaps the most well-beloved Eucharistic hymn of our time, popularly attributed to St. Thomas Aquinas, the medieval Dominican friar known for his theological treatises as well as his Eucharistic hymnography. Unlike most of Aquinas's work, the poem reveals the intensely personal side of his faith. Rich in theological content and (...) inspiring deep Eucharistic devotion, this poem amply repays a closer investigation. We will look first at the questions of authorship, background, and structure before moving on to a discussion of the text itself.The "Disputed Question" of AuthorshipWhile the Adoro te has traditionally been attributed to St. Thomas Aquinas, the Thomistic authorship of the text was contested in the twentieth century, with two main objections being raised. The first claims that the content of the poem contradicts Thomas's own teachings and cannot have flowed from the same pen. The second objection is historical, claiming that a lack of evidence makes Thomistic authorship improbable.The first objection, claiming that the content of the poem is irreconcilable with Thomistic authorship, takes objection to a line in the poem which seems to claim that sense perception is unreliable and inaccurate, at least with regard to the Eucharist. The text of the Adoro te uses the word fallitur (deceived) with reference to the senses: "Visus, tactus, gustus in te fallitur"—"Sight, touch, taste in you are deceived." Some scholars have claimed that this line contradicts the teaching of Aquinas that the senses are [End Page 365] infallible in regard to their proper sensibles.1 Robert Wielockx addresses this charge in his study of the Adoro te, arguing that "the text does not contradict the continuous teaching of Thomas according to which the senses are not wrong when they judge their proper object, which as far as the Eucharist is concerned, is only the sacramental species."2 The substantial presence of Christ in the Eucharist is a mystery which is not knowable by the senses, and as Paul Murray, O.P., observes: "That's surely the point St. Thomas is making."3 However, the Thomistic insistence that all knowledge comes through our senses is not missing even here. While sight, touch, and taste fall short of comprehending the truth before them, the Adoro te itself proclaims that it is another sense—hearing—which reveals the mystery: "sed auditu solo tute creditur"—"but by hearing alone it is safely believed."4Thus there is no solid objection to Thomistic authorship based on the poem's content. But what about the historical evidence? Dom André Wilmart published a comprehensive study of the manuscript tradition in 1929. Noting that there were no extant copies of the text dating to Aquinas's lifetime and that the biography of Aquinas written by his own Dominican confrere and contemporary, William of Tocco, made no mention of the Adoro te, he considered it most probable that the poem was authored at a later date and ascribed to Aquinas.5However, Dom Wilmart did not know that he was not working with William of Tocco's final version of his work. The publication of a critical edition of William of Tocco's Ystoria Sancti Thome de Aquino in 1996 demonstrated that Tocco published his work in four successive redactions. The fourth and final version of his text (unknown to Dom Wilmart) was finished just before his death in 1323, and in this final version, Tocco includes the text of the Adoro te, attributing its authorship to St. Thomas.6 [End Page 366] Furthermore, Wielockx published a study of the Adoro te in 1998; his investigation of the manuscript tradition found that, of fifty-one sources, forty-four explicitly cite St. Thomas as their author. The remaining sources simply lacked any attribution. We may thus conclude with Wielockx: "External evidence, which must be given priority in sound criticism, wholly favors Thomas Aquinas's authorship of the poem."7BackgroundWith the attribution of the poem to St. Thomas Aquinas on secure footing, we now move to the background of the poem. Unlike Aquinas's Eucharistic hymns such as... (shrink)

Book review of "Causality: Philosophical Theory Meets Scientific Practice" by P. Illari and F. Russo,.

P. F. Strawson; II*—Scruton and Wright on Anti-Realism Etc., Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 77, Issue 1, 1 June 1977, Pages 15–22, https://doi.

The ontic structural realist stance is motivated by a desire to do philosophical justice to the success of science, whilst withstanding the metaphysical undermining generated by the various species of ontological underdetermination. We are, however, as yet in want of general principles to provide a scaffold for the explicit construction of structural ontologies. Here we will attempt to bridge this gap by utilizing the formal procedure of quantization as a guide to ontic structure of modern physical theory. The example of (...) non-relativistic particle mechanics will be considered and, for that case, it will be shown that a viable candidate for an ontic structural realism framework can be constituted in terms of the combination of a state-space with Poisson bracket structure, and a set of observables, with Lie algebra structure. 1 Introduction2 Formulation Underdetermination and Structural Ontologies3 Quantization and Structural Ontologies4 The Case of Non-relativistic Particle Mechanics4.1 Formulation underdetermination4.2 The classical ontology4.3 Quantum theory and the generalized structural ontology4.4 Interpretation of results5 Conclusion and Prospects. (shrink)

Cheating is a serious issue among business students worldwide. However, research investigating the social factors that may help prevent cheating in Chinese higher education is rare. The present study examined two key social relationship factors of perceived teacher-student relationships and peer relationships by the students. It attempted to build a model which addressed the effects of two variables on Chinese business students’ cheating behaviour: the teacher’s approachability and the relationship goal of the students. Two important social influence factors were also (...) tested as mediators: neutralizing attitudes and perceived cheating norms of the students. A student survey was conducted with 1329 questionnaires collected. The results showed the negative effects of both social relationship variables on cheating, and that their effects were fully mediated by neutralizing attitudes. Moreover, perceived cheating norms fully mediated the effect of the teacher’s approachability, but not so for the relationship goal of the students. This study provided novel insights and recommendations for promoting academic integrity in Chinese business schools and universities. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Skeptical Selves: Empiricism and Modernity in the French NovelDaniel GordonSkeptical Selves: Empiricism and Modernity in the French Novel, by Elena Russo; 225 pp. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996, $35.00.Skeptical Selves explains how linguistic relativism has shaped French literature from the Enlightenment to the present. Elena Russo provides three cases: Prévost’s Histoire d’une Grecque moderne (1740), Constant’s Adolphe (1816), and des Forêts’s Le Bavard (1946). Her fascinating (...) scholarly goal is to portray the inexorable decline of the novel in a climate of ever growing doubt about the truthfulness of narration. Her remarkably ambitious philosophical goal is to save the novel by refuting skepticism!More precisely, Russo’s target is not every form of doubt but rather a specific current of French skeptical consciousness. In recent years, the representatives of this current have been Derrida and Blanchot. Its main feature is a denial of the correspondence notion of the language-truth relationship combined—paradoxically—with an intense nostalgia for a perfectly mimetic language that has allegedly been lost. The seemingly most radical critics of the sign, Russo claims, never overcome the perverse yearning for the very mimesis whose possibility they deny (p. 3).Russo is getting at an interesting distinction here, the distinction between epistemological modesty, which she upholds, and French skepticism, which she deplores. Epistemological modesty means the redefinition of truth according to some criterion other than perfect representation of the external world. French skepticism for her means the insistence on an absolute standard of mimetic reliability and a simultaneous denial that this standard can ever be reached. “Much of the language of negativity we have grown accustomed to in contemporary criticism rests upon the following syllogism: to know is to know directly and without mediation; this is not possible; therefore, the world is unknowable. Any conceptualization is ipso facto viewed as suspect, hence the flight towards nonverbal forms of expression, such as music and silence” (p. 13).After suggesting in her first chapter that French skepticism is a specific style of thought, not a final answer to our epistemological queries, Russo goes on to illustrate the impact of this skepticism on the novel. Prévost’s text, she observes, is one of the first novels built around the distorted point of view of a fallible [End Page 179] narrator. The narrator is the French ambassador to Constantinople who falls in love with a woman, Théophé, recently freed from a seraglio. Both his love and his comprehension are frustrated by the woman’s apparent simplicity and virtue. “Signs acquire a meaning opposite to their manifest one,” Russo notes. “It is precisely the discourse that should have made Théophé look credible that makes her appear suspicious. She is cunning and deceptive because she appears ‘naive’ and ‘innocent’; she is opaque because of her ‘simplicity’ and ‘openness’” (p. 42). The whole point of the novel is to show that we are imprisoned in subjectivity and there is no way out. For a time the narrator attempts to resolve his doubts regarding Théophé’s words by concentrating instead on her body. But here as well he can discover only ambiguity: nothing reveals clearly whether she is conquerable and whether she already has another lover.The novel ends with the unexplained death of Théophé, and Russo comments: “we are given the impression that, rather than ending his text, Prévost is ridding himself of an intractable problem” (p. 66). Artfully, the rest of the book helps us see that the tendency to thematize philosophical problems that have no solutions is intensified in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—to the point where not merely the ending of novels but novels themselves disappear. (Of course, Russo means not that people no longer write novels but that the genre has succeeded in diminishing its own stature by so frequently decrying the limits of language.)The chapter on Constant did not strike me as the strongest part of the book. The problem is due perhaps to the fact that Constant was a truly great thinker, a brilliant political theorist and philosopher of religion as well as a romantic novelist. One chapter does not... (shrink)

We investigate the semantics of the logical systems obtained by introducing the modalities and into the family of substructural implication logics (including relevant, linear and intuitionistic implication). Then, in the spirit of the LDS (Labelled Deductive Systems) methodology, we "import" this semantics into the classical proof system KE. This leads to the formulation of a uniform labelled refutation system for the new logics which is a natural extension of a system for substructural implication developed by the first two authors in (...) a previous paper. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Sacramental Wisdom:Humilitatio, Eruditio, Exercitatio in the Scholastics and TodaySr. Albert Marie Surmanski O.P.IntroductionThe relationship between human nature and the sacraments is often characterized in a way that takes away from the beauty and power of the sacraments. Sacraments are sometimes viewed today as something basically irrelevant to human life, an interesting spiritual "option" for those who find comfort in ritual. This view leads to a sacramental practice that is (...) occasional, irregular, or nonexistent. Many young people who fail to grasp religion as important to their reality implicitly embrace this perspective. The difficulty parishes have had in the past few years in convincing parishioners to return to liturgical prayer after each wave of the coronavirus pandemic demonstrates this viewpoint.In another perspective, the sacraments might be viewed precisely as expressions of what it means to be human, or one might say, to be human in a world in which God reveals himself at all times.1 In this view, the sacraments [End Page 1391] are our own graced self-expression as a community. They merely make thematic what already happens each moment. Alternatively, they celebrate who we are, and perhaps can be radically updated to reflect changing categories of social identity. 2Both of these viewpoints overlook the fallen state of human nature that cries out for healing from God. The first view does not preclude knowledge of human violence and fragility, but fails to recognize the sacraments as a medicine needed for the remedy of human ills. The second viewpoint, while professing a need for Christ, looks to the human person or community for healing rituals. This approach risks being enmeshed with human nature in a disordered state in such a way that it celebrates human disorder instead of healing it. Alternatively, the viewpoint may lead to the abandonment eschatological hope and wither into inanity.There are profound metaphysical and anthropological issues that play out in these two opposite but strangely united viewpoints. Rather than directly analyze these errors, this paper would like to propose the recovery of a medieval viewpoint that offers another perspective. This is Hugh of St. Victor's explanation that the sacraments fit and heal human nature through offering humanity humility, instruction, and exercise. 3 This paper will briefly survey Hugh's contribution, analyze its reception by several of the thirteenth-century Scholastics, shows its deep rootedness in biblical wisdom, and then show how it fruitfully opposes current-day challenges.Hugh of St. VictorHugh of St. Victor was a twelfth-century canon of the Parisian Abbey of St. Victor. The most influential writer of the Victorine school, his work is characterized by an Augustinian concern for the re-formation of the image of God in man, a sense of the wise ordering of salvation history, and an emphasis on both virtue and liturgical practice. In his masterwork, De Sacramentis Christianae Fidei, Hugh of St. Victor divides the works of God into two main periods: the work of creation and the work of restoration. Within the [End Page 1392] work of restoration, there are three periods: the period of the natural law, that of the Mosaic or written law, and that of grace, inaugurated by Christ.4 His book's division into two parts cuts across these distinctions: Part 1 of Hugh's text covers creation, the restoration in general, faith, sacraments in general, as well as particulars of the sacraments of the periods of the natural and written law. Part 2 includes the Incarnation, the Church, various Christian rituals, and the final restoration of Christ's return.Hugh is writing around the time when theologians began to list the number of the sacraments of the Church as seven. Emerging from the wider use of the term, Hugh uses the word "sacrament" in a wide sense, but distinguishes several categories of sacraments. Following Dominique Poirel, scholars recognize that Hugh uses the word sacramentum in five main ways.5 The first is a general definition: (1) any sign of anything sacred. The second through fourth are more specific usages, to which we do not commonly give the term "sacrament" today: (2) Scripture, which signifies sacred realities both through its text and the... (shrink)

Cicero's philosophical works are now exciting renewed interest, in part because he provides vital evidence of the views of the Greek philosophers of the Hellenistic age, and partly because of the light he casts on the intellectual life of first century Rome. This edition uses the 1997 Clarendon text by the acclaimed translator P.G. Walsh.