At the top of his ethical system Aristotle placed, as the supreme value, eudai- monia (happiness). But what does this really mean? ...

This second volume in the series "Studies in Hellenistic Civilization", published for the Danish Research Council for the Humanities, offers a comprehensive analysis of the Stoic theory of Oikeiosis.

From Stoicism to Platonism describes the change in philosophy from around 100 BCE, when monistic Stoicism was the strongest dogmatic school in philosophy, to around 100 CE, when dualistic Platonism began to gain the upper hand - with huge consequences for all later Western philosophy and for Christianity. It is distinguished by querying traditional categories like 'eclecticism' and 'harmonization' as means of describing the period. Instead, it highlights different strategies of 'appropriation' of one school's doctrines by philosophers from the other (...) school, with all philosophers being highly conscious of their own identity. The book also sets out to break down the traditional boundaries between, on the one hand, the study of Greco-Roman philosophy in the period and, on the other hand, that of contemporary Hellenistic Jewish and early Christian writings with a philosophical profile. In these ways, the book opens up an immensely fruitful period in the history of philosophy. (shrink)

This book presents an innovative challenge to the traditional reading of Paul. Troels Engberg-Pedersen argues that the usual, mainly cognitive and metaphorical ways of understanding central Pauline concepts must be supplemented by a literal understanding that directly reflects Paul's materialist cosmology.

John and Philosophy: A New Reading of the Fourth Gospel offers a Stoic reading of the Fourth Gospel, especially its cosmology, epistemology, and ethics. It works through the gospel in narrative sequence providing a 'philosophical narrative reading'. In each section of the gospel Troels Engberg-Pedersen raises discusses philosophical questions. He compares John with Paul and Mark to offer a new reading of the transmitted text of the Fourth Gospel. Of these two profiles, the narrative one is strongly influenced (...) by the literary critical paradigm. Moreover, by attending carefully to a number of narratological features, one may come to see that the transmitted text in fact hangs together much more coherently than scholarship has been willing to see. The other profile is specifically philosophical. Scholarship has been well aware that the Fourth Gospel has what one might call a philosophical dimension. Engberg-Pedersen shows that throughout the Gospel contemporary Stoicism, works better to illuminate the text. This pertains to the basic cosmology that is reflected in the text, to the epistemology that underlies a central theme in it regarding different types of belief in Jesus, to the ethics that is introduced fairly late in the text when Jesus describes how the disciples should live once he has himself gone away from them, and more. (shrink)

The natural source for new pancreatic beta cells is an important issue both for understanding the pathogenesis of diabetes, and for possibly curing diabetes by increasing the number of beta cells. Dor et al.1 investigated beta‐cell renewal and regeneration by genetic lineage analysis in mice during physiological growth and after partial pancreatectomy. The data conclusively showed that beta‐cell replication was the only source for new beta cells without contributions from stem cells or other non‐beta cells. This underlines the capacity for (...) beta‐cell self‐renewal and casts doubt that other cell types are able to generate new beta cells in the intact pancreas. BioEssays 26:1156–1159, 2004. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Existing accounts of Foucault’s archaeological methodology have not (a) contextualized the concept properly within the intellectual field of its emergence and (b) explained why it is called ‘archaeology’ and not simply ‘history’. Foucault contributed to the field of ‘history of systems of thought’ in France around 1960 by broadening its scope from the study of scientific and philosophical systems into systems of ‘knowledge’ in a wider sense. For Foucault, the term ‘archaeology’ provided a response to new methodological questions arising from (...) this initiative. Archaeological methodology had already been developed into a distinct comparative approach for the study of linguistic and cultural systems, notably by Dumézil. Foucault redevised archaeological methodology for the post-Hegelian tradition of studying ‘problems’ prevalent in the history of systems of thought. The article thus furnishes the groundwork for a ‘sociological archaeology’ or ‘problem analysis’ that is not particularly dependent on Foucault as a social theorist of power. (shrink)

In a letter of 1932, Karl Popper described _Die beiden Grundprobleme der Erkenntnistheorie – The Two Fundamental Problems of the Theory of Knowledge_ – as ‘…a child of crises, above all of …the crisis of physics.’ Finally available in English, it is a major contribution to the philosophy of science, epistemology and twentieth century philosophy generally. The two fundamental problems of knowledge that lie at the centre of the book are the problem of induction, that although we are able to (...) observe only a limited number of particular events, science nevertheless advances unrestricted universal statements; and the problem of demarcation, which asks for a separating line between empirical science and non-science. Popper seeks to solve these two basic problems with his celebrated theory of falsifiability, arguing that the inferences made in science are not inductive but deductive; science does not start with observations and proceed to generalise them but with problems, which it attacks with bold conjectures. _The Two Fundamental Problems of the Theory of Knowledge_ is essential reading for anyone interested in Karl Popper, in the history and philosophy of science, and in the methods and theories of science itself. (shrink)

The live outdoor webcam seems inseparable from the mid-1990s’ popular proliferation of the Internet. Combining a well-known medium, i.e. the photograph, with a new one, i.e. the Internet, the live outdoor webcam seems in the rear-view mirror to have contributed significantly to the popular perception of the Internet as a globally distended and thus “geographical” medium. Moreover, due to its role in the NASA Triana mission, the never-realised flagship of the Clinton–Gore administration’s Digital Earth project, the live webcam seemed to (...) play an important part in the construction of what leading geographers coined a “virtual geography”—the geography of the Internet, and the networked geography—that sought to establish itself as a new field of study during the late 1990s. In order to substantiate for this interpretation, I would like in the first part of this article to identify a number of basic characteristics of the outdoor webcam and, in the second, to analyse and discuss two papers written by leading scholars in the field; papers which have been important in the assessment of the impact of the Internet and geographical information systems (GIS) before the scientific community as well as policy makers within technological innovation and the public sector. (shrink)

Discussions about the nature of the emotions in Hellenistic philosophy have aroused intense scholarly interest over the last few years. The topics covered by the essays in this volume range from the classical background of Hellenistic theories, through debates on emotion in the major Hellenistic schools, to discussions in later antiquity. Special emphasis is placed on the development of the Stoic views on the nature and value of the emotions. The essays are written with a high level of philosophical and (...) classical scholarship, but contain no exclusive technicalities. Audience: This first comprehensive treatment of the emotions in Hellenistic philosophy can be read with pleasure and profit not only by professionals in ancient philosophy but also all those who are interested in the philosophy of mind and its history. (shrink)

Completeness is shown for several versions of Girard's linear logic with respect to Petri nets as the class of models. One logic considered is the -free fragment of intuitionistic linear logic without the exponential !. For this fragment Petri nets form a sound and complete model. The strongest logic considered is intuitionistic linear logic, with ,&, and the exponential ! , and forms of quantification. This logic is shown sound and complete with respect to atomic nets , though only once (...) we add extra axioms specific to the Petri-net model. The logic is remarkably expressive, enabling descriptions of the kinds of properties one might wish to show of nets; in particular, negative properties, asserting the impossibility of an assertion, can also be expressed. Unfortunately, with respect to this logic, whether an assertion is true of a finite net becomes undecidable. (shrink)

Krifka (The origin of topic/comment structure, of predication, and of focusation in asymmetric bimanual coordination, 2006, Interdisciplinary Studies on Information Structure (ISIS): Working Papers of SFB 632 08: 61–96, 2007b) suggests that asymmetric bimanual coordination and ultimately the evolution of lateralization in humans may be the cognitive basis of linguistic topic-comment structure and foreground-background structures in general. As asymmetric bimanual constructions abound in sign languages and are also found in their possible precursors, cospeech gesture and homesign, sign languages may serve (...) as a test ground for the hypothesis. Asymmetric bimanual constructions are indeed used for differentiating foreground and background in sign languages, but some of these constructions are derived from indexical gestures, not manipulation, i.e., they draw on visual attention. Signed topics may be marked by nonmanual features derived from signals of visual attention, and the defining feature of signed topics is eye contact with the addressee, needed to establish a communicative common ground. There, thus, seems to be not one embodied origin of topic-comment structures, but several. Finally, signed topic-comment structure demonstrates how attention shifts in the course of the entire structure, thereby explaining how topics can be described alternately as foreground (e.g., Talmy, Attention phenomena, Oxford University Press, 2007: 265) and background (Jacobs, Linguistics 39: 641–681, 2001). (shrink)

The article investigates characteristics of legal concepts as found in academic articles, focusing upon the knowledge base of legal experts. It is a cognitively oriented study of one of the semiotic basics of communication for academic legal purposes. The purpose is to study the structure of knowledge elements connected to the concept of “Criminal liability of corporations” from US law in and across individual experts in order to look for individual differences and similarities. The central concern is to investigate the (...) conditions for the observable efficiency of semiosis in academic discourse. In a first basic section I discuss aspects relevant for a cognitively oriented study of academic discourse. The empirical part of the article consists of an analysis of text passages from two articles in American law journals. The results of the study support the assumption that high efficiency and precision of semiosis is due rather to the use of specific cognitive processing skills than to total identity of cognitive structures across individual experts. (shrink)