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The criticism against the absolute validity of the assertion quantum intendis, tantum facis is an integral component of Aquinas’ doctrine of moral intention. This paper aims to investigate this criticism within the domain of sinful actions according to Aquinas’ division of sins. The quantum-tantum assertion is only valid regarding the mortal sins directly against God, which do not involve any effect of sensual suffering according to their species, whereas these kinds of sins cannot bear any degree of gravity: the loss of the connection with God is radical. Meanwhile, the mortal sins with sensual suffering as effect and the venial sins as the corresponding imperfect form do not follow the assertion and possess varied degrees of gravity: their sinful gravity depends not only on the intentional action, but on the corresponding realization. The fact that, among sins, the validity of the quantum-tantum assertion varies because of the sins’ relation to sensual effect indicates that sinful action, with or without a sensual effect, is involved in the species of sinful acts.
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The current text tries to explore possible connections between will and intellectual process in the context of the work of Peter John Olivi. Olivi presents the will in an innovative light, which provides the basis for later authors such as John Duns Scotus or William of Ockham. Olivi’s claim is that the will is a totally active power, which is the first mover of the soul and its other powers. The self-evidential freedom that the will possesses makes it responsible furthermore for its own self-reflexivity. Olivi goes even further to claim that the reflexivity of the rest of the soul’s powers depends on the self-reflexivity of the will. Based on this, the paper traces different passages, in which Olivi speaks about the free control, which we can observe having in our thoughts – freedom in terms of judgment, discerning, choosing an object for our knowledge, etc. Important for this discussion is Olivi’s understanding of intentionality and more particularly his concept of “aspectus”. The intellectual-volitional acts stand in the context of a broader intentional directedness of the human being towards the outside world. We would like to trace in what way this intentional directedness might be freely controlled from the will, so that different epistemological processes could be enabled to take place.
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This paper aims to be a discussion-opener. It is making a statement that should be examined further about the very plausible connection between the contemporary crisis in aesthetics as a philosophical discipline and the breaking of the philosophical relation between the idea of contingency as a condition for the human autonomous act and the art. This idea is based on the interrelation between the free will and the dignity of the person, as understood within the metaphysics of ens morale, and the value of any creative act.As an introductory demonstration of this interrelation, we propose the short but important elaboration on what is an act of art by Francisco Suárez in his De bonitate et malitia humanorum actuum (sect. 1, n. 17.). There we see that the value of the act of art acquires a double significance – on the one hand, the designation of an object as a work of art depends entirely on the conscious autonomous intention of the artist to create it, and on the other hand – the evaluation of each object of art depends on the knowledge and the will invested uniquely by the author in this particular object as a result of a unique creative act. In order to clarify the context of Suárez’ view, we also explicate the essence of the synchronic contingency, developed earlier by John Duns Scotus.
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This paper attempts to follow the impact of the Pseudo-Dionysian corpus in “The Divine Comedy” by Dante Alighieri. The aim of the text is to examine the theological aspects of the Comedy in order to put a spotlight on the equal understanding of the two authors about the mystical experience as an assimilation to the Divine likeness. For that reason, the attention is drawn not only to the directly perceived Dionysian angelology, but also to the conception of hierarchy in general, the presence of light and the approach of describing the indescribable.
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Enumerating the parts of the soul could hardly be an object of leisure-time activity and it is only in themedieval presentative culture that we could find it as naturally integrated topos of a dramatic text. Thisseemingly paradoxical situation loses almost all of its mysterious aura in dramatic genres like theconventional for fifteenth-century England “drama of moral instruction”, which is by definitionnonrealistic in form and religiously utilized by content. The focus of this article is the famous drama ofWisdom Who is Christ from the Macro MS and specifically its first part which concerns the introductoryexposition of the “structure” of the soul, the latter being a central character of the play. While the themeof the parts of the soul are not new to premodern philosophy and theology, it is the way this topic isinternalized in the new devotional trends of the time that makes the analysis of the text and its dramaticpotential so fruitful. This analysis is all the more crucial for the understanding of the play as most of theaction is delegated only to parts of the soul as “representatives” of the protagonist and carriers of themechanics of the stage salvation. Important works of contemporary laical devotional and contemplativeliterature are considered in terms of their influence on the dramatic piece considered.
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The study seeks to clarify solitude as a more original phenomenon than the sociality derived from it and advocates solitude as the most ontological trait of hypostazing the subject. The author draws on the analyses of the solitude of Emmanuel Levinas who understands solitude as the basic category in the architecture of being. In this case Levinas fundamentally contradicts Heidegger, for whom solitude is merely a deficient mode of being with others and is derived rather by a more originally co-existence than by its negation. These are analyses that the author considers as unsurpassed but also neglected or overlooked. Existence is rooted in itself. It is the self-relationship of the existing to the event of his existence, it is an irreversible unity between the existing and its existence. This is the most original union. It is solitude more original than loneliness.
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The volume Philosophy and Life Sciences in Dialogue is a result of the IV. International Summer School Bioethics in Context, organized by Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski” and FernUniversität in Hagen. The book is exemplary in many ways. It contains 11 high-quality articles on fundamental themes and concepts with real philosophical depth – nature, autonomy, the future of trans- and post-humanism, the meta-topic of bioethics and its relations with life sciences. The authors present illuminating historical backgrounds as a context to these theoretical discussions and a source of interesting or forgotten arguments. Most of the articles analyze recent and avantgarde scientific research with its social implications: CRISPR-Cas9 technology, digitalization of health care, justification of animal experiments, questions of human cloning, moral enhancement and the artificial synthesis of life. The main idea of the book is that bioethics is necessarily connected to human practice: it is not just knowledge but a living culture.
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Vesselin Petrov's new book on Whitehead is an analysis of “some specific features of his teachings, such as his views concerning rationality, dynamic holism, things and objects, events, anticipation, creativity, nature, organism, and life” (Petrov, 2019: 7). The book is a real achievement for the genre: a monographic thematical study of a comprehensive author's philosophy as “a philosophy of organism”. Alfred Whitehead is a unique, difficult to understand thinker who introduces new concepts and new meanings of traditional and modern concepts. Prof. Vesselin Petrov is an author of a series of works on Whitehead and processual philosophy and editor of collections of articles on processual philosophy and Whitehead. The author is one of the leaders in modern Whiteheadianism. Professor Petrov has been the Executive Director (2015 – 2017) of the International Process Network. Whitehead is a unique thinker who creates a philosophy entirely of a non-classical type. Whitehead's philosophy is postmodern in the meaning introduced twenty years before French postmodernism as a constructive outcome of Modernism. For Whitehead, unique, modernism proves to be anti-rational. His philosophy is different from both the continental and the analytic.
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Pejović verkörpert in seiner Person das ursprüngliche philosophische Ethos und die Gelehrsamkeit. Die Stärke seines Denkens spiegelt sich in der verfeinerten Analyse des Themas wider. Sein literarisches Talent ist klar und er fühlt sich wie ein Virtuose und ein Künstler von Worten und Stil, der stellenweise poetisch ist. Er spricht leicht über die schwierigsten Themen der Philosophie. Er besitzt einen klaren, lehrreichen und enthusiastisch angemessenen, verfeinerten und raffinierten Ausdruck, der über alle unsere philosophischen Autoren hinausgeht. Dies wird bereits in den Titeln seiner Bücher, Studien, Aufsätze und Artikel sichtbar, die die Tiefe seiner Bedeutung angeben, und als würde die Bedeutung des gesamten Textes in ihnen selbst liegen. Obwohl nicht der Einzige, zeigte Pejović, dass es möglich war, anders zu denken, neue Perspektiven zu öffnen, sich der Zukunft zu öffnen, indem man aus dem marxistischen Regenmantel herauskommt, in den wir fast alle gehüllt waren. Professor Pejović demonstriert, wie sich die Evolution entwickeln kann, um auf Kommendes, Neues und Andersartiges zu treffen. Natürlich ist das Neue und Andersartige allein dadurch nicht schon hier, aber um neue Horizonte zu eröffnen, müssen wir gegen die Strömung vorgehen.
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In my paper I wish to prove that the truth of the pictures does not stand in correlation with reality. The picture is not the reflection of everyday things, but a different, truer representation of things. The privilege of pictures stands in their being able to always go beyond themselves. The picture possesses a particular kind of logic, as its delotic logos, that is, its nature of showing the thing itself but from a different perspective as well in the same time, cannot be grasped conceptually or by language translation.
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An article is an introductory analysis of concept of religious belief in the language of logic. In its first part, there is a comparison of the concept of religious belief with the concept of scientific belief, next part is a presentation and analysis of Bocheński’s conception of rationality of religious beliefs (and their justification), and the third part of article is an attempt of analysis of Aquinas conception of faith (in Sth II-II) in the light of contemporary logic.
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With the systematic aim of clarifying the phenomenon sometimes described as “the intellectual apprehension of first principles,” Descartes’ first principle par excellence is interpreted before the historical backcloth of Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics. To begin with, three “faces” of the cogito are distinguished: (1) the proto-cogito (“I think”), (2) the cogito proper (“I think, therefore I am”), and (3) the cogito principle (“Whatever thinks, is”). There follows a detailed (though inevitably somewhat conjectural) reconstruction of the transition of the mind from (1) via (3) to (2) and back again to (3). What emerges is, surprisingly, a non-circular, non-logical, and ultimately non-mysterious process by which first principles implicitly contained in a complex intuition are gradually rendered explicit (and, if abstract, grasped in their abstract universality). This process bears a striking family resemblance to that intuitive induction (“grasping the universal in the particular”) which Aristotle scholars have distinguished from empirical forms of induction.
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In this article the authors introduce the radical project of phenomenological philosophy and argue that the idea behind the project was to give philosophy a new beginning. The authors refer to selected works of Edmund Husserl and to his correspondence with Arnold Metzger. They discuss Husserl’s critique of philosophy and science, and his motivations for creating a new scientific philosophy, which applies a radical method of reduction. According to Husserl, the new phenomenological philosophy will ultimately lead to overcoming the crisis of rationality and to the spiritual renewal of humanity.
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Georg Simmel is an excellent example of a “total intellectual”, in other words, according to Pierre Bourdieu, a thinker who crosses the boundaries between disciplines and fields of scholarship, or who transfers knowledge between various fields of activity. Simmel freely combined sociology, philosophy, economics, fine art studies, literary studies, and so forth. On the one hand, this attitude lay the foundation for his exceptionally innovative analyses and led to the establishment of new paths of thought. On the other hand, it was met with strong criticism from contemporary intellectuals. Simmel thought “beyond borders” not only in conducting his analyses but also in choosing the language in which to present them. His preferred form of expression was an essay in which he would use many rhetorical devices specific to literary language. Both the nature of Simmel’s analyses and the innovative way in which he presented them contributed to the fact that his works have continued to this day to inspire intellectuals in many different fields of the social sciences and humanities. In this article, the author explores the phenomenon, focusing on both Simmel’s thinking “beyond borders” and contemporary ways of interpreting those ideas.
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Books were materially and metaphorically botanical in the early modern period. This article uses The Garden of Cyrus (1658), Thomas Browne’s wide-ranging philosophical tract, to illustrate how the often self-conscious links between books and gardens could operate in epistemologically significant ways. It argues that Browne’s repeated positioning of his book as a garden creates a productive model for aesthetic, theological and scientific experimentation and innovation. The framework of the garden constructs a space in which the foremost, apparently contradictory, models of knowledge associated with the seventeenth-century garden—the analogical approach of the doctrine of signatures and the empirical approach associated with the “new science”—can coexist. Extrapolating from the book of nature to suggest the inherently discursive and rhetorical forms of Browne’s knowledge as well as its limitations, the article concludes by proposing a new spatial model for this kind of coterminous literary and experimental approach: the elaboratory.
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In their debate on whether or not the young should be allowed to study history, Degory Wheare and Gerhardus Vossius quote Bartholomäus Keckermann and state that he wants to exclude the young from studying history, Wheare arguing for Keckermann’s purported position, Vossius opposing it. Their disagreement is part of a larger controversy on the relevance of history for moral instruction in general, contemplating the question whether or not history is best understood as ‘philosophy teaching by example.’ But the interpretation of Keckermann’s position presupposed by bothWheare and Vossius is wrong. Keckermann’s Ramist predecessors argued against a central presupposition of Wheare’s views, i.e., the exclusion of the young from studying moral philosophy. Keckermann’s own position in this regard is not fully clear. But a closer analysis of his distinction between methods for writing and for reading history shows that Keckermann did want the young to study history. If Keckermann had believed that such exclusion were necessary, it could only have been related to reading historical texts, not to writing them: writing texts about historical figures or events does not require moral precepts, but only the application of certain logical tools. A view that implies that writing a historical text should be possible for students, whereas reading such a text would go beyond their capabilities, is absurd. Hence, we can assume that Keckermann expected the young to study both history and moral philosophy.
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Book review: Contemporary Polish Ontology. Skowron, B. (ed.), Philosophical Analysis, 82. Berlin; Boston: De Gruyter, 2020. pp.320.
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