Luis de Molina's ‘middle knowledge’: Thomas Stapleton's ‘antidote’ to John Calvin†

The Bible commentator, Thomas Stapleton (1535–98), an English Catholic exile in Leuven and Douai, played a vital role in the ‘golden age of biblical scholarship’ (1550–1650). His Antidota (1595) aimed at giving the ‘correct’ interpretation of the Bible in response to the ‘poisoned’ commentaries of Calvin and others. This battle for the ‘true’ faith also involved Stapleton in internal Catholic debates, especially the de auxiliis controversy pitting Jesuit theologians insisting on human free will against their more Augustinian-inclined peers emphasizing God's grace. While previous scholarship placed Stapleton within the latter camp because of his extensive citation of Augustine, this paper intends to establish that Stapleton actually belonged to the first group and that his orientation was not to Augustine, rather the Spanish Jesuit theologian, Luis de Molina (1535–1600). Through an analysis of Stapleton's Antidota, and specifically his commentary on Matthew 11:21, this paper demonstrates Stapleton's dependence on Molina's so-called theory of ‘middle knowledge’.     

THE SUPERNATURAL AS LANGUAGE GAME

Abstract. For many in the Anglo‐American tradition of language analysis, Ludwig Wittgenstein, the great progenitor of twentieth‐century philosophy of language, showed conclusively that theological terms lack any referent in reality and therefore represent a discourse that can do no more than manifest the existential attitudes that speakers take toward reality as a whole. To think that such terms represent more is to be bewitched by the use of language. Is it possible, however, that theological language references a fundamental human drive? In this article I reexamine the dyad of nature and supernature from the perspective of Wittgenstein's philosophy. Perhaps surprisingly, Wittgenstein's thought on the subject offers much more than his famous, terse aphorism at the conclusion of his first masterwork, the Tractatus Logico‐Philosophicus ([1921] 1961, 74, §7): “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.” Furthermore, the basic Tractarian drive to determine the relationship between language and reality, which is redirected but not extinguished in Wittgenstein's second, divergent, opus, the Philosophical Investigations ([1953] 1967), may be the place for a renewed examination of what the supernatural means in human discourse. Does talk of God give expression to the fundamental transcendence of human knowledge? Is it a language game we can eschew?     

Predictors of organizational commitment: The study of part-time army reservists

A predictive model built upon a multiple role conflict/felt responsibility conceptual framework and containing six previously untested predictors and nine previously tested organizational-related predictors of organizational commitment was investigated. The sample consisted of two battalions of U.S. Army Reserve members. Stepwise multiple regression analysis utilizing a double cross-validation design on each battalion was the data analytic technique. Increased job satisfaction and stronger intent to stay consistently entered each equation as the first and second predictors, respectively. Group cohesion also appeared in more than one equation. The variance explained across the four cross-validated samples averaged .46 and the results were very stable. The importance of the investigation of commitment for this part-time, voluntary organization was discussed, as were future research directions regarding organizational commitment.