Medical Manichaeism

Medical discourse in the contemporary United States is rife with military metaphors. These metaphors have come under vigorous criticism over the last few decades but to no avail; the militaristic tendency has proven tenacious. This essay suggests that its tenacity stems, at least in part, from a dualistic understanding of medicine unaddressed by prior criticisms. For an alternative, this essay turns to Augustine of Hippo, balancing close readings of works that deal explicitly with medical themes—The Catholic Way of Life and the Manichean Way of Life (De moribus) and The Nature of the Good (De natura boni)—with a constructive approach. By adapting Augustine's privative account of evil, we can understand disease as a condition of loss and treatment as a task of restoration. This reconfiguration shifts the focus of our interpretive discourses from malicious invaders to a fuller affirmation of the lived experiences of those who are ill.     

Renegotiating Aquinas

While Roman Catholic feminist ethicists typically endorse moral realism and crosscultural standards of justice, they also have been influenced by the postmodern interrogation of abstract reason and moral universalism. As theologians writing after the Second Vatican Council, they are increasingly sensitive to the communal and ecclesial dimensions of morality and of Christian ethics, and to the integral relation of Christian faith and ethics. This essay will consider two approaches to Catholic feminist ethics that differ in the relative weight they give to constructive work for social justice (realist gender justice ethics), or to the grounding of ethics in prayer and mysticism (postmodern gendered faith ethics). Using critical feminist reappropriations of the theology and ethics of Aquinas as examples, this essay will argue that the two approaches are overlapping and interdependent.     

RELIGION AND FRANCIS BACON'S SCIENTIFIC UTOPIANISM

Francis Bacon often is depicted as a patriarch of modernity who promotes human rational action over faith in divine Providence and as a secular humanitarian who realized that improvement of the human condition depended on human action and not on God's saving acts in history. Bacon's New Atlantis is usually described as a “scientific utopia” because its ideal order, harmony, and prosperity are the result of the investigations of nature conducted by the members of Solomon's House. I challenge these characterizations by showing that Bacon's so‐called scientific utopianism is grounded in his religious convictions that his age was one of Providential intervention and that he was God's agent for an apocalyptic transformation of the human condition. I examine the centrality of these religious themes in two of his philosophical works, The Advancement of Learning and The Great Instauration, which are well known for setting out Bacon's critique of the state of learning and for presenting the principles of his epistemology. Analysis of The Advancement of Learning demonstrates Bacon's conviction that his reform of natural philosophy was part of a Providentially guided, twofold restoration of the knowledge of nature and the knowledge of God. Examination of The Great Instauration reveals that Bacon sees his age as one of apocalyptic transformation of the human condition that restores humanity to a prelapsarian state. Analysis of the New Atlantis shows that utopian perfection can be achieved only through a combination of right religion and the proper study of nature. Moreover, when the “scientific” work of Solomon's House is recontextualized within the religious themes of salvation and deliverance that permeate the New Atlantis, the full scope of Bacon's “scientific utopianism” can be seen, and this project is not the one usually portrayed in scholarly treatments. Bacon's program for rehabilitating humanity and its relation to nature is not a secular, scientific advance through which humanity gains dominion over nature and mastery of its own destiny but rather one guided by divine Providence and achieved through pious human effort.     

The Moral Argument for the Existence of God and Immortality

This essay tries to show that there exist several passages where Kierkegaard (and his pseudonyms) sketches an argument for the existence of God and immortality that is remarkably similar to Kant's so‐called moral argument for the existence of God and immortality. In particular, Kierkegaard appears to follow Kant's moral argument both when it comes to the form and content of the argument as well as some of its terminology. The essay concludes that several passages in Kierkegaard overlap significantly with Kant's moral argument, although Kierkegaard ultimately favors revealed faith over natural theology in general and Kant's moral faith in particular. Whereas Kant uses the moral argument to postulate the existence of God and immortality, Kierkegaard mainly uses it as a reductio ad absurdum of non‐religious thinking.     

论儒家自然哲学的天道时序观及其生态意义——以《易传》为中心

在哲学中,"天道"是天地万物运行的总体过程、性质和规律.关于天道运行的机制,易学自然哲学的说法是"神妙万物".神是阴阳运行的微妙、神秘、不知其然而见其功的作用,也是变化的动力;天道运行所表现出来的节奏、节律、秩序以及由这种节律所决定的应该采取的行动则是时和时序.儒家自然哲学的时与现代牛顿时间观不同.儒家的天道观是有机的、内在的,人和自然可以相互影响的.其自然规律,是生态性质的,是一种稳定性,而不是超出人为控制的必然性;可以因人的不当行为而遭到破坏.儒家自然哲学对于天道的这种认识在历史上产生了敬畏自然的生态态度,对于当今人类社会具有重要的启发意义.     

The Ethics of Sex: A Call to the Gay Community

Addresses the gay community and suggests three principles to govern contemporary sexual behavior: first, the presumed goodness of homosexual relationships; second, an updated version of natural law, that one do what is healthy and wholesome, as determined by the best available opinion of the day, which scientific research provides; third, a developmental principle, that all are not capable of the same level of interpersonal and sexual relationships. Discussion proposes both negative and positive guidelines for sexual practice.     

论罗尔斯的政治义务理论

政治义务是政治哲学的核心问题。哈特首先用“相互限制原则”来解释政治义务,这一原则为罗尔斯所继承并加以修正。鉴于该原则存在的诸多问题,罗尔斯在《正义论》中削减了它在政治义务的道德证明中的作用,而诉诸正义的自然责任原则。这个原则仍然受到来自多方面的批评,许多罗尔斯的追随者对这些批评作了回应。罗尔斯从公平游戏原则到自然责任原则的转变反映了他对契约论不同的态度。     

How is the Other Approached and Conceptualized in Terms of Schutz's Constitutive Phenomenology of the Natural Attitude?<Superscript>1</Superscript>

The problem of the other was one of the central problems for the founder of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl. He investigated the other as the alter ego intensively in the Fifth Cartesian Meditation, in which he introduced the conceptions of “analogical apperception' and “pairing' as fundamental forms of “passive synthesis.' Although it is no doubt Husserl who investigated the other most seriously and intensively, there is anaporiain his theory of the other. If the other is an object of ego's intentional consciousness, the other turns out to be no more than a modification of the ego. In the face of such anaporia, some phenomenologists embarked upon inquiry into the other. This paper focuses primarily on Alfred Schutz's discussion of the “other' in general and about the “stranger' in particular.     

Types of \mathsf{I} -Free Hereditary Right Maximal Terms

The implicational fragment of the relevance logic “ticket entailment” is closely related to the so-called hereditary right maximal terms. I prove that the terms that need to be considered as inhabitants of the types which are theorems of T_→ are in normal form and built in all but one case from and only. As a tool in the proof ordered term rewriting systems are introduced. Based on the main theorem I define FIT_→ – a Fitch-style calculus (related to FT_→) for the implicational fragment of ticket entailment.