A DEFENSE OF THE CAROLINGIAN “DEFENSE OF MEDICINE”: INTRODUCTION, TRANSLATION, AND NOTES

Traditio ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 75 ◽  
pp. 87-125
Author(s):  
JOEL L. GAMBLE
Keyword(s):  
Content Analysis ◽  
English Translation ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Christian Faith ◽  
Medical Texts ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Imitation Of Christ ◽  
History Of ◽  
As If

The “Defense of Medicine” prefaces the Codex Bambergensis Medicinalis 1, a Carolingian collection of medical texts. Some scholars have dismissed the Defense as an incoherent patchwork of quotations. Yet, missing from the literature is an adequate assessment of the Defense's arguments. This present study includes the first English translation accompanied by a complete source commentary, a prerequisite for valid content analysis. When read systematically and with attention to the author's use of sources, the Defense is limpid and cogent. Its first purpose is to defend the compatibility of Christian faith and secular medicine. Key propositions include the following: God made nature good, so the natural sciences are reconcilable with divine learning; scripture respects medicine; God expects the sick to avail of physicians and deserves honor for healings done through physicians. Counter-arguments used by the Defense's opponents, who rejected medicine on principle, can also be reconstructed from the text. Two further purposes of the Defense have hitherto been explored insufficiently. After justifying medicine, the Defense addresses sick patients. It encourages them that illness can be spiritually healthful, an instrument for curing their souls. The Defense then addresses caregivers. It tells them why they should succor the sick, even the poor: not for gain or fame, but in imitation of Christ and as if treating Christ himself, whose image the sick bear. The Defense thus contributes to the history of ideas on medicine, health, sickness, and the ethics of altruistic care.

scholarly journals Explanation and Understanding as Methods of Historical and Biographical Cognition

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 3-9
Author(s):  
Mykola Bakaiev
Keyword(s):  
Causal Explanation ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Biographical Research ◽  
Rational Explanation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Understanding Function

Traditionally, explanation is considered to be the method of natural sciences and understanding to be the method of humanities. However, this paper considers both to be methods of history. Namely, the author focuses on how explanation and understanding function in history in general and in biography in particular. Referring to biographical realm helps explicate the specifics of explanation and understanding as well as broaden the view about their uses in humanities. In the first part, the author refers to explanation and understanding in history as such. In particular, causal explanation (explanatory sketch by Karl Hempel) and rational explanation (history of ideas by Mark Bevir) are considered in the paper along with the relationship of hermeneutic notion of understanding with the two. The second part of the paper deals with the functioning of explanation and understanding in biographical research. Namely, it considers biographical understanding by Tilmann Habermas and Neşe Hatiboğlu as well as cases of causal and rational explanations in biographical research. In particular, it is shown that while causal explanation occurs in biography as explanatory sketch, it is not a separate distinct notion. It is also shown that rational explanation is used in biographical reconstructions in order to clarify the influence of particular events on beliefs of people. Based on the materials involved, the author demonstrates the specifics of explanation and understanding in biography compared to their usage in historical cognition in general.

Epilogue

1999 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 137-138
Keyword(s):  
English Translation ◽  
The State ◽  
De Anima ◽  
Scientific Text ◽  
English Translations ◽  
History Of ◽  
Selection Of ◽  
As If

In 1864 the biologist George Lewes wrote (p. viii) ‘Numerous and exhaustive as are the works devoted to Aristotle’s moral and metaphysical writings, there is not one which attempts to display, with any fullness, his scientific researches . . . Although Aristotle mainly represents the science of twenty centuries, his scientific writings are almost unknown in England. Casual citations, mostly at second hand, and vague eulogies, often betraying great misconception, are abundant; but rare indeed is the indication of any accurate appreciation extending beyond two works, the De Anima, and the History of Animals. The absence of translations is at once a cause and a sign of this neglect.’Things have improved, a bit, in the intervening 135 years. Cohen and Drabkin brought together a large and diverse selection of English translations of ancient scientific works in 1948. Every year for the last 25 years, on average, there has been a new edition or notification of the discovery of a new scientific text. Galen has been the focus of a recent scholarly project whose proportions reflect his corpus. Nevertheless, despite the 9,000 printed pages of that vast corpus already published, there are still unedited and untranslated treatises surviving in full in Arabic, and two-thirds of the corpus still awaits an English translation. The state of editions and translations of ancient scientific works as a whole remains scandalous by comparison with the torrent of modern works on anything unscientific – about 100 papers per year on Homer, for example. And an embarrassingly large number of classicists are as (if not more) ignorant of Greek scientific works as their predecessors were in 1864.

scholarly journals Czynności ludzkie jako obiektywny wymiar badań nauk humanistycznych. Analiza porównawcza koncepcji Kazimierza Twardowskiego i Floriana Znanieckiego

2020 ◽  
Vol 12(48) (3) ◽  
pp. 5-25
Author(s):  
Arkadiusz Jabłoński
Keyword(s):  
Human Behavior ◽  
Human Activities ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Research Approach ◽  
Natural Phenomena ◽  
Cause And Effect ◽  
History Of ◽  
Scientific Treatment

The article is an analysis of the concept of human activities of two great Polish thinkers − Kazimierz Twardowski and Florian Znaniecki. The text is analytical and synthetic in nature, bordering on the history of ideas and methodology. The main problem of the article is to show what research approach in humanities results from the concept of human activities by Twardowski and Znaniecki. They present different ways of conceptualizing human activities, which complement each other logically and define complementary areas of description of human behavior. Twardowski strives to objectively describe human activities as logical and semiotic situations contained in human products. Such a perspective provides the basis for a scientific treatment of them, different from discovering hidden deterministic cause-and-effect relationships specific to natural phenomena. In Znanieckiʼs approach, activities are treated as a material of culture, i.e. an order of relations between all externalized human experiences. This is the basis of a humanistic understanding of human behavior that conforms to cause and effect thinking in the natural sciences.

History and future of life on Earth - a synthesis of natural science and theology

DIALOGO ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 233-251
Author(s):  
Andreas May
Keyword(s):  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Christian Faith ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Modern Natural ◽  
History Of ◽  
Science And Theology ◽  
Life On Earth ◽  
Different Cultures ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Intelligent Life

"A synthesis of research results of modern natural sciences and fundamental statements of the Christian faith is attempted. The creation of the universe is addressed. Four important events in the history of the Earth as well as the diversity of living beings are shortly discussed. There are good reasons to believe that the universe was created by a transcendent superior being, which we call God, and that this superior being intervened in evolution and Earth history to promote the development of intelligent life. Furthermore, it can be concluded that intelligent life is very rare in the universe. This is the explanation for the “Fermi paradox”. Intelligent life on planet Earth has cosmic significance. The overabundance of this universe inspires the hope for participating in the fulfilled eternity of the Creator in transcendence. Prehistoric humans had long had hope for life after biological death. While scientific speculation about the end of the universe prophesies scenarios of destruction, the Christian faith says that humanity is destined to be united with Jesus Christ. Furthermore, all evolution will be completed with the Creator in transcendence. Then the whole of creation will “obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God”. From the first primitive living cell, an abundance of the most diverse living beings has evolved. Comparably, humanity has differentiated into a plethora of different cultures. This entire abundance will find its unification and fulfilment in transcendence with the Creator of the universe, without its diversity being erased."

scholarly journals Alasdair Agonistes: MacIntyre and a New Discontent with Modernity

2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-20
Author(s):  
Steven E. Pena
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Natural Kinds ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Rational Scheme ◽  
History Of ◽  
Identification Of Species ◽  
Almost All ◽  
Moral Enquiry

This paper is an examination of certain assumptions that, I hold, lie in the background of MacIntyre’s conception of the formation of the intellectual schema as found, most prominently, in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? and Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry. A thorough examination of MacIntyre’s concept of the rational schema, I will show, reveals that the parsing he proposes to carry out on intellectual history is confronted with a problem that finds its analogue in the field of biological taxonomy. In order to carry out this project of determining where the seams lie in intellectual history one must first recognize that the parsing itself is a scheme-dependent undertaking. As such it is not unlike the necessarily somewhat arbitrary identification of species and genera in the biological realm. In other words, it should be recognized that intellectual history, like the morphology of the plant and animal kingdoms, is continuous, not discreet. An almost wholly unexamined assumption that stalks through Whose Justice? and Three Rival Versions is that there are something like intellectual natural kinds in the history of ideas. Indeed, the notion that there are “traditions” at all in the sense in which MacIntyre uses the term may be a highly conventional artefact of an Enlightenment-era view of intellectual progress. This leads me to conclude that MacIntyre has failed to observe that the view of traditions and schemes neatly succeeding one another, on which much of his critique is dependent, is itself a product of the perspective he calls “encyclopedia.” This, in turn, will make manifest why it is that almost all of MacIntyre’s examples of rational scheme-switching are from the natural sciences rather than the normative, a fact I will show is connected to a paradigm of linear progression that one tends to find in the exact sciences, but not in praxis.

Bergson and the Politics of Intuition

1958 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 634-656 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith Shklar
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
The Other ◽  
Political Consequences ◽  
Political Theories ◽  
Political Studies ◽  
History Of ◽  
French Intellectuals ◽  
Metaphysical Position

Politicaltheory is not an independent realm of thought. Ultimately it must always refer back to some metaphysical presuppositions ofWeltanschauungthat is not in itself political. This does not imply that every metaphysical position entails logically necessary political consequences. But it does mean that implicitly or explicitly political theories depend on more general religious, epistemological, and moral considerations. This condition of political thinking serves to explain much of the narrowness of contemporary political theory. For the dominant currents of philosophy neither can, nor wish, to provide a basis for political speculation, which is increasingly regarded as an undisciplined form of self-expression. On the other hand, the naive hope that political studies might fruitfully emulate the methods of the natural sciences, and so share their success, has all but evaporated. The result is that political theory is now concerned to insist on its own limitations, to be critical and even negative in character. This is not a new thing. The lack of philosophical inspiration combined with the decline of “scientific” aspirations has plagued politically sensitive minds at least since the very beginning of the present century. And, from the first, one of the responses to this frustration has been the effort to escape philosophical difficulties by grasping at intuitive short-cuts to truth. The most remarkable of these flights to intuition was political Bergsonism. Moreover, this is not an entirely closed chapter in the history of ideas. Even if Bergson no longer enjoys his earlier popularity, he is still widely read, especially in America. Again, the recent vogue of existentialist “politics” points to an analogous trend, while the penchant for “action,” which is inherent in intuitive politics, is as strong as ever among French intellectuals.

In quest of the universal language

2002 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 299-313 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert E. Stillman
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
English Translation ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Test Case ◽  
Specific Time ◽  
Good Test ◽  
Universal Language ◽  
Philosophical Language ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of

The new English translation of Paolo Rossi’s now classic study, Logic and the Art of Memory, presents a useful opportunity to examine contemporary efforts to understand what its subtitle calls “the quest for a universal language.” At the same time, an old seventeenth-century philosophical romance, Thomas Urquhart’s Jewel, affords a good test case for evaluating the success of those contemporary critical efforts — including Rossi’s own. First among contemporary scholars, Rossi made it possible to study seriously the seventeenth-century universal language movement by recovering the history of an idea — the pursuit of the so-called clavis universalis, the universal key to knowledge, from the ancient arts of memory to the Enlightenment’s philosophical language projects. While Rossi’s study has clearly withstood the test of time, since it still has much to teach us about the history of an idea — what Urquhart would call “pure eloquence” — his study has less utility in clarifying the status of that idea in history. Understanding Urquhart’s Jewel requires, I argue, two different forms of history whose interplay is always complicated: the history of ideas and the history of those politically charged engagements with ideas by authors whose situation at a specific time and a specific place brings meanings to their work that transcend epistemological concerns alone.

VICTORIAN READERS

2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 727-739
Author(s):  
Miriam Bailin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Victorian Literature ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Jane Eyre ◽  
Home Life ◽  
Know How ◽  
Imitation Of Christ ◽  
Small Collection ◽  
History Of ◽  
As If

There is, perhaps, no richer archive of Victorian reading experiences than Victorian literature itself. We know how Maggie Tulliver, child of the rural Midlands in the early years of the nineteenth century, felt when reading the Imitation of Christ in the bleak aftermath of her father's bankruptcy, how the young David Copperfield felt sitting on his bed in Suffolk, “reading as if for life” in the shadow of an abusive home life (56; ch. iv), and how a besieged Jane Eyre felt reading Bewick's History of British Birds in the window-seat at Gateshead; we know because Eliot, Dickens, and Brontë trace those feelings and their significance in vivid detail. We know more: Maggie's book, is a “little, old, clumsy book. . .the corners turned down in many places” with “certain passages” marked in “strong pen and ink,” one of a job lot brought to her by Bob, the packman (301; bk. 4, ch. 3). We know that the novels available to David from the small collection on his father's shelf were largely picaresque tales from a hundred years earlier, Gil Blas, Humphrey Clinker, and Roderick Random; and that Jane was reading the second volume of Bewick's Birds with its evocative vignettes in the introductory pages, an edition whose letter-press the ten-year-old Jane “cared little for” (14; vol. 1, ch. 1).

Revisiting the ‘Darwin–Marx correspondence’: Multiple discovery and the rhetoric of priority

2021 ◽  
pp. 095269512110192
Author(s):  
Joel Barnes
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Evolutionary Biology ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Research Infrastructures ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Shed Light

Between the 1930s and the mid 1970s, it was commonly believed that in 1880 Karl Marx had proposed to dedicate to Charles Darwin a volume or translation of Capital but that Darwin had refused. The detail was often interpreted by scholars as having larger significance for the question of the relationship between Darwinian evolutionary biology and Marxist political economy. In 1973–4, two scholars working independently—Lewis Feuer, professor of sociology at Toronto, and Margaret Fay, a graduate student at Berkeley—determined simultaneously that the traditional story of the proposed dedication was untrue, being based on a long-standing misinterpretation of the relevant correspondence. Between the two, and among several other scholars who became their respective allies, there developed a contest of authority and priority over the discovery. From 1975 to 1982, the controversy generated a considerable volume of spilled ink in both scholarly and popular publications. Drawing on previously unexamined archival resources, this article revisits the ‘case’ of the so-called ‘Darwin–Marx correspondence’ as an instance of the phenomenon of ‘multiple discovery’. A familiar occurrence in the natural sciences, multiple discovery is rarer in the humanities and social sciences. The present case of a priority dispute in the history of ideas followed patterns familiar from such disputes in the natural sciences, while also diverging from them in ways that shed light on the significance of disciplinary norms and research infrastructures.

Was Keynes Kuhnian? Keynes and the Idea of Theoretical Revolutions

1985 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 451-471 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Wayne Parsons
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Economic Theory ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
First Flush ◽  
Scientific Revolutions ◽  
Structure Of Scientific Revolutions ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of

Notwithstanding the shortcomings of his argument, T. S. Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions continues to have a significant impact on the way in which economics and other social sciences view themselves. Indeed, it could be said that Kuhn's influence has been much the greater on the more methodologically disposed social sciences than upon the natural sciences to which his original thesis was addressed. However, since the first flush of enthusiasm for Kuhn amongst the social sciences there has emerged, as Keith Tribe has noted, a growing unease with the thesis on the grounds that it is ‘not capable of doing the work that it is called upon to perform’. Nevertheless, despite these new found doubts Kuhn's ideas still provide – to use a ‘Kuhnian’ expression – a powerful ‘framework’ through which changes in economic theory, such as the ‘Keynesian Revolution’, may be understood. Because consideration of such matters has been primarily the preserve of economists preoccupied with the development of techniques of economic analysis, rather than of students of politics concerned with the history of ideas, other issues, such as Keynes's notion of theoretical change and revolution, have in the analysis of the ‘Keynesian Revolution’ been neglected. Indeed, as Axel Leijonhufvud has observed, the absence from the debate on the structure of scientific revolutions of philosophically disposed case studies from economics and other social sciences has itself left social science ‘unsure about what exactly we can learn from it’.

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