Humanism in Africa

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. A. Masolo
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Human Person ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Mutual Dependency ◽  
Human Reality ◽  
Modes Of Thought ◽  
The Middle Ages

This chapter shows that the idea of humanism in contemporary African thought takes as its backdrop the historical interaction between Africa and foreign cultural and political invasions of the continent since the Middle Ages. Christianity and Islam, before European political invasion, introduced novel concepts and values of the human person and human life, introducing with them new political and social concepts and structures. The emerging synchrony and sometimes tensions between these and indigenous African worldviews have seen African philosophers and political visionaries reaching out to indigenous African modes of thought, whether secular or with some supernatural inclinations, as reservoirs of better concepts of human nature that will heal a world broken by unsound concepts of human nature that not only resulted in unsound epistemological and other philosophical theories, but also produced the injustices of domination, racism, and inequality across the globe. Grounded in the idea of the relational nature of humans among themselves and with nature, African philosophers and thinkers have argued that the well-being of human and non-human reality depends on developing and defending the values of mutual dependency.

The Four Paradoxes of Nuclear Strategy

1964 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans J. Morgenthau
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Use Of Force ◽  
Nuclear War ◽  
Nuclear Strategy ◽  
Nuclear Age ◽  
Modern Age ◽  
Modes Of Thought ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Middle Ages

The nuclear age has ushered in a novel period of history, as distinct from the age that preceded it as the modern age has been from the Middle Ages or the Middle Ages have been from antiquity. Yet while our conditions of life have drastically changed under the impact of the nuclear age, we still live in our thoughts and act through our institutions in an age that has passed. There exists, then, a gap between what we think about our social, political, and philosophic problems and the objective conditions which the nuclear age has created.This contradiction between our modes of thought and action, belonging to an age that has passed, and the objective conditions of our existence has engendered four paradoxes in our nuclear strategy: the commitment to the use of force, nuclear or otherwise, paralyzed by the fear of having to use it; the search for a nuclear strategy which would avoid the predictable consequences of nuclear war; the pursuit of a nuclear armaments race joined with attempts to stop it; the pursuit of an alliance policy which the availability of nuclear weapons has rendered obsolete. All these paradoxes result from the contrast between traditional attitudes and the possibility of nuclear war and from the fruitless attempts to reconcile the two.

Receiving the Ars Poetica

2019 ◽  
pp. 244-272
Author(s):  
Jennifer Ferriss-Hill
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Artistic Process ◽  
Literary Achievement ◽  
Ars Poetica ◽  
Made In ◽  
The Middle Ages ◽  
Making Art

This epilogue traces the themes and concerns of the previous chapters throughout the Ars Poetica's considerable reception history. If the Ars Poetica's poetic qualities have not always been clear to scholars of literature, they seem to have been more evident to the practicing writers who, inspired by Horace's poem, wrote artes poeticae of their own. Indeed, practicing poets have long discerned what many literary scholars have not: that the poem's value lies not so much in its stated contents as in its fine-spun internal unity; in its interest in human nature and the onward march of time; in the importance of criticism—both giving and receiving it—to the artistic process; and in the essential sameness of writing, of making art, and of living, loving, being, and even dying. The argument made in this study for reading the Ars Poetica as a literary achievement in its own right may therefore be viewed as a return to the complex, nuanced ways in which it was already read in the Middle Ages, through the sixteenth century, and into the twenty-first. The authors of the later works examined in this chapter read the Ars Poetica as exemplifying and instantiating the sort of artistry that it opaquely commands, and they reflected this in turn through their own verses.

Hume and the Legacy of Academic Scepticism

2019 ◽  
pp. 39-76
Author(s):  
Peter S. Fosl
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
David Hume ◽  
General Framework ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Early Modernity ◽  
Treatise Of Human Nature ◽  
Pierre Bayle ◽  
The Middle Ages

Chapter Two of Hume’s Scepticism charts the development of Academic scepticism from Cicero and Augustine, through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and into early modernity. The exposition is organized around sceptical ideas that anticipated or may have influenced David Hume, who describes himself an ‘academical’ sceptic. The chapter also sets out Cicero’s influence upon Hume, scepticism at the college in La Flèche where Hume wrote much of A Treatise of Human Nature, and Hume’s self-conception of Academic scepticism. Accounts of sceptical ideas in Marin Mersenne, Simon Foucher, John Locke, Pierre-Daniel Huet, and Pierre Bayle set the stage for Hume’s own Academicism. The chapter closes with a five-point General Framework defining Academic Scepticism.

scholarly journals The Livery Companies of London

1927 ◽  
Vol 1 (6) ◽  
pp. 7-8
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The Church ◽  
Creative Tasks ◽  
The Middle Ages

The mediaeval craft guild owing its origin to religion, and protected by the church, was a remarkable institution in its way, caring as it did, at least in its best days, for the well-being of its members while exacting from them a certain standard of workmanship. It is an arguable point that the worker of the Middle Ages, often engaged on creative tasks and deriving from his labor the satisfaction of his artistic instincts, was a happier man than the modern factory employee, whose work frequently consists in the continuous repetition of one monotonous operation.

scholarly journals Etyczne warunki rezygnacji z uporczywej terapii

2013 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 159-171
Author(s):  
Wojciech Bołoz
Keyword(s):  
Medical Treatment ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Therapeutic Benefit ◽  
Exceptional Value ◽  
Futile Therapy ◽  
Accepted Practice ◽  
The Middle Ages

Death is an inevitable phenomenon, but it can be experienced with dignity. For this reason, people are continually seeking decent ways to die. One of these is avoiding or moving away from so-called aggressive medical treatment if it doesn’t provide the dying with any therapeutic benefit and only generates costs and prolongs suffering. Consensual, inevitable death has been practiced in medicine since the time of Hippocrates, although at the same time we can see a tendency towards the opposite, uncompromising fight to the end. This trend is sometimes justified by the exceptional value of human life, which demands both the patient’s and doctor’s heroism. Since the Middle Ages, it has been a widely accepted practice to limit the care for human life to the use of so-called, ordinary, and proportionate remedies. The acceptance of this principle also means withdrawing futile therapy.

The Manuscript Evidence and its Implications

2018 ◽  
pp. 288-301
Author(s):  
Ali Bonner
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Christian Teaching ◽  
The Middle Ages

This chapter presents data on the numbers of surviving manuscript copies of Pelagius’ works. The large number of surviving manuscript copies shows that, travelling under false attributions, Pelagius’ writings were widely available throughout the Middle Ages. The chapter offers an analysis of the manuscript evidence and its significance, showing that without an external authority identifying a work as by Pelagius, his works passed as orthodox and did not attract comment. It also discusses the evidence of marginalia, showing that readers could not see a difference between Pelagius’ letters and Jerome’s; a discussion of further myths about Pelagius—that his works were dangerous to Christianity, that they were expelled from Christian teaching, and that questions over the Biblical account of human nature and how salvation was determined were ever resolved in western Christianity.

Miron Costin și epoca în care a trăit

Transilvania ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 91-96
Author(s):  
Carmen Oprișor
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Complex Structure ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
17Th Century ◽  
Cultural Conditions ◽  
The Middle Ages

In the present article we pointed out the historical context in which our culture came into being. We also showed what social and cultural conditions of the Middle Ages influenced the evolution of our civilization. Miron Costin`s work, a Romanian historian from the 17th century, was imbued with literary features. He was educated in Poland and he became an important scholar. Costin was very concerned with writing a chronicle with a complex structure and with elaborate sentences. He created memorable human portraits in vivid colours, and his remarks upon history and human nature are still relevant to us today. He was also the first writer whose chronicle proved to be the work of a gifted memorialist.

The Corporate Idea and the Body Politic in the Middle Ages

1947 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 423-452 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anton-Hermann Chroust
Keyword(s):  
Moral Education ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Western World ◽  
Human Society ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
Doctrine Of The Church ◽  
The Middle Ages

The social thought of the Middle Ages, which undertook to comprehend and scientifically to formulate the nature and foundation of all human society, proceeded from the principle of a single and uniform but articulate whole. The idea of an organic conception of all human society in its entirety was as familiar to the mediaeval mind as the notion of an atomistic or mechanistic constrution of human associations was alien to that mind. Aside from issuing into a distinct and definite theory of “public law,” the mediaeval efforts to understand mankind in its entirety and to treat every form of human society as an organic unity were the starting points of a novel philosophy of law and state which brought about a new and glorious development of legal, social, and political ideas. This development was fully in line with the professed aim of the mediaeval spirit, namely the spiritual and moral education of die western world. It had for its core the doctrine of the Church, and for its goal the elaboration of an integrated outlook on all of human life. In die fields of legal, social, and political speculation this development was greatly enhanced by the collaboration of theologians, philosophers, and jurists. Here, as elsewhere, die mediaeval mind displayed and, on the whole, preserved that high degree of unity of thought and purpose which had its roots not only in that commonly shared conception of a single harmonious universe governed by one infinitely wise God, but also in the conviction that all first premises of right thought or right action were divinely revealed truths rather than discoveries made by human reason alone.

SIGNS and MEANINGS: Translation in the Middle Ages versus Translation today: The Semiotics of Translation

2014 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 47-79
Author(s):  
Astrid Guillaume
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Semiotic Analysis ◽  
Translation Process ◽  
Source Language ◽  
Modes Of Thought ◽  
Target Culture ◽  
The Middle Ages

Abstract Translation in the Middle Ages did not involve the same constraints as translation today for various reasons, which this article will attempt to highlight through a semiotic analysis of the opposing powers and other translation-related pressures which interact in the translation process. This process involves a source language and a target language, but above all a source culture and target culture. Translation in the Middle Ages, like translation today, is primarily about taking into consideration certain constraints, some of which are shared between the two eras but which, in all cases, take into account the period in which they were translated. Indeed, an era involves modes of thought, political and religious ideologies, translation and stylistic practices that are unique to that particular time. If, as example periods, we have chosen two eras which are quite remote from each other, it is to demonstrate that the issues certainly differ, but not as much as one might imagine, particularly in certain political and ideological contexts.

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