Supposition Theory and Porretan Theology: Summa Zwettlensis and Dialogus Ratii et Everardi

Vivarium ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 51 (1-4) ◽  
pp. 119-144 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luisa Valente

Abstract The article investigates how the problem of (linguistic) reference is treated in the theology of two pupils of Gilbert of Poitiers by means of suppo* terms (supponere; suppositus,-a,-um; suppositio). Supposition is for Gilbert an action performed by a speaker, not a property of terms, and he considers language as a system for communication between human beings: key notions are the ‘sense in the author’s mind’ and the ‘interpreter’s understanding’. In contrast, the two Porretans tend to objectify language as a formal system of terms. Suppositio becomes in the Summa Zwettlensis the name itself as subject term in a proposition, and is divided into many kinds; formal rules are described which govern the influence of the predicate on the subject term’s denotation. In Everard of Ypres’ Dialogus Ratii et Everardi, supponere is a function (officium) of the name, and ‘human is a species of individuals’ is, as in some logical treatises and differently from Gilbert, a case of rhetorical transfer.

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-37
Author(s):  
Syarifudin Syarifudin

Each religious sect has its own characteristics, whether fundamental, radical, or religious. One of them is Insan Al-Kamil Congregation, which is in Cijati, South Cikareo Village, Wado District, Sumedang Regency. This congregation is Sufism with the concept of self-purification as the subject of its teachings. So, the purpose of this study is to reveal how the origin of Insan Al-Kamil Congregation, the concept of its purification, and the procedures of achieving its purification. This research uses a descriptive qualitative method with a normative theological approach as the blade of analysis. In addition, the data generated is the result of observation, interviews, and document studies. From the collected data, Jamaah Insan Al-Kamil adheres to the core teachings of Islam and is the tenth regeneration of Islam Teachings, which refers to the Prophet Muhammad SAW. According to this congregation, self-perfection becomes an obligation that must be achieved by human beings in order to remember Allah when life is done. The process of self-purification is done when human beings still live in the world by knowing His God. Therefore, the peak of self-purification is called Insan Kamil. 


Author(s):  
Philip Goff

This is the first of two chapters discussing the most notorious problem facing Russellian monism: the combination problem. This is actually a family of difficulties, each reflecting the challenge of how to make sense of everyday human and animal experience intelligibly arising from more fundamental conscious or protoconscious features of reality. Key challenges facing panpsychist and panpsychist forms of Russellian monism are considered. With respect to panprotopsychism, there is the worry that it collapses into noumenalism: the view that human beings, by their very nature, are unable to understand the concrete, categorical nature of matter. With respect to panpsychism, there is the subject-summing problem: the difficulty making sense of how micro-level conscious subjects combine to produce macro-level conscious subjects. A solution to the subject-summing problem is proposed, and it is ultimately argued that panpsychist forms of the Russellian monism are to be preferred on grounds of simplicity and elegance.


Author(s):  
Christine M. Korsgaard

According to the marginal cases argument, there is no property that might justify making a moral difference between human beings and the other animals that is both uniquely and universally human. It is therefore “speciesist” to treat human beings differently just because we are human beings. While not challenging the conclusion, this chapter argues that the marginal cases argument is metaphysically misguided. It ignores the differences between a life stage and a kind, and between lacking a property and having it in a defective form. The chapter then argues for a view of moral standing that attributes it to the subject of a life conceived as an atemporal being, and shows how this view can resolve some familiar puzzles such as how death can be a loss to the person who has died, how we can wrong the dead, the “procreation asymmetry,” and the “non-identity problem.”


Vivarium ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 51 (1-4) ◽  
pp. 260-274
Author(s):  
Simo Knuuttila

Abstract Many fourteenth-century logicians took affirmative propositions to maintain that the subject term and the predicate term stand or supposit for the same. This is called the identity theory of predication by historians and praedicatio identica (or one form of praedicatio identica) by Paul of Venice and others. The identity theory of predication was an important part of early fourteenth-century Trinitarian discussions as well, but what was called praedicatio identica by Duns Scotus and his followers in this context was something different. After some remarks on Scotus’s view and its background, I shall analyse Adam Wodeham’s explanation of Scotus’s praedicatio identica and how he understood the assumptions pertaining to supposition in the Scotist approach. I also describe Wodeham’s own solution to Trinitarian sophisms, which did not deviate from the identity theory of predication.


2019 ◽  
Vol 160 (39) ◽  
pp. 1527-1532
Author(s):  
Bettina Pikó ◽  
Erzsébet Kapocsi ◽  
Gergely Tari ◽  
Hedvig Kiss ◽  
Katalin Barabás

Abstract: It is a necessary part of modern medical education that medical students should learn about the binary nature of human beings – biological and cultural – since both have an impact on our behavior. The subject of medical anthropology helps with understanding the mechanisms and lay concepts behind patients’ decisions which is particularly important in our globalized world. The major goal of this course is to help medical students with acquiring cultural competence through theoretical bases and empirical examples that may help them later in their work when they meet patients with different cultural backgrounds. In the present study, we introduce the course of Medical Anthropology as it happens at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Szeged: the so-called Szeged model – its aims, syllabus, strengths, opportunities and possible difficulties. During the development of the subject, we greatly focused on its links to other subjects of behavioral and medical sciences and on its practice-oriented nature. Thus, the course partly contains of lectures and seminars which display cultural variability in relation to biological reality through practical examples. As a result, the topics of medical anthropology prepare the students to use the knowledge as well as skills and attitudes in clinical practice. Orv Hetil. 2019; 160(39): 1527–1532.


2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-77
Author(s):  
Kamau Wango

Artistic commemoration of leaders and other iconic personalities has been in existence for centuries. Statues in particular have been used as a fitting avenue for the commemoration of political leaders and other luminaries in many fields. The premise upon which statues are made is that the subjects featured initiated and attained, in their lifetimes, concrete achievements that significantly impacted upon the lives of their fellow human beings. Other criteria for commemoration include proven integrity, dedication and selflessness in the service of the country and citizens. Statues as an integral part of public art have often generated substantial controversy on various fronts in many countries. Some of these gravitate around issues such as disputed likeness, queries about the fundamental achievements cited of the subject, at times open protests on the actions, character and integrity of the subject as well as the location of the statues. Other areas of contention include the implication of the presence of statues upon the political psyche of the country and their long-time impact on history, the youth and posterity. This paper examines the extent to which African countries have embraced this mode of artistic rendition to commemorate African political leaders in a way that is commensurate to their achievements. It is outside the scope of this paper to delve into the intricate web of back-and-forth arguments about the ‘concreteness’ of the legacies of the featured leaders who are mainly founding political figures of the respective countries. The paper, however, analyses the artistic essence of the selected statues in terms of their visual impact and whether they are indeed useful in articulating the legacies of the subjects and further, whether they ultimately bear ‘enduring visual value’ that spurs conversation and insight into these legacies. Statues must, at the very least, spur debate and conversation into the legacy of the featured subject. It becomes a form of constant interrogation as history itself takes its course; controversy is not necessarily a negative occurrence since it forms part of this discourse. The concept of immortalization, which is what initiators of statues often hope for is much harder to achieve and difficult to define. The paper examines 20 statues of African political leaders in different African Countries.


Author(s):  
Professor John Swarbrooke

I completed the main text of this book a few days before Coronavirus, as it was called at the beginning, started to become a major story in the news in Europe. Now, just over three months later, as the book is about go for printing it seems as if the COVID-19 pandemic, as it is now called, is about the only story in the world’s media. In the circumstances, it seems important that I say something about the virus and its potential impact on the subject of this book. As I write these words, in early Ma y 2020, the pandemic has killed at least 264,000 people worldwide and some 3.8 million people are confirmed to have been infected, although the actual number is likely to be significantly higher as many people who have had the virus may not have had it confirmed through testing. To put this in context, the Spanish Flu pandemic in 1918 killed an estimated 50 million people, while the highly publicised outbreak of SARS in 2003 killed fewer than 1,000 people. The 2014-2016 Ebola outbreak in Africa resulted in the deaths of an estimated 11,300 people. So COVID-19 is far and away the largest pandemic, in terms of deaths, to hit the world in just over a century. Of course, we do not yet know the final death toll from it, for as I write it is still continuing. Furthermore, unlike SARS and Ebola this virus is a true pandemic, affecting virtually every part of the planet where human beings live.


Author(s):  
Laurie M. Johnson

This chapter looks at the similarities and differences between Thucydides and Hobbes on the subject of regimes. Hobbes was convinced that Thucydides had proved the absurdity of democracy and the desirability of absolute monarchy. However, Hobbes misread Thucydides on this point. For Hobbes, monarchy was the only regime in which the selfish interests of the ruler and ruled rationally coincide. Revealingly, in order to deal with the leadership of Pericles, Hobbes had to characterize him superficially as a monarch, ignoring how Pericles won and maintained his power. But it is just the type of statesmanship exemplified by Pericles that Hobbes cannot accept because of his rigid assumptions about human nature. Thucydides' focus on the importance of studying the thought, character, and actions of statesmen is an important difference between the Thucydidean and the Hobbesian realist models. Hobbes's horror at civil violence led him to lose faith in ordinary human reason and thus in political deliberation. It is because he lost faith in the latter that scientific reason emerged as a powerful alternative. But if human beings are so unreasonable that one can no longer take seriously what they say, how can one expect them to be reasonable enough to accept Hobbes's prescriptions? The Hobbesian solution is that an absolute government must enforce the plan. The chapter then argues that this solution to political problems is even more dangerous than the Thucydidean solution, which relies on political rhetoric and judgment.


Author(s):  
Alexander Mansutti Rodríguez

Mansutti adopts Needham’s scheme of distinguishing three analytical levels; the jural rules; the statistical-behavioural, and the categorical. He includes a computer simulation to gain a time depth in his model of Piaroa kinship and marriage, which demonstrates that the exceptions to the marriage rules are not residual and inexplicable but are necessary to maintain the ideal model anticipated by the formal rules. Although violations of the rules are motivated by personal desires and not a desire to save the formal system, they are in fact necessary to its preservation. Moreover, he employs Bourdieu’s distinction between official and private kinship, and illustrates his approach with apposite case studies. For instance, he describes how personal interests can be transmuted into community interests, and genealogical relationships between two people in small-scale societies can be “read” along different routes with telling results.


Author(s):  
Anubhuti Dwivedi

Peace is a spiritual phenomenon, but it evolves through various disciplines – psychology, economics, biology, and so on. This is because human beings are complex in nature, and various facets of human existence are correlated with these disciplines. Peace is an integration of all aspects of humanism in a state of equilibrium. This chapter discusses peace as imbibed in ideas of microeconomic equilibrium. Economics is so often disapproved by spiritual thinkers as being a science of self-centeredness even after decades of progress in the subject matter after Alfred Marshall's “Principles of Economics.” This seems justified as today an ordinary man is still concerned with individual welfare first. Therefore, peace needs to be seen from this micro-perspective first so that the society may move to higher objectives later once the individuals are in equilibrium and have attained peace in this narrow but indispensable sense.


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