Medicine and the Inquisition in Portugal (Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries): People and Books

2018 ◽  
Vol 23 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 92-113 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hervé Baudry

Abstract The Tribunal of the Inquisition was established in Portugal in 1536. This paper deals with three aspects concerning medicine in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Portugal: the institution and its members, the medical practitioners, and the books. On the one hand, doctors were necessary to carry out specific duties in the life of the Inquisition. On the other hand, a significant percentage of the victims of the Inquisition were medical professionals, the overwhelming majority being New Christians accused of Judaism. Finally, as did the Roman and Spanish Inquisitions, the Portuguese Holy Office looked after the censorship of books, many of which dealt with medical matters.

2013 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 377-389 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel W. Smith

This paper examines the intersecting of the themes of temporality and truth in Deleuze's philosophy. For the ancients, truth was something eternal: what was true was true in all times and in all places. Temporality (coming to be and passing away) was the realm of the mutable, not the eternal. In the seventeenth century, change began to be seen in a positive light (progress, evolution, and so on), but this change was seen to be possible only because of the immutable laws of nature that govern change. It was not until philosophers such as Bergson, James, Whitehead – and then Deleuze – that time began to be taken seriously on its own account. On the one hand, in Deleuze, time, freed from its subordination to movement, now becomes autonomous: it is the pure form of change (continuous variation) that lies at the basis of Deleuze's metaphysics in Difference and Repetition (and is explored more thematically in The Time-Image). As a result, on the other hand, the false, freed from its subordination to the form of the true, assumes a power of its own (the power of the false), which in turn implies a new ‘analytic of the concept’ that Deleuze develops in What Is Philosophy?


2014 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean-Louis Quantin

AbstractIn seventeenth-century religious discourse, the status of solitude was deeply ambivalent: on the one hand, solitude was valued as a setting and preparation for self-knowledge and meditation; on the other hand, it had negative associations with singularity, pride and even schism. The ambiguity of solitude reflected a crucial tension between the temptation to withdraw from contemporary society, as hopelessly corrupt, and endeavours to reform it. Ecclesiastical movements which stood at the margins of confessional orthodoxies, such as Jansenism (especially in its moral dimension of Rigorism), Puritanism and Pietism, targeted individual conscience but also worked at controlling and disciplining popular behaviour. They may be understood as attempts to pursue simultaneously withdrawal and engagement.


2012 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-195 ◽  
Author(s):  
Muzaffar Alam

This article examines a seventeenth-century text that attempts to reconcile Hindu and Muslim accounts of human genesis and cosmogony. The text, Mir’āt al-Makhlūqāt (‘Mirror of Creation’), written by a noted Mughal Sufi author Shaikh ‘Abd al-Rahman Chishti, purportedly a translation of a Sanskrit text, adopts rhetorical strategies and mythological elements of the Purāna tradition in order to argue that evidence of the Muslim prophets was available in ancient Hindu scriptures. Chishti thus accepts the reality of ancient Hindu gods and sages and notes the truth in their message. In doing so Chishti adopts elements of an older argument within the Islamic tradition that posits thousands of cycles of creation and multiple instances of Adam, the father of humans. He argues however that the Hindu gods and sages belonged to a different order of creation and time, and were not in fact human. The text bears some generic resemblance to Bhavishyottarapurāna materials. Chishti combines aspects of polemics with a deft use of politics. He addresses, on the one hand, Hindu intellectuals who claimed the prestige of an older religion, while he also engages, on the other hand, with Muslim theologians and Sufis like the Naqshbandi Mujaddidis who for their part refrained from engaging with Hindu traditions at all.


1994 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 127-146 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Hunwick

Murray Last obliquely suggests that [the “Kano Chronicle”] is best regarded as a rather free compilation of local legends and traditions drafted in the mid-seventeenth century by a humorous Muslim rationalist who almost seems to have studied under Levi-Strauss.The danger lies in being carried away by one's own ingenuity.The question of the authorship and date(s) of writing of the so-called “Kano Chronicle” (KC) and hence how historians should evaluate it as a source, have intrigued students of Kano (and wider Hausa) history since the work was first translated into English by H. R. Palmer in 1908. Palmer himself had the following to say:The manuscript is of no great age, and must on internal evidence have been written during the latter part of the decade 1883-1893; but it probably represents some earlier record which has now perished….The authorship is unknown, and it is very difficult to make a guess. On the one hand the general style of the composition is quite unlike the “note” struck by the sons of Dan Hodio [ʿUthmān b. Fūdī, Abdulahi and Muḥammad Bello, and imitated by other Fulani writers. There is almost complete absence of bias or partizanship…. On the other hand, the style of the Arabic is not at all like that usually found in the compositions of Hausa mallams of the present day; there are not nearly enough “classical tags” so to speak, in it…. That the author was thoroughly au fait with the Kano dialect of Hausa is evident from several phrases used in the book, for instance “ba râyi ba” used in a sense peculiar to Kano of “perforce.” The original may perhaps have been written by some stranger from the north who settled in Kano, and collected the stories of former kings handed down by oral tradition.


2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 68-85
Author(s):  
Karl Loxbo

In light of Sweden’s exceptionally high levels of generalised trust, a widely argued view is that this country is well equipped to counterbalance contemporary challenges of xenophobia and build trust between diverse groups. However, while trust remains at high levels in Sweden, the same, somewhat paradoxically, goes for xenophobic attitudes. Therefore, the main question addressed in this article is why many Swedes report that they trust ‘most people in general’ while simultaneously displaying high levels of xenophobia. Drawing on unique survey-data, the article presents three main answers. First, the article shows that Swedish respondents place much more trust in their cultural in-group – which they tend to equate with ‘most people’ – than in their cultural out-group. Second, when relating these different measures of trust to respondents’ degree of xenophobia, on the one hand, and their party preferences, on the other hand, the article shows that an overwhelming majority of the electorate report that they trust people from Western Europe, while only a minority report that they tolerate and trust non-Europeans. Third, and most crucially, the article finds that high trust in the cultural out-group is associated with tolerance, whereas high trust in the in-group instead appears to breed xenophobia.   


Author(s):  
Alexander Broadie

This chapter expounds the concept of ‘judgment’, a concept deployed by seventeenth-century Scottish philosophers in their philosophy of mind. Close attention is paid to the discussion on judgment in the Metaphysica generalis of Robert Baron, where he addresses the idea of judgment as a free act. A notable feature of Baron’s treatment of judgment is his contrast between, on the one hand, the logician’s concern with judgment as a bearer of truth in inferences in which canons of inference are deployed that ensure that if the judgments serving as premises are true then so also must be the judgment drawn as a conclusion from those premises; and, on the other hand, a judgment that is passed by an arbiter, a person agreed upon by two parties in dispute who undertake to accept the judgment he makes as to which party is in the right.


1998 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-195 ◽  
Author(s):  
Haim Gerber

AbstractIn this study I reexamine some well-known generalizations about Islamic law prior to the impact of the West, e.g., the contention that Islamic law became increasingly closed, based more and more on blind imitation. My examination of the fatwā collection of the seventeenth-century Palestinian Muftī Khayr al-Dīn al-Ramlī suggests that increasing closure never took place. On the one hand al-Ramlī faithfully continues the tradition of his classical predecessors, or, in other words, he practices taqlīd by obligating himself to earlier authorities. On the other hand, his fatwās convey a sense of openness, flexibility, and liveliness. These characteristics are concretized in some of the major terms that he uses: ijtihād, or free discretion of the jurist in areas of the law that remained open; iṣtiḥsān, or relaxation of formal rules; and ʿurf, or local customary law, which, by definition, is changeable over time. In my view, the flexibility of Islamic law has been underemphasized in the scholarly literature, and hence it is on this factor in particular that I have chosen to concentrate.


1999 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 407-419
Author(s):  
Christine M. Newman

The Bowes of Streatlam, in the bishopric of Durham, were notable on two counts in the later part of the sixteenth century. On the one hand, they were highly regarded for their uncompromising loyalty to the Crown, an attachment which was to bring them disastrously close to the brink of financial ruin under the parsimonious Elizabeth, who repeatedly failed to reimburse and compensate them for activities undertaken in her name. On the other hand, the family was particularly noted in the religiously conservative north for its staunch adherence to the Protestant faith. The seeds of this Protestantism were in evidence from the earliest years of the Reformation, but it was given greater definition and inspiration by the example of Elizabeth Bowes, the ardent adherent and later mother-in-law of the Scottish reformer John Knox. Yet, if Elizabeth was the first, she was certainly not the only uncompromisingly Protestant matron in the Bowes family during this period. Towards the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth century the second wife of her grandson Sir William Bowes was to assume Elizabeth’s spiritual mantle, thereby reinforcing still further the family’s attachment to the Reformed faith.


2011 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 296-330 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carla Rita Palmerino

AbstractThis article documents the general tendency of seventeenth-century natural philosophers, irrespective of whether they were atomists or anti-atomists, to regard space, time and matter as magnitudes having the same internal composition. It examines the way in which authors such as Fromondus, Basson, Sennert, Arriaga, Galileo, Magnen, Descartes, Gassendi, Charleton as well as the young Newton motivated their belief in the isomorphism of space, time and matter, and how this belief reflected on their views concerning the relation between geometry and physics. Special attention is paid to the fact that most of the authors mentioned above regarded rarefaction and condensation, on the one hand, and acceleration and deceleration, on the other hand, as analogous phenomena, which consequently had to be explained in similar terms.


Author(s):  
Adrián Alcolea Moreno ◽  
Javier Olivito ◽  
Javier Resano

Due to sparsity, a significant percentage of the operations carried out in Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) contains a zero in at least one of their operands. Different approaches try to take advantage of sparsity in two different ways. On the one hand, sparse matrices can be easily compressed, saving space and memory bandwidth. On the other hand, multiplications with zero in their operands can be avoided. We propose the implementation in an FPGA of an architecture for CNNs capable of taking advantage of both, sparsity and filter compression.    


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