scholarly journals Invincible Ignorance and the Americas: Why and How the Salamancan Theologians Made Use of a Medieval Notion

2018 ◽  
Vol 2018 (26) ◽  
pp. 284-297
Author(s):  
Marco Toste
Keyword(s):  
1988 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 393-405 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. B. Pippard
Keyword(s):  

1944 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 160-165
Author(s):  
Howard Mumford Jones

It is with genuine pleasure that I bring to the founders of the Academy of American Franciscan History the good wishes and congratulations of the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.Having said this, and having said it with all the sincerity at my command, I ought, if a Spartan laconicism were proper, to sit down. The assembly will recognize, I am sure, that I am a pious fraud. I represent a novel and interesting version of what I may term invincible ignorance. I venture to address you as fellow students, but I do not dare to address you as fellow scholars, since this would either exalt me beyond my desert or degrade you below your merit. This Academy is being founded to recapture a tradition descending from the Middle Ages—and I am no mediaevalist, except in the sense that it was once said of a lady of uncertain time of life that around her hung the last enchantments of the middle ages. You are launching an historical venture, but I am, alas, only a dean, and no opinion is more universal in the learned world than that a dean, whatever lower virtues he may possess, is ipso facto no scholar. When the harassed chairman of an alumni club, in search of better oratory, wired the president of his alma mater to send him a good speaker, preferably a professor but certainly not lower than a dean, the president replied: “I am sending you two assistant professors. There is nothing lower than a dean.”


Diametros ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Maciej Marek Zając

Just War Theory debates discussing the principle of the Moral Equality of Combatants (MEC) involve the notion of Invincible Ignorance; the claim that warfi ghters are morally excused for participating in an unjust war because of their epistemic limitations. Conditions of military deployment may indeed lead to genuinely insurmountable epistemic limitations. In other cases, these may be overcome. This paper provides a preliminary sketch of heuristics designed to allow a combatant to judge whether or not his war is just. It delineates the sets of relevant facts uncontroversially accessible and inaccessible to contemporary professional soldiers. Relevant facts outside these two sets should by default be treated as inaccessible until proven otherwise. Even such a rudimentary heuristic created in this way demonstrates that practical recommendations of MEC-renouncing Just War Theory are not too challenging to follow and still signifi cantly impact a compliant combatant’s behavior.


1993 ◽  
Vol 35 ◽  
pp. 51-62
Author(s):  
Renford Bambrough

As there is a condition of mind which is characterized by invincible ignorance, so there is another which may be said to be possessed of invincible knowledge; and it would be paradoxical in me to deny to such a mental state the highest quality of religious faith,—I mean certitude. (J. H. Newman, Grammar of Assent, 138–139)‘She's an artist. She keeps saying the same thing without repeating herself. (Iris Murdoch, The Good Apprentice, 66)In being initiated into our life as human beings we are subject to causal influences; guiding, teaching, restraint, compulsion, incentives, rewards, warnings, penalties. Until such influences have achieved their most important work we do not share the human understanding within which there can be ratiocination, evidence, argument. So there is and must be a causal story of how we come to acquire a human understanding; a causal story for the species as a whole and a causal story for each of us; and there is not and could not be any acceptable account, either for the species or for the individual, of how we reasoned or argued our way into our initial and fundamental understanding. I say the same thing without repeating myself if I call such knowledge and understanding invincible. It is not possible to Overthrow it by reasoning any more than it is possible to establish it by reasoning.


Author(s):  
Gavin D'Costa

Chapter 2 faces the challenge that previous Catholic teachings have implied that Jewish rituals are both dead and deadening. Through a close examination of the Council of Florence and other magisterial teachings, it is established that the conditions under which dead and deadening operated do not actually relate to contemporary Rabbinic Judaism as understood in Catholic teaching. If invincible ignorance of the truth of Christ is presupposed, then Jewish practices can be understood very positively. It is also established that earlier teachings did positively view the practice of Jewish rituals in the early Church and by Jesus and the apostles. This is significant for the concluding chapter.


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