Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations: A Sceptical Reading

Cicero wrote his later philosophical works as an Academic sceptic. In those dialogues, he often writes speeches for and against a proposition, leaving the reader’s judgement free. But in his Tusculan Disputations, Cicero speaks only against an interlocutor’s stated belief. He does this five times. The theses of Cicero’s five arguments form a Stoic outlook on happiness. Can the Tusculans be sceptical? I argue that Cicero aims to convince neither his interlocutor, nor the reader, of the truth of what he argues for. Rather, he aims to argue us out of each stated belief, and not into any other. I further argue Cicero the author chooses to argue against exactly the five beliefs of his interlocutors not to argue for any dogmatic position, but to argue against five beliefs that are very widely believed, and troubling to believe. Academic scepticism can relieve us of those beliefs and troubles.

Self-Recording of a National Disaster: Oral History and the Palestinian Nakba

It was the stated belief of Zionist leaders that Palestinians expelled from Palestine in 1948 would forget their country within one or two generations. This has not happened and it is therefore a question for research through what relationships and social processes memories of the original land, and the way of life within it, have been produced and reproduced over more than seventy years. This paper is based on interviews as well as participant observation in two camps, Shateela and Bourj al-Barajneh near Beirut (Lebanon), augmented by email interviews with a wider range of Palestinian subjects, both geographically and socially.

Preliminary Study of Death Anxiety of Believers versus Percipients of the Paranormal

This research tested the hypotheses that belief in the paranormal is associated with a lessening of death anxiety and that direct experiences of the paranormal are stronger correlates with less fear than the stated belief. Contrary to predictions, scores on Templer's 1970 Death Anxiety Scale were not associated with scores on either Belief in the Paranormal or Paranormal Experiences, subscales of the Anomalous Experiences Inventory. Instead, significant sex differences were found on three out of the five subscales which indicate a need to clarify possible sex-specific variables in the perception and report of anomalous phenomena by 14 men and 19 women.

Towards a history of the Royal Society in the eighteenth century

A long-standing impression persists among scholars - with a few exceptions - that the Royal Society of London was in decline during the eighteenth century. This misperception has stemmed from four major sources: from the often-stated belief that the Society failed to follow the illustrious example that its greatest Fellow, Sir Isaac Newton, had set in the Principia ; from the negative opinions, repeatedly quoted, of several literary lions of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries; from the continued popularity of Babbage’s Reflections on the Decline of Science in England , published in 1830, which has cast a pall over the reputation of the Society in the eighteenth century ever since; and from the intensive study devoted to the Society’s early years, which has overshadowed later periods.

Azusa and Other Myths: The Long and Winding Road from Experience to Stated Belief and Back Again

Those must have been marvelous days, when signs and wonders were accompanying the early days of the Pentecostal revival at the beginning of this century. The more Pentecostals search the roots of their movement, the more evidence is found that a charismatic spirituality lies at the heart of the Pentecostal phenomenon that has brought an impulse of renewal to twentieth-century Christianity. I believe that Pentecostals need to learn to appreciate their past metaphorically in order to recover and incorporate that early charismatic spirituality into today's Christian experience. Spiritual thirst today will not be quenched by mere deductive propositions and statements of doctrine. In order to illustrate my point, I invite you first to look at the concept of "initial evidence" as it has been discussed in the recent book edited by Gary B. McGee.1 In a second step, I will illustrate the difficulties arising from a conceptualization, or should I say objectivization, of such a phenomenon. Then, I will suggest reasons and provide tools that encourage believers of today to find their way back to the roots and the early spirituality of Pentecostalism, without, at the same time, rejecting some of the information and interpretive understandings that Pentecostals have gathered from a critical, analytical approach. It is a journey from the marvelous memories of early Pentecostalism, to hypothetic-deductive procedures, and back to a mythic consciousness of God's Spirit working among God's people today.