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“Give the work to the busy man,” my mother used to say. It made sense. A busy man (or woman, in her case) had momentum and a can-do spirit. The technical name for a can-do spirit is self-efficacy, a belief that you are capable of being effective. Psychologist Albert Bandura, who coined the term, attributes…
Introduction For more than thirty-eight years, I have taught Reformational Philosophy at Dutch state universities. Every two years, I dealt with the topic of Ethics of Technology. As a thinker about the relation between Christian faith and technology, I have always been much interested in this subject. How must we think ethically about, for example,…
1. Introduction The concept of evolution is crucial in Teilhard’s conception of the world; it is the most central concept in his “Weltbild”. Considering the importance of this concept, a look at the secondary literature surprises: There are many books and articles on Teilhard’s spirituality, on his concept of love, on his relationship to women…
The soul absent from philosophy Not many people would disagree with the remark that the term ‘soul’ is not often used in philosophical circles or heard in philosophical discussions nowadays. Its use is also quite limited in psychology, which, despite the etymology of its name has now little to do with an anatomy of the…
Writing in The Journal of Politics last year, Jon R. Bond reaffirmed the long-standing hope of many political scientists that someone in their discipline would come along “to do for political science what Newton did for physics.”1Political science “is truly a ‘hard’ science,” according to Bond, though that is “not the only way to study…
øQuÈ pueden significar sensaciÛn y percepciÛn? øSon utilizados ante todo como tÈrminos sinÛnimos, coextensivos? øO bien media en su empleo alguna diferencia? Aunque las respuestas a estas preguntas varÌen tanto como varÌa el uso de los mismos tÈrminos, de todas formas interesan porque la argumentaciÛn que conduzca a la distinciÛn o indistinciÛn entre sensaciÛn y…
1. Introduction. Antonio Rosmini is one of the greatest Italian philosophers and theologians who lived in the nineteenth century (Rovereto 1797 – Stresa 1855). The integral concept of being and man reveals the continuity of the Rosminian philosophical system which is highly influenced by the Church Fathers especially St. Augustine and of the Scholastic Theologian,…
Overall perspective The attempt to reduce what is truly unique to something else leads to the deification of something or some aspect within creation, normally accompanied by imperialistic “all”-claims such as, “everything is number,” “everything is matter,” “everything is feeling,” “everything is historical” or “everything is is interpretation.” The distortions thus created inevitably result in…
We must love each other or die. – W. H. Auden. The particularly toxic form that individuality has taken in European and Anglo-American culture in this era is substantially underpinned by a conception of mind, self, and soul that would hold these to be internal to the central nervous system of our biological organism. This…
0. Introduction In this paper I want to address the problem of using the notion of “person” or “personhood” in the biomedical ethics. I want to do this in four steps: In the first step I want to argue that there is a need to distinguish between persons and human beings as the medical science…