Dreams in Evagrius Ponticus' Life and teaching

There are few late antiquity authors who pay more attention than Evagrius todreams. For him, visions and dreams are not a way to prophesy the future or tokeep in contact with the dead. They are basically a way to know oneself and thestate of ones own spiritual life. After contextualizing the theories on dreams in themost significant authors of that period, I discuss the place that visions and dreamsoccupied in the Evagrian corpus, describing their mechanisms as a complex operationbetween passions, memory and the influence of demons.Fil: Peretó Rivas, Rubén Angel. Universidad Nacional de Cuyo. Facultad de Filosofía y Letras. Instituto de Filosofía. Centro de Estudios Filosóficos Medievales; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Mendoza; Argentin

L'enganyifa del disseny intel·ligent

Ciència obsoleta i pseudociència en el neocreacionism

Controversies on the origin of life

Different viewpoints, many with deep philosophical and historical roots, have shaped the scientific study of the origin of life. Some of these argue that primeval life was based on simple anaerobic microorganisms able to use a wide inventory of abiotic organic materials (i.e. a heterotrophic origin), whereas others invoke a more sophisticated organization, one that thrived on simple inorganic molecules (i.e. an autotrophic origin). While many scientists assume that life started as a self-replicative molecule, the first gene, a primitive self-catalytic metabolic network has also been proposed as a starting point. Even the emergence of the cell itself is a contentious issue: did boundaries and compartments appear early or late during life's origin? Starting with a recent definition of life, based on concepts of autonomy and open-ended evolution, it is proposed here that, firstly, organic molecules self-organized in a primordial metabolism located inside protocells. The flow of matter and energy across those early molecular systems allowed the generation of more ordered states, forming the cradle of the first genetic records. Thus, the origin of life was a process initiated within ecologically interconnected autonomous compartments that evolved into cells with hereditary and true Darwinian evolutionary capabilities. In other words, the individual existence of life preceded its historical-collective [email protected]

John Rziha, Perfecting human actions: St. Thomas Aquinas on human participation in eternal law, Catholic University of America Press, Washington, 2009; 300 p., ISBN 978-0-8132-1672-0.

Fil: Peretó Rivas, Rubén