713 research outputs found
The Crisis of Causality:Voetius and Descartes on God, Nature and Change
The Crisis of Causality deals with the reaction of the Dutch Calvinist theologian Gisbertus Voetius (1589-1676) to the New Philosophy of René Descartes (1596-1650).Voetius not only criticised the Cartesian idea of a mechanical Universe; he also foresaw that shifting conceptions of natural causality would make it impossible for theologians to explain the relationship between God and Creation in philosophical terms. This threatened the status of theology as a scientific discipline.Apart from a detailed analysis of the Scholastic and Cartesian notions of causality, the book offers new perspectives on related subjects, such as seventeenth-century university training and the Cartesian method of science. It will be of great importance to any student of seventeenth-century intellectual history, philosophy, theology and history of science
Public Relations: Too Little Emphasis on Communication
Examining the literature on public relations, the notion emerges that all major public relations approaches recognize communication as a means to “do” public relations; some even use “communication” in the name of their approach. However, as a key concept that needs to be defined and discussed, communication is largely overlooked. After close reading of relevant literature in order to understand what is really understood under “communication”, there is hardly any reference to be found to (recent) communication theories. Is it because most public relations scholars seem to hold a non-communication view of communication
Blended Learning and Math Growth: Investigating the Role of IXL Math in the Growth of 5th Grade Students’ Math Fluency Scores
Because of an increase in usage of online adaptive technology in the classroom replacing much of the paper and pencil work previously given as math homework, this study was designed to compare the growth rates in MAPS (Measurement of Academic Progress) math scores between a control group of 5th grade students who did not have access to online practice and a treatment group of students who were assigned online practice throughout the school year. If growth rates were greater in the treatment group, this study could support the movement of decreasing the amount of traditional homework and implementing more online practice in its place. This study concluded that the treatment group out-performed the control group in overall scores and growth rates
Communication planning: Agility is a game changer in strategy development
The purpose of this conceptual article is to explore what agility means for communication planning. Agility is focused on adaptation to change. A review of current communication planning models shows that most models are focused on long-term detailed planning with little room to fully adapt to change. In contrast, agility encourages to focus on choices to be tested, not only at the output or tactic levels but for every choice in the strategy. This implies that we should alter our idea of evaluation as the final step in our planning models and focus much more on goal-based and goal-free formative evaluation, in order to test choices over and over again and show that strategy is not a product but a process of adaptation. The design of an agile communication strategy must be short and simple and show the coherence of the choices made. Based on the literature in business and marketing strategy modeling, a framework for an agile communication strategy with eight building blocks is presented. The intention of this model is to introduce a framework that helps to see strategy building as a narrative that ensures coherence in the choices made and offers room for fully adapting to change
Bodies, Morals, and Religion: Utopia and the Erasmian Idea of Human Progress
Although Thomas More’s description of the Utopians’ ‘Epicurean’ position in
philosophy nominally coincides with Erasmus’s defence of the Philosophia
Christi, More shows no concern for the arguments Erasmus gave in support of
this view. Taking its starting point from Erasmus’s depreciations of the body
and More’s intellectual as well as physical preoccupations with the bodily
sphere, this article presents the theme of the human body and its moral and
religious significance as a test case for comparing Erasmus and More. The
treatises both men wrote on Christ’s suffering in the Garden of Gethsemane
confirm that both authors dealt with the notion of the body in contrasting
ways: Erasmus shows a tendency to address the moral-psychological question
of mentally conquering the worldly self, whilst More highlights the way in
which ordinary facts and physical things may carry spiritual and religious
meaning. Paradoxically, Erasmus consistently applied his spiritualized ideal of
man to this-worldly moral and social concerns, whereas More focused on the
physical domain out of a religious interest in transcendent truths. In line with
Giulia Sissa’s thesis, our hypothesis is that More ostensibly appropriated an
Erasmian type of idealism in Utopia, but, contrary to Erasmus himself, focused
on the exterior form of a virtuous society, rather than on its moral and spiritual
preconditions. While Erasmus advocated a mental transformation towards
reason, More’s Utopia envisioned what might come of this
La découverte du domain mental. Descartes et la naturalisation de la conscience
Although Descartes’ characterization of the mind has sometimes been seen as too ‘moral’ and too ‘intellectualist’ to serve as a modern notion of consciousness, this article re-establishes the idea that Descartes’ way of doing metaphysics contributed to a novel delineation of the sphere of the mental. Earlier traditions in moral philosophy and religion certainly emphasized both a dualism of mind and body and a contrast between free intellectual activities and forcibly induced passions. Recent scholastic and neo-Stoic philosophical traditions, moreover, drew attention to the disparity between the material and the immaterial, as well as to the possibility of a retreat into the personal realm of one’s own mind. Yet none of these moral and religious assessments of the relation between mind and body were motivated by the purely epistemological interest that we find in Descartes in setting apart a world of consciousness from the world of physics. The present article explains how Descartes made use of specific theological and moral philosophical theories in his own analysis of mental faculties; how he changed the orientation of metaphysics itself in the direction of a phenomenology of the mental; how he never returned to the naive idea of offering a dualist foundation for ethics; and how his mechanicism may have motivated his epistemological transformation of the science of metaphysics. In all these various ways, Descartes inaugurated an understanding of human mental life on the basis of physiological rather than metaphysical considerations, a view of psychology that is related to the experience of human individuals, and a naturalistic characterization of the mind in terms of a domain of consciousness rather than of moral conscience
Method vs. Metaphysics
This article discusses Descartes’s preferred focus on morally and theologically neutral
subjects and points out the impact of this focus on the scientific status of theology.
It does so by linking Descartes’s method to his transformation of the notion of substance.
Descartes’s _Meditations_ centred around epistemological questions rather than
non-human intelligences or the life of the mind beyond this world. Likewise, in his early
works, Descartes consistently avoided referring to causal operators. Finally, having first
redefined the notion of substance in the _Principia,_ Descartes would completely abandon
making use of this notion in his later years. Indeed, in contrast to many authors
before and after him, Descartes never showed any interest in the long-established
metaphysical interpretation of substances as being causal factors of natural change.
With God, nature, and mind commonly serving as instances of substantial causality,
Descartes’s philosophy had a huge impact on the place of God in science and discreet
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