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Contrary to a generally accepted idea, the legal use of topics within the framework of late scholastic, did not have as a function to introduce indecisiveness or relativism into the treatment of particular cases. On the contrary, its function was to obtain unquestionable conclusions, based on the logical properties of a classification of genus and species, it constituted deductively, inductively and analogically by the examination of substantive law and ratio legis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When he was reacting to the ideological debates of the Paris Commune in the Spring of 1871, Karl Marx complained that the French revolutionaries wasted their time rehearsing the issues of the previous revolutions instead of facing the revolutionary tasks of the present. Marx's insights are confirmed by a glance backward at the 1848 revolutions, and forward from him to 1968. French historiography has long wondered whether the Paris Commune was like the dawn of something new, or like the dusk of the ancien régime of working-class movements. In August 1944, when the Paris Resistance took control of the Hôtel de Ville, they were repeating what their forebears had done in all the previous Paris revolutions. In May 1968, Daniel Cohn-Bendit prevented the most radical part of the student movement from marching on the presidency at the Palais de l'Élysée. This choice reveals that the mental patterns which structured the political imagination of the student movement were moments like the storming of the Winter Palace in the Soviet revolution, not the French revolutionary traditions. It also betrayed the shift in political realities undergone by France in a century: the symbolical seat of power directly addressed by the protesters was national, not local. Radicalism and revolutions are traditionalist phenomena in many ways, and their symbolic choices reflect the values and representations that are widespread in the societies from which they emerge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

INTRODUCTION The most obvious functionality of radicalism is that it challenges the status quo, whether in its language, legitimations, objectives, institutions, processes, dispositions of power or achievements – or all of these. These are, after all, the instrumentalities of governance, of rule, and it is, at one end of a spectrum or the other, the transformation of rule which radicalism seeks. Such an apparently unexceptional statement, or definition, belies the problems immediately confronting the historian. The essays in this collection circulate – sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly – around two of the most important of these problems or questions. The first concerns the transformation of rule implicitly envisaged by radicalism and the ambivalent status which attaches to it. Is it a question of substance or imagination, of fact or of fiction and might there be continuous histories of either of these? Should radical ideas, groups, movements and actions be depicted as existing in a ‘real’ world and is their history to be juxtaposed in counterpoint with the hard ‘facts’ of political, legal, constitutional, social and economic history? Yet, as an alternative to the status quo, radicalism appears to shift from the real world to the imagined, from reality to ideality, from description to fiction. But, of course, we also recognize that realities are themselves constructed and, in some sense, imaginatively constructed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chapter 2 of the book "Bioethics and Vulnerability: A Latin American View" is presented. It tackles how case-based reasoning or casuistry can complement moral principles in relation to bioethics. It also analyzes the casuistical method based on studies by philosophers Albert R. Jonsen and Stephen Toulmin in their book "The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning." According to the chapter, casuistry shows relevance of context particularly in cases in Latin America.

An introduction to the chapters discussed within the book "Bioethics and Vulnerability: A Latin American View" is presented, including a chapter by Arleen L. F. Salles on challenges facing bioethics in Latin America, another chapter on the potential of casuistry, and another chapter on the sources of concern in the South.

The article focuses on Frederick Denison Maurice's understanding of the union of Godhead with human flesh as the center of human existence. It states that his understanding of the incarnation put the relationship between God and humankind at the center of existence to focus on human relationship as a concrete reality than God as an abstract concept or principle. It explores the assertion of Maurice regarding the primacy of human relationship and his shift from casuistry to social morality.

The article analyzes the literary works of Theophrastus in the tradition of Greek casuistry. Casuistry may be defined as the discovery and application of good or at any rate broadly acceptable reasons and methods for resolving conflict between two laws or rules, or principled and strongly felt religious, moral, or social imperatives. It is rather more than what it is commonly taken to be, the accommodating of laws, etc. to special circumstances, in which the strict principle or letter of the law would lead to anomaly or hardship. For principles do not directly conflict with circumstances and facts, only with other principles, namely those which particular circumstances can be presented to embody or to be instances of.

The chapter discusses the corruption of the economists' teachings brought about by a confused public opinion. The economists' unconscious casuistry in fact further weakened their authority. Orthodox theory had previously enjoyed much uncritical acceptance, but in the late nineteenth century the economists encountered a less disinterested rather than a more critical audience. In their fight to get a hearing, economists generally have allowed the taint of intellectual compromise to affect their teaching.

For the godly ministers of Essex, the examples related by correspondence and word of mouth made Archbishop Laud's metropolitical visitation, imminent in Essex, an object of intense concern. A week ahead of the disciplinary circuit's return to the county, William Munning, a friend of Robert Ryece and minister of Good Easter, near Felsted, wrote to New England: Wee have noe newes heere worth the relating, onely wee heare, that the Archbps Metropoliticall Visitation is (once againe) coming downe into this county. What effects it will produce I am not prophet sufficient infallibly to foretell: but (if wee may ghesse by the proceedings of Pope Regulus [Wren] in our next neighbour and native diocesse) it is to be feared that wee shall have more loste groates swept out of the house, instead of the duste, to the little laude of our good huswifery. Perhaps some of this fear can be explained by the unfamiliarity of the metropolitical visitation: the provincial discipline was normally exercised as soon as practicable after the installation of a new archbishop, and there had not been such a visitation since 1613. However, Munning grounded his fears in what he knew of the proceedings in Norwich and, no doubt, in what was remembered of the diocese's last encounter with Laud. The intervening period had been characterised by perhaps the worst possible combination of policy and practice. The public face of Juxon's episcopacy threatened the full vigour of Laudianism, while the application of his policy was sufficient to arouse hostility without being thorough enough to silence dissent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is the story of a life of Robert Boyle that was never written, with reflections on the significance of this paradox for our understanding both of Boyle and of the nature of scientific biography in his day. In fact, of course, we have two biographical accounts of Boyle dating from the sixty years following his death, on which almost all subsequent writings on him have been based. One was the sermon preached at Boyle's funeral on 7 January 1692 by his friend, Gilbert Burnet, Bishop of Salisbury, which included a lengthy section described at the time as a ‘Panegyric’ of Boyle. As one might expect of a funeral sermon – a genre in which Burnet specialised – this is an unashamed eulogy of Boyle, with something in common with the various verse ‘elogiesy’ of the deceased scientist that were produced in the aftermath of his death. In it, Burnet drew on his intimate knowledge of Boyle (and on biographical notes that had been vouchsafed him) to paint a memorable but rather onesided view of the great natural philosopher as a truly good man, pious, sober, modest, painstaking and intellectually innovative. His aim was to illustrate ‘to how vast a Sublimity the Christian Religion can raise a mind, that does both throughly believe it, and is entirely governed by it’. In many ways, this image has dominated perceptions of Boyle ever since. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We now know how Calvin wished the magistracy to be organized. But we are still left asking what exactly he wished magistrates to do. The first Institution described the office of magistrates in such a bland and abstract way that no fault would have been found with Calvin's account by Servetus, Castellio and most Anabaptists, let alone by papists and other evangelicals: ‘to accommodate our lives to human fellowship, to shape our morals and conduct so that they may accord with civil justice, to reconcile us one with another and to promote the common peace and tranquillity’. But this formulation relies upon Lutheran external/internal, religious/civil distinctions which (as we have seen) had ceased to be adequate to Calvin's thought by 1542 at the latest. And at last, in the 1559 Institution, Calvin made additions which clarified what had long since been explicit in other writings. He prefaced the account of the ‘appointed end’ of magistracy just cited with: ‘to cherish and protect the outward worship of God, to defend the sound doctrine of godliness (pietas) and the order and standing (status) of the church’. In that edition he also went on to insist that the competence of magistrates extends to both tables of the Ten Commandments, that is, to the enforcement of pietas as well as aequitas and external righteousness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By the beginning of 1542 Calvin had formulated a rounded scheme of ecclesiastical polity, the digest of his pastoral experience at Geneva and Strasbourg as mediated by reflection upon Scripture and discussion with the leading evangelical theologians and organizers of his day; had buttressed it by scriptural legitimation; and had rendered it more or less coherent with the guiding themes of his theology (though here much remained to be done). But it is one thing to meditate a political scheme, another to have it received for law (and this had been accomplished by 20 November 1541, by which time all the Genevan Councils had accepted the draft), and yet another to transform scheme and law into a living reality – especially when the scheme was conspicuously vague at crucial points about the relations between a church as there outlined and the secular authorities, whose good-will and cooperation it required. More important, nothing specific had been said about what exactly these two potestates or regimines were actually to do, whether severally or in tandem. For the ends of both had so far only been set out in very general terms with little substantive content, and the same can be said about the character and conditions of their ‘cooperation’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]