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At the end of the 19th century, Cardinal Mercier founded the Higher Institute of Philosophy (HIPh) in Louvain, an academic centre that sought to harmonise Thomistic doctrine with both modern science and philosophy. The Vasque priest Juan Zaragüeta Bengoechea was trained in the HIPh and occupied a prominent place in Spanish academic life during the first half of the 20th century, making important contributions to philosophy, pedagogy, psychology, and Spanish culture in general. This paper presents a portrait of Zaragüeta and briefly outlines some of the key aspects of his conception of psychology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I analyze the risks of transhumanism from a legal-philosophical perspective, a development that proposes to transform human beings through the direct application of advanced technologies. I highlight the weak points of transhumanism, calling into question its goals, its moral principles and its conception of the human being. Instead, I defend a humanism that preserves personal autonomy and human dignity. Moreover, I point to the need for an adequate ethical education to recognize the enormous danger involved in blindly following science and technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to analyze the bonds that occur between the notion of academic freedom and religion, from the scope of the dogmatic core of the right, but in the line of their historical relations and the emergence of modern academic freedom as well. The examination is performed in the context of german research university, which strongly contrast with scholastic period, but also in the context of its further development in the American university. This process ends with the AAUP 1915 Declaration, which shapes the present status of relationships between denominational and public universities. The main proposal of the paper is that academic freedom and faith, despite they seem opposed to modern mentality, actually are inseparable at the essence of the right, either from a negative or a positive point of view. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with Balzac's Poetics of the Novel as expressed in his famous prologue to La Comédie humaine. Firstly, I examine a particular reading of the main tenets of this text, which, by focusing on modern science, makes the latter the essential model of La Comédie humaine. Secondly, I offer a new reading from a hermeneutical perspective. Consquently, it may be concluded that Balzac in his prologue refused to understand the human world by means of biological categories, thus becoming a forerunner of Dilthey's differentiation between Natural and Human Sciences (Geisteswissenschaften, 'Sciences of the Spirit'). Lastly, it is necessary to underline what the "Avant-Propos" owes to the literary model of Walter Scott and of the tradition of the novel in general, whose defense and vindication is arguably among Balzac's aims in this theoretical text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are three main ways in which Christian theology enriches a broader scientific narrative. First, it provides us with a reassurance of the coherence of reality; second, it offers answers to the scientifically unanswerable ultimate questions; and third, it is able to enrich a scientific narrative by preventing it from collapsing into a technocratic catalogue of common things. In this regard, the paper explores some aspects of the relevance of theology for the understanding of the world, as a means of opening up a discussion of how could be developed an inclusive scientific theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines Robert Kilwardby's (ca. 1215-1279) treatment of causal necessity and contingency. In his Commentary on Aristotle's Posterior Analytics and in his De ortu scientiarum, Kilwardby seems to be particularly concerned with the precarious epistemological status of ethics and physics insofar as these disciplines deal with contingent events. In order to reconcile strictly scientific knowledge with conjectural forms of knowledge, Kilwardby sets the problem of contingency in a genuinely gnoseological rather than metaphysical context, arriving at a highly original account of contingency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between science, technology and praxis is one of the key issues to understand the theory of Jürgen Habermas. The need to broaden rationality has forced Habermas to consider this legal phenomenon. In this paper I attempt to show how Habermas emphasizes the duality of law, because it can be a means of emancipation, but also a modernizing object and an instrument of modernization with the subsequent repercussions on the freedom of contemporary societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explains that the so-called "Standard Cosmology", a means of chronicling the universe from the Big Bang until the present, is a mixture on three levels: experimental results, scientific hypotheses and the traditional narrative construction. The narrative construction is not the product of hypotheses, and certainly not of experimental results, but rather a mold that is forced upon us to deny the contingency and unify a heterogeneous series of areas of scientific knowledge and languages, which are incommensurable. The use of the cosmological narrative model is due to the belief, never clearly defined in the PSR (Principle of Scientific Reason), also known as the Strong Anthropic Principle (SAP). This old metaphysical principle is the keystone for the contemporary self-styled "scientific system" and an indispensable foundation for science to be considered an ideology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the relationship between science and philosophy in the works of Carlos Vaz Ferreira. The idea of "search of truth" is the key to understand the role played by both science and philosophy in human knowledge, and their respective scopes and limits. According to Vaz Ferreira, science and philosophy are not mutually exclusive, but rather complementary; moreover, they do not exhaust the wealth of ways that humans have of acciesing reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]