bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
On Sophistry and the Definition of Happiness: A Rejoinder to Mr William Frerking
Authors: Meynell Hugo 
Published: July 2007

In a recent article in New Blackfriars, Mr William Frerking took me to task for some comments which I made on the famous question which Glaucon poses to Socrates in The Republic. He said a number of wise and sensible things. But none of these had any bearing on my argument. I must first assure Mr Frerking that I do not have the strange conception of happiness which he seems to attribute to me; and then try to show that such a view of happiness is by no means implied by what I wrote in my article.Mr Frerking expresses surprise that nowhere in my article do I offer a definition of happiness. There are two reasons for this: first, that I do not think that the term ‘happiness’ is susceptible of exact definition; and second, that my conception of happiness, unlike that attributable (at least on one interpretation, as we shall see) to Mr Frerking, is just the same as that which is ordinarily current. Still, misunderstanding has evidently arisen; so it may be as well for me to try to spell out roughly what I, and I believe most other people, mean by happiness. Happiness, as Aristotle rightly suggests, is a state one seeks for its own sake, and not as a means to some other state.
Dhammapada: Words of Wisdom
Authors: Don Peter W.L.A. 
Published: July 2007

Of the many works which comprise the Tipitaka, the Buddhist canonical scriptures in Pali, none has had greater appeal to the Buddhist, whether monk or layman, than the Dhammapada. It is the favourite vademecum of the devout Buddhist. The reason for this is mainly the fact that it is a small work which contains in concise, epigrammatic form ‘the concentrated essence of the religion’.The Tipitaka is a collection of the traditionally accepted canonical texts of the Theravada (also called Hinayana), the form of Buddhism which with local variations is dominant in South-East Asian countries—Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia—and is therefore known as the Southern School of Buddhism, which is one of the two main branches of the religion, the other being the Northern School, the Mahayana, which once flourished in India, whence it spread into Tibet, Nepal, China, Korea and Japan, in which countries it counts large numbers of adherents.
Capitalism or Socialism: The Rational Choice
Authors: Nyerere  
Published: July 2007

My subject is an examination of the alternative economic and social systems which are open to Third World countries. In order to keep this discussion within reasonable bounds I must make certain assumptions. It is important that these should be clear before I begin : for if the assumptions are not shared, then much of what I say will be irrelevant. Fortunately, my assumptions are not very controversial— at least within Africa.The Assumptions:My first assumption is that any discussion about the appropriate economic and social organisation must, for the time being at least, be conducted within each nation state, and the decision must be made exclusively by the people of that nation.Secondly, I take it to be axiomatic that all the peoples of the Third World desire to govern themselves, and want their countries to be completely independent of external control. This does not rule out the possibility of political or economic links between two or more countries; nor does it exclude a possible voluntary merger of sovereignties, provided that these things are agreed upon after discussions based on the equality of all participants.Thirdly, I shall assume that, to everyone in the Third World, the present degree of poverty, and the general lack of economic development, is completely unacceptable. We have to increase our production of wealth so that we may increase the level of our collective and individual consumption.My fourth and final assumption is that our struggles for independence were national struggles, involving the rights of all the inhabitants. We were not aiming to replace our alien rulers by local privileged elites, but to create societies which ensure human dignity and selfrespect for all.
Out of the Ghetto
Authors: Archer Antony 
Published: July 2007

It is clear that the early Christians expected the coming of the Kingdom almost at once, and equally clear that it has not come. This long period of waiting has caused a number of problems for the Christian church and it is intended here to consider some of these and the way they were solved until recently in the Catholic church.A number of them are those which are inevitable in an organisation that goes on a long time. The original spirit of the movement is replaced by routine. Rules and regulations are drawn up. Early practices lose their meaning—this is particularly true of liturgy—but, since they continue, new meanings are invented for them. A clear example of this is the old rule of eating fish on Fridays. When the original connection with fasting was lost people began to argue that it was about establishing one’s identity in an alien environment. The history of the Mass and the complicated meanings attributed to the most trivial and accidental details are another obvious example.In the same way a form of organisation develops which, as time goes on, becomes increasingly complicated and unwieldly. A special class of people, the clergy, grows up for running it, all with a career structure and rewards of their own and their established place in wider society—and so a gap forms between the clergy and the other members of the church.
On Not Quite Agreeing With Marx
Authors: Meynell Hugo 
Published: July 2007

Marx denied that he was a moralist. But it can hardly be disputed that anyone who thinks seriously about certain matters which have to do with morals—the nature and causes of wrongdoing and suffering in human society, and how they may be remedied—must come to grips with his arguments. To put the matter bluntly, any responsible intellectual who is not a Marxist must at times ask himself just why he is not; and in what follows, I shall try to explain why I am not. To cope with the whole range of Marx’s writings, one needs to be a specialist; those who are not so may well be, as I am, deeply indebted to David MacLellan for his admirable summary, supported with copious quotations, of the main features of Marx’s thought. For better or for worse, anyway, my Marx will be largely Marx as McLellan presents him.It is fundamental to Marx’s thought that human relationships, and consequently the whole web of institutions which make up society, are determined by the material circumstances in which men live and work; and consequently that if you change these material circumstances, you will change human ideas and behaviour at large. This thesis is generally labelled ‘historical materialism. Now the word ‘determined’ may be understood here in a relatively strong or a relatively weak sense. If it is taken in a strong sense, the thesis is that, given the material circumstances and the means of production prevalent in a society, its members cannot but behave very much as they do. (It would appear to be incorrect to ascribe to Mans a rigid determinism applying to the details of every individual action.)
Justification and Verification
Authors: Turner Geoffrey 
Published: July 2007

In this article I want to draw attention to one particular argument used by some modern Protestant theologians, an argument concerning the verifiability and falsifiability of Christian belief. This argument consists of an appeal to the Pauline idea of justification, but the difficulty which the argument raises concerns the meaning which is given to ‘justification’. The concept of ‘justification’ can acquire rather different meanings from the contexts in which it is used; that is to say, the meaning which ‘justification’ has on any particular occasion depends on the character of the position which it is being used to attack. Let us look at some of these positions in order to see what differences of meaning ‘justification’ may have.Paul gave the first peculiarly Christian exposition of the idea of ‘justification’ in his letter to the Romans, though he had previously used the idea in a more rudimentary fashion in his letter to the Galatians. Paul used the idea to distinguish Christianity from any other form of religion, particularly that of Judaism. He says that justification, i.e. the state of being righteous which allows us to stand before God without fear of condemnation even though we are technically still sinners, comes through faith and not through works of the Law (the Jewish Torah). In so far as we try to justify ourselves before God by performing pious practices and carrying out morally good behaviour, we will not succeed either in performing these works successfully or in being judged to be righteous (Rm. 3.20). But in so far as we abandon any attempt to make ourselves righteous before God, in so far as we accept that God makes us stand uncondemned, we will be judged to be righteous (Rm. 3.21-6).
Meaningful Dialogue
Authors: Marinoff Irene 
Published: July 2007

To indicate the subject of this essay two popular expressions, which everybody uses and professes to understand, have been deliberately chosen. Through this constant use the significance of the words has evaporated, and one is left with little more than a vague indication of goodwill and low-level understanding. Yet a closer study of both terms is rewarding since it leads straight into the mystery of human— and Divine—communication.For all time the word ‘dialogue’ is linked to the name of Plato, who used this literary form to demonstrate his master’s method of enquiry and develop his own philosophy. For both philosophers the aim is the apprehension of truth. However, this is not handed over to the pupil in a packet to be passively accepted and absorbed. Socrates is conscious that he knows nothing. If he leads his disciples into making contradictory statements, he does not do so in order to overwhelm them at the end with a ready-made solution in the maimer of a deus ex machina. He shares his own thought processes with them, teaching them to examine their preconceived ideas. If the disciple takes this seriously he will learn to think for himself and acquire a sensible approach to philosophical problems. It is fascinating to follow the argument in a dialogue as superficially simple as Euthyphro. Twice the disciple is forced to admit that ‘piety’ is ‘piety’ because it is beloved by the gods, though he has previously agreed to the opposite statement and granted that ‘piety’ had a special excellence which makes it ‘pious’ and consequently beloved by the gods.
Worker's Control in Chile
Authors: Obrero Jose 
Published: July 2007

The last assembly we held before the coup was impressive. It was a sequel to an assembly which the administration had called several days before to inform us that our stock of raw material was down to zero; that with the truck owners’ strike there was no way of bringing the stock of ingots reserved for us in Concepcion; that we’d have to consider seriously the prospect of a halt in production. The news was badly received.The Production Committees met immediately, and obtained unanimity quickly: except for workers of this plant, nobody was going to stop production. We’d get the raw material to Santiago—cost what it may—and that was that.The determination was made and it was firm; we communicated it to the administration who gave us the green light, though it took a while to put together the means to realise it. . . .Once we had obtained the transport to fetch the raw material, we convoked an assembly to inform all the workers of our success and ask for volunteers to accompany the trucks. Everyone knew what was involved—a long journey and a perilous one, most of it on our own time, with no bonus. The truck owners and right-wing terrorist groups were sniping at anything that moved along the roads, dynamiting bridges and railway tracks. The response was tremendous —just about everyone volunteered; the selection proved difficult.
On Re‐reading Goldman
Authors: Grainger Roger 
Published: July 2007

I’m sitting next to Evelyn, in the choir stalls of the hospital chapel. Evelyn, who has been a patient in this hospital for at least twenty-five of her fifty years, is singing away lustily with the rest of us. But the words she is singing are quite different from the ones I’m singing. So different in fact that I can’t make them out at all. But, no matter; ‘God is his own interpreter, and He will make it plain’, the rest of us sing.In Religious thinking from Childhood to Adolescence, Ronald Goldman says that ‘some religious experiences are so profound and personal and mysterious that it is doubtful if they are communicable at all, except through the emotional language of the arts’. In Evelyn’s case, it is simple enough. She can’t read. She is simply feeling religious emotions and singing religious words in a religious way; the result is, she sounds just like the six-year-old child quoted by Goldman:
‘Thy deliberately Faith I full,Faith against almighty worship God,And Faith all unto you,Faith against thy holy prayer’.In fact, Evelyn is perfectly capable of what Goldman would consider to be ‘adult’ religious thinking, and I know this because I’m preparing her for Confirmation in a few weeks’ time. In the meantime, not understanding the words of Cowper’s hymn is certainly not stopping her from undergoing a genuinely religious experience. In fact, she is worshipping more completely and wholeheartedly than we are. She is more totally involved in an experience of Divinity. Although they are opaque to us, the words she is using fit her experience exactly. The parallel with glossolalia is obvious.
Varieties of Resurrection
Authors: Turner Geoffrey 
Published: July 2007

During the last decade a large number of books on the resurrection have appeared, which reflect a wide range of theological perspectives. What is puzzling is not that there should have been such an interest in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, but that the interpretations should have been so various. Why is there no unanimity of understanding concerning the resurrection? After all it is an event that is described in only a few short texts; why do exegetes find it so difficult to interpret these texts? The previous sentence, however, has already introduced us to some of the problems involved in this extremely complex hermeneutical situation. Is the resurrection an event? and is it (can it be) described in the New Testament? Exegetes and dogmatic theologians differ over these problems as much as over their understanding of the texts, and yet what is the relation of such questions as these to the linguistic content of the texts?These reflections are prompted by the publication of an English translation of an interpretation of the texts concerning the resurrection by the distinguished French exegete Xavier Léon-Dufour. The bulk of Léon-Dufour’s book is presented as a straightforward interpretation of the texts, from the christological hymn of Philippians 2.6-11 and other Pauline and pseudo-Pauline literature to the major texts of Corinthians 15 and the closing chapters of each of the Gospels. Léon-Dufour offers an interpretation of the meaning of the texts not only in the limited literal sense but also in the wider context of the whole gospel message of each of the evangelists. One has the impression of an exegete with a distinguished past moving towards the end of a career and wanting to make a final statement on that most important of ‘events’.
The Sacrament Machine: Rumbles from the Production Line
Authors: Harbert Bruce 
Published: July 2007

Antony Archer rightly suggests (‘Dismantling the Sacrament Machine’, NB January 1975) that present Church structures impede the preaching of the Gospel, and that the laity must begin to do tasks from which they have hitherto been cut off, in particular that ‘it is urgent that the laity take preaching into their hands’. He points to the inadequacy of much present-day priestly preaching, and discusses the possibility of such a move as forbidding the clergy to preach, but concludes : ‘However, such a move as forbidding the clergy to preach, superficially attractive though it is, would only compound the present distortion. After all the priest is ordained to preach the Gospel and attempts to change the Church should be in accordance with its theology’. It is this last point that I wish to develop.Nobody would deny that there are many lay people who have the gift and vocation of preaching the Gospel, and are able to do it better than most priests. But preaching remains an inalienable part of Christian priesthood. You can be a preacher without being a priest, but not a priest without being a preacher. If we stress the sacramental functions of the priest at the expense of his preaching role, or vice versa, we distort our picture of his office. Though individuals may be more suited to one task than to the other, priests must be trained for both, and both must be expected of them. To train a man to administer the sacraments without training him to preach is like teaching a violinist to stop the strings with his left hand, without showing him how to wield the bow in his right. The reason for the interdependence of the two roles lies deep in the nature of the Gospel itself. Christ came both to speak and to act: he both utters, and is, the Word of God. Indeed, it is hard to conceive what is meant by administering the sacraments without preaching, since all human gestures reveal something about those who make them, and so every sacramental act communicates, proclaims, preaches, though it may do so very badly. Bro. Antony has fallen into a trap when he says ‘By preaching is meant here verbal communication’, since the verbal is inseparable from other forms of communication.
The New Bestiary
Authors: Edwards Adrian 
Published: July 2007

In the early days of anthropology, it was not quite clear whether the new arrival was an infant prodigy, or simply a know-all adolescent. If the claims of the first generations of anthropologists were correct, marvellous keys had been discovered for tracing the prehistory of the family and the origins of religion; but the development of the subject brought about their rejection, though Morgan’s scheme of the evolution of the family was absorbed into the ossified dogmas of Soviet Communism (from which it has by now been quietly dislodged), while Sir James Frazer’s mythology of corn spirits and dying gods not only impressed Freud but gave English-speaking intellectuals their abiding image of traditional religion.Professional social anthropology meanwhile followed the path of academic respectability, the elaboration of its own methodology and, more particularly, its own academic language, which admirably fulfilled the related functions of revealing its mysteries by successive degrees to the initiated while concealing them from outsiders. Respectability once attained, however, has a way of losing its charm, and we now seem to be on the verge of a new wave of anthropologists as prophets. Dr Roy Willis presents himself as one of the first of the band, with his revelations contained in Man and Beast, the first of a new series, entitled Approaches to Anthropology, under the general editorship of Professor Mary Douglas.Let it be said at once that Dr Willis is a singularly urbane prophet and his kerygma contains little that menaces doom, though much that stirs up thought.
‘Slant’ and the Language of Revolution
Authors: Wall Alan 
Published: July 2007

‘The distinctive character of Western European Marxism since 1918 has been its co-emergence and colloquy with various currents of idealism—Dilthey, Croce, Husserl, etc. The same pattern is likely to be repeated in Britain, should an ‘Anglo-Marxism’ ever finally emerge. The precondition for a transcendence of this dialectic is the reunification of theory and practice in a mass socialist movement. This has not yet been achieved anywhere in Europe’ (Perry Anderson, New Left Review, 35).Slant, the journal of the Catholic left in Britain in the 1960s, began publication in 1964 and ended in 1970. Its formation and development were the result of factors both within and outside the Catholic Church. The development of the ‘New Left’ in Britain seemed to open up an area of potential middle-class radicalisation. After Hungary and Suez in 1956 what appeared to be required was a de-Stalinised, socialist humanism, responsive to the specific conditions of welfare-state capitalism whilst being at the same time internationalist in its perspectives. In the early 1960s the New Left was a political tendency—with all the vagueness which that term implies. It represented a hesitant, exploratory analysis, which was only later to refine its insights into a more rigorous critique of contemporary capitalism.
What is Fascism ?
Authors: Eagleton Terry 
Published: July 2007

Only a few years ago, an article with a title such as this would have seemed of merely historical interest—akin, perhaps, to a paper on the Second International or Rosa Luxemburg’s theory of imperialism. But fascism is no longer of merely antiquarian interest, if indeed it ever was. As the crisis of world monopoly capitalism intensifies, fascism is once more a real political issue in the advanced capitalist societies; and some historical analysis of its constitutive structures is absolutely indispensable to the political task of rooting it out. This isn’t easy, for a number of reasons. For one thing, fascism is a phenomenon of considerable complexity, and for that reason among others lends itself temptingly to vulgarly reductive explanations whose theoretical bankruptcy leads straight to political impotence. For another thing, there isn’t always enough time to plough one’s way through the history and theory of fascism when the National Front are gathering at the local town hall. And so Front-hunting can become a seductive displacement of the real task of examining what fascism actually signifies. There is, too, the problem of knowing how seriously at the moment to take fascism in our society—of steering a line between that bland dismissal of it on which it historically thrives, and diverting one’s political energies from the major tasks which confront us—the destruction of the bourgeois state through the building of revolutionary proletarian leadership—to a more immediate but (at present) structurally less determinant issue. In this, the issue of fascism is rather like that of sexuality: it’s never easy to draw the line between pathological obsession and ascetic underplaying.To risk a reductive formulation: fascism is essentially the attempt to ensure the rule of monopoly capitalism in its purest, most untrammelled, most invulnerable form. But of course monopoly capitalism is extremely reluctant to do any such thing.