There were two prevailing sentiments in Europe after the Reformation: One opposing papal authority and one advocating individual freedom. This paper analyzes these two sentiments and finds that the concept of conscience is crucial in understanding them. The issue of conscience is about judging truth and good, and in initiating the Reformation, Martin Luther heavily appealed to his conscience while countering Catholic attacks. With the wide dispersal of the Reformation, Luther's notion of conscience was well received among his supporters throughout Europe. Descartes later transformed Luther's conscience into an epistemological being (the cogito), and argued that its existence was the only valid thing that survived his thorough skepticism " and as such is the foundation of human knowledge. Rousseau continued this line of thinking, which we call subjectivism, and re-employed the term conscience as a replacement for cogito, holding that conscience is the final authority in judging good and bad; that, as the starting point of human existence, it cannot be withheld from any human being; and that it therefore constitutes an inalienable human right. This paper argues that the Enlightenment was a subjectivist movement propelled by this conscience-cogito-conscience conceptualization, and that it sought to enlighten this inalienable conscience.
This article critically appraises a process of recognising prior learning (RPL) using analytical tools from Habermas' theory of communicative action. The RPL process is part of an in-service training program for health care assistants where the goal is to become a licensed practical nurse. Data a...
I argue that the notion of human rights is a flawed notion of relatively recent historical origin, growing primarily out of Enlightenment concerns to separate human beings from their metaphysical and communal heritage. I critique liberal, secular individualism as an abstract perspective that fail...
Recent research on secularization in later Victorian Britain has emphasized the proliferation of substitute religions as a compensation for the decline in the Church of England's - and by extension Christianity's - intellectual and ethical authority. This article complicates that picture by drawi...
Literature examining information judgments and Internet search behaviors notes a number of major research gaps, including how users actually make these judgments outside of experiments or researcher-defined tasks, and how search behavior is impacted by a user's judgment of online information. Usi...
Buchanan's constitutional economics takes social conflict (the 'Hobbesian jungle', 'Hobbesian anarchy') as the starting point for the analysis of social contract. Buchanan argues that in the presence of social conflict either some social contract (e.g. some system of formal laws) or some generall...
The judgment in Qarase v. Bainimarama provided a legal basis for the 2006 military coup in Fiji and stated that the President was entitled to grant authority to the military to act outside of the powers prescribed by the written Constitution. According to the ruling, the Royal Prerogative powers ...
The medical model of childbearing assumes that a pregnancy always has the potential to turn into a risky procedure. In order to advocate humanized birth in high risk pregnancy, an important step involves the enlightenment of the professional's preconceptions on humanized birth in such a situation...
Confucianism, not only is the core of Chinese cultural educational thoughts but its influence has been identified in the West by the European scholars. And with the impact of Confucianism civilization, the theological authority in the Dark Ages wavered. The human-based ideas of Confucianism that ...
This article investigates Marmontel's reworking of the ancient legend of Pero and Cimone in his bestselling novel Les Incas (1777). According to an anecdote in Valerius Maximus's Memorable Doings and Sayings (c.30 CE), Pero saves her father, condemned to death by starvation, by breastfeeding him ...
The religious intolerance that nowadays feeds a number of current conflicts leads us to rethink our modern conception of toleration, which emerged from the theological and philosophical debates accompanying or thrown up by the doctrinal controversies and politico-religious wars of the 16th and 17...
