Conferences Books

THE EVER-ILLUMINATING WISDOM OF ST. THOMAS AQUINAS (EIWSTA)is a collection of six essays applying the thought of the Angelic Doctor to such problems as the nature of Man, metaphysics, reasoned discourse and debate, reason informing the Faith, and science and faith. These essays deal with the use of disciplined reason and clear thinking as means to inform the Catholic Faith as well as a guide to living well and understanding the natural world as well religious concepts.

St. Anselm (1035-1109)wrote a text titled PROSLOGIAN in which he argued that for the Catholic Faith to stand scrutiny, devout Catholics had to have a means whereby Catholicism made sense and stood the test of reason. This book and Anselm's use of reason are said to have began Medieval Scholasticsm. St. Thomas Aquinas as well as others enhanced St. Anselm's work to develop what some Medieval historians call The Church Intellectual which was based on reason and faith and are a bulwark against errors and heresies.

The essays in this book (EIWSTA)built on St. Thomas' work and focus on first on the nature of Man and the view of the Fall of Man. St. Thomas Aquinas accepted the concept of the Fall of Man, but he did not accept Luther's view of men's depravity. St. Thomas did not accept Calvin's view of predestination either St. Thomas argued that Man was created in God's image and had free will and the use of reason for good or evil. Basically St. Thomas argued that men could use reason to realize a better moral order. Of course men had to have God's grace and inspiration to improve their moral and ethical standing. Basically St. Thomas argued that men were not as good as they could or should be. In other words, men's reason could lead to a realization of better moral order that could be just approaching God's moral order. By realizing a Superior Being or God, men could improve law and justice. In fact, it was the Catholic Church that taught Western Man what a scientific legal system was like. Readers should note that there is a book titled TREATISE ON LAW which is an edited portion of Aquinas' work dealing with law.

The essays also deal with the fact Aquinas had a clear method of achieving truth both in metaphysical studies (justice, good vs. evil, ethics, etc.)and science. Aquinas mentioned that such a method may involve uninformed statements or opinions. When men realize contradictions, they have doubt. By using reason and logic, St. Thomas stated that men could learn and develop understanding.

The essays also dealt with habit which can interfere with reason and truth. Therefore, Aquinas stated that ordered, clear thinking should also be developed as a habit to undermine bad habits and sloppy thinking. While St. Thomas was not a political radical, his enhancement of using reason and logic to approach the mysteries of God and the Faith was revolutionary. Yet, Aquinas was a gentleman who attacked and refuted opponents' arguements, but he never attacked his opponents personally. In fact, Aquinas referred to Averroes (1128-1198)who was a Moslem as the Commentator-the Commentator on Aristotle. St. Thomas faced hostility after he died and some of his work was declared heretical in 1277, but Pope John XXII canonized St. Thomas Aquinas in 1323.

St. Thomas did not see any contradiction between science and faith or the Bible. As these essays stated that while faith was beyond reason, it was not opposed to reason. Aquinas stated that any apparent contradcition between the Bible and science was due to an inaduquet understanding of Scripture. Readers should know that many of the early Church Fathers were clear that much of the Bible was allegorical including St. Augustine and St. Jerome. The latter translated the Vulgate Bible. In fact St. Jerome said that children could read the Scriptures and never drown. Yet, theologians could swim in the Scriptures and never touch bottom.

Why are these essays and St. Thomas Aquinas' work important? The essays steer the reader to a great thinker who thought that there was an ordered world, and men should try to live order lives to attain a higher level of civilization and to use St. Augustine's one title to approach THE CITY OF GOD. These essays are a reminder that if there is to be any "progress' (spiritual or scientific) men must have an awareness of reason and a sensible world. Nothing could ever be done or achieved in society steeped in skepticism and irrationality. These essays are a good start, and serious readers are led to more comprehensive reading of St. Thomas Aquinas' work which is a counterweight for what passes as thought these days.

(shakes Hugo's hand vigorously..) welcomE (Welcome)goOd man:It's an honor to have had Justice Black on the Supreme court presiding and overriding previous cases to the advantage of the individual and the minority race and religion.Yes a former Klu Klux Klan member when it was fashionable and honorable in this country to be so,justice Black overrode his colleagues cases when it was his "Turn" to do so: BecomiNg one of the champions of individual liberty and religious freedom.Naysayers be wary of judgement And the thoughts that a persons affiliations braNd his destiny!Strom Thurman should be so proud of him!

I found this to be one of the most interesting tomes on the subject! Here I was, looking for the ballroom champion (Peter Eggleton), and I stumbled across this physics volume that put it all in place for me. I recommend it for students of astronomy.

Evolutionary multi-objective optimization is becoming more and more used these days, and most breakthroughs in this subject can be found in these proceedings (proceedings of EMO'03 are even better than EMO'01, the program committee did a wonderful job). These are not the standard technical proceedings whose intended audience are specialists in the field, anyone with a basic knowledge of evolutionary computation can understand these papers. The proceedings begin with short tutorials explaining what EMO is and after that about the first half deals with more theoretical aspects while the second part with applications.

Reading these proceedings like a book is feasible (you may skip some papers you're not interested in) and most of the papers are very well written, so if you're interested in recent advances in EMO, reading these proceedings is almost required. The book by Kalyanmoy Deb (Multi-objective optimization using evolutionary algorithms) is nice but does not provide enough treatment from an applications perspective, but it constitutes a nice textbook to enter the subject of EMO anyway.

Both EMO2001 and 2003 proceedings are "must-read" in evolutionary multi-objective optimization !

This is a fine medium-advanced book on evolvable hardware. The book contains some of the very latest material you will be able to find available on print or in the internet. Specially, I find very interesting the immunotronics approach from the University of York staff.

BRAVO!

Absolutely fascinating exploration of pre-modern theories and representations of the passions (emotions). It is amazing to see how artists anticipate neuroscientific truths regarding the expression of human emotions both two-dimensionally (on the face) and three-dimensionally (in body language and the rhetoric of gesture).

Well worth the wait for the final editing of Ms. Monatgu's 1959 doctoral dissertation under the late Sir Ernst Gombrich.

A pity that Dr. Montagu was unable to entend her reach into more recent periods, including the impact of Darwin and Warburg on the understanding of emotion in aesthetic experience in more recent times!

Anyone who is interested in learning the basics of Grothendieck's remarkable work on Tensor products (Resume de la theorie des produits tensoriels topologiques, 1956) is strongly urged to read Pisier's excellent exposition of the subject. The first five chapters contain a full account of notions such as Absolutely summing operators, Factorization through Hilbert space, Type and Cotype, as well as several proofs of Grothendieck's celebrated theorem. Chapters 6,8,9 and 10 are more specialized, the highlight being the last chapter, (10), in which Pisier presents his own solution to the sixth and last open problem from Grothendieck's original paper.

I haven't read this book. I don't even know what it's about. I like Faulkner, though. So, go to town, boys...

This little known volume comprises one of the few collections of how religion impacted Faulkner's literature, and how important understanding religion's impact on the South is to the understanding of Southern history and its literature. This collection is a series of lectures given at the 16th Annual Yoknapatawpha Conference sponsored by the University of Mississippi in 1989, and includes papers by the likes of Alfred Kazin, Charles Reagan Wilson, Richard King, Glenn Meeter, Virginia V. Hlavsa, Doreen Fowler and Evans Harrington on a diverse range of subject material within the discipline of religion and literature: William Faulkner and the Southern Religious Culture, the God of Defeat by Kazin, Quentin as Redactor: Biblical Analogy in Faulkner's "Absalom! Absalom!" and the Crucifixion in "Light in August" among other thought provoking papers. This is a must have for any serious student of Faulkner or the serious student of Religion and Literature.

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