Daniel Andersson

Due to the alarming rise of antibiotic resistance, medically unwarranted use of antibiotics has assumed new moral significance. In this paper, a thematic content analysis of focus group discussions was conducted to explore lay people’s views on the moral challenges posed by antibiotic resistance. The most important finding is that lay people are morally sensitive to the problems entailed by antibiotic resistance. Participants saw the decreasing availability of effective antibiotics as a problem of justice. This involves individual as well as collective moral responsibility. Yet, holding agents responsible for their use of antibiotics involves varying degrees of demandingness. In our discussion, these findings are related to the contemporary ethical debate on antibiotic resistance and two proposals for the preservation of antibiotic effectiveness are compared to and evaluated against participants’ views.

By exploring the world of pre-modern and early modern scholastic Aristotelianism, this chapter outlines one of the likely metaphysical backgrounds against which Bacon developed his views on material appetites. By material appetites, he meant a set of original tendencies in nature, inherent in every part of matter. When we take into consideration the context of late scholastic and Aristotelian philosophy, Bacon’s position emerges out of an exceedingly variegated landscape of philosophical solutions, a true sylva sylvarum of conceptual differences, deliberate borrowings and tacit accretions. As someone who during his philosophical apprenticeship must have waded into the dense forest of Aristotelian arguments in translations and commentaries, Bacon was acquainted with the distinctive Aristotelian unease about material appetite. As is well known, in Aristotle’s metaphysics matter is presented in terms of inert substratum. Furthermore, while Aristotle argued that appetite might denote life at both an inanimate (ἔφεσις) and animate (ὄρεξις) level, no form of intentional and ‘orektic’ teleology could be assigned to inanimate nature given the unintentional character of natural purposiveness. Through elaborating an original notion of material appetite, Bacon overcame classic scholastic objections and redefined traditional ontological divisions between matter, unsentient drive and conscious desire.

This paper looks at the relation of natural history, in its guise as an observational genre and one which tended to offer competing explanations of its phenomena, to the discourse of practical divinity. Natural history is here intended as a genre in which the practice of observation is accorded a significant place and a genre which lends itself to the accumulation of competing explanatory accounts of the phenomena. In particular, it examines the relation of the cognitive and the practical with respect to a rather unusual instance of that discourse. It attempts to site the work of practical divinity vertically, horizontally and orthogonally.

An analysis of the accession history, together with a few refinements thereto, of the Báthory Jesuit College in Transylvania tells us much about the internationaland local buying practices of a humanistic reading community in a period of confessional strife. This short article makes a few corrections to our current knowledge of this library, together with a few obiter comments on Transylvanian book pricing and on the second-hand usage of student works. The Republic ofLetters depended, naturally enough, on the inculcation of a worldview that was not wholly parochial. Accordingly, the article also considers the nature of the intellectual culture that the partial reconstruction suggests and, finally, the division of labour between international and local markets for the sourcing of books.