Sermones y espejos de príncipes castellanos
This essay describes the evolution of the political discourse in the Castilian mirrors of princes. In fact it can be observed that, even if the catalogues of vices and virtues were already considerably important in the treaties of Arabic origin, these lists became even more relevant in the treaties of western sources and became their distinctive mark. This allowed the bringing together of the political and the religious discourse and it especially contributed to the mixing of two literary genres: the mirrors of princes with the sermons.
LOS ESPEJOS DE PRÍNCIPES EN CASTILLA (SIGLOS XIII-XV): UN MODELO LITERARIO DE LA REALEZA BAJOMEDIEVAL
Los espejos o tratados de educacion de principes son obras de caracter politico-moral que recogen un conjunto de directrices morales y de gobierno basicas que han de inspirar la actuacion del buen soberano cristiano. Por ello, estos tratados se convertiran, en un sentido figurado, en espejos, en los cuales todo principe cristiano deberia mirarse para guiar su actuacion. No obstante, estos frecuentemente incluyen referencias a aspectos diversos, entre los que cabria destacar el mundo de la Corte y la administracion real. (...)
Reid on Hypotheses and the Ether; A Reassessment
In recent years historians of science have come to see that Thomas Reid’s Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man had a profound impact on the development of British methodological thought in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Larry Laudan has argued that Reid was “the first major British philosopher to take Newton’s opinions on induction, causality, and hypotheses seriously”; and that Reid was thereby instrumental in changing the character of British methodological discourse in the Enlightenment.(1) Geoffrey Cantor has examined in detail the influence of Reid’s critique of ether theories and hypotheses in the Essays on leading protagonists in the nineteenth-century debates surrounding the wave theory of light,(2) and Richard Olson has traced the origins of the scientific style of British physics in the Victorian period to the writings of Reid and other Common Sense philosophers. (3) As well as delineating Reid’s influence, Laudan, Cantor, and Olson have attempted to identify the problems to which he addressed himself in articulating his methodology, and they have analysed with some care the internal structure of his methodological views. Thanks to the work of these historians, therefore, we have a fairly comprehensive picture of Reid’s methodology and its fortunes in the nineteenth century.