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Thomas Aquinas maintains that we share in the life of the Trinity as human beings, and in order to grasp the implications of that notion, this chapter examines what he thinks human beings are. First, it looks at the concepts of Dualism (Descartes’ view that people are composed of a separate mind and body) and Physicalism (which says that people are made up of one kind of matter – or body – and that this includes the mind, or mental processes), and concludes that Aquinas occupied a viewpoint between these two extremes. Next, it looks at the position that he held on people as having both soul and body, which he does not treat as distinct things, but nevertheless feels obliged to distinguish. Following on from this, Aquinas’ thinking on death and the soul is examined. The last part of the chapter looks at desire and action; here, Aquinas is shown to treat human action both as voluntary (free) and as occurring on the basis of dispositions, which are determined by past events and by choice.

Outlines the philosophical quest for reality, and how humans are related to the real world through perceptions, thoughts and beliefs. A discussion of what constitutes a metaphysical question is followed by a brief outline of certain philosophers’ ideas on reality through history, focusing on causality, subjectivity and objectivity, physicalism (or materialism) and giving a critique of correspondence theory. Introduces the subject of whether certain ideas, such as colours and morality, are real both as human perceptions and in a correspondent reality.

The underlying thesis of this book is that, although computing technology, in its relatively short lifetime, has clearly impacted modern economies and cultures, our understanding of software remains rooted in our experience with precomputer technology. It follows, therefore, that if we wish to take advantage of software’s unique capabilities, we must begin by reassessing our objectives and constraints. with this renewed understanding serving as a framework, we then can explore alternative paradigms. A revised interpretation is necessary, I assert, because there is a ceiling on the returns available by simply improving the present methods. To attain the level of productivity that software makes possible, we need a new normative model that explains how we ought to develop and employ software. Part III identifies one such normative model, called adaptive design, and demonstrates its efficacy. Yet this is not a book about adaptive design; it is about the mismatch between software’s inherent flexibility and the methods now used in software’s construction. If we are to rectify that disjunction, we must abandon our historical assumptions and reexamine the foundations upon which computer science and software engineering rest. The first two parts of the book are devoted to this reappraisal and foundation building. In Part I, the relationships between science and technology were considered. The discussion was not limited to computers and software. It began by examining the two myths that dominated technological thinking at the time the first digital electronic computers were created; resilient myths that sometimes persist in policy making and academic research. The first myth is that the goal of science is to discover immutable truths about the universe, and the second is that technological advancement depends on the application of this scientific knowledge. These two ideas combine to produce an implicit model of progress: As scientific knowledge accumulates, greater technological advances are enabled. The model is hierarchical. Technological progress follows the discovery of scientific knowledge, and, therefore, technology requires a scientific base to prosper.