Doctrinal Grounds Research Articles

A imunidade tributária das receitas decorrentes de exportação

The study aims to analyze the tax norms immunity from exportations incomes in relation to social contributions* PIS/COFINS and CSLL (*federal taxes levied on corporations for the financing of social security). The critical exam of immunity concepts, social contributions, incomes and the analysis of the legal, judgmental and doctrinal grounds of article 149, § 2o, II, of the Federal Constitution reveal that the non taxation has been applied only for PIS/COFINS. It is suggested, to bring effectiveness for the immunity norms to the CSLL, reducing the immune incomes from the other sorts of incomes received by the legal entity, resulted on which will be deducted the expenditures in order to determinate the profit.

Neither Fish Nor Fowl: New Strategies for Selective Regulation of Information Services

This paper will examine whether and how the FCC can support a campaign to deregulate or treat as outside its jurisdiction many next generation network services while at the same time imposing financially burdensome requirements and regulatory duties on some ventures that fit within the information service provider classification. The FCC has erected a regime largely predisposed to treat next generation services as information services free of interconnection, unbundling, tariffing, line sharing and other requirements Title II of the Communications requires the FCC to impose. To support its deregulatory mission the FCC has found ways to subordinate the telecommunications components in a service that blends telecommunications transmission of bits with information services. For example, in reclassifying DSL from a telecommunications service to an information service the FCC combined the need for deregulatory parity with a new finding that the once stand alone telecommunications service characteristic of DSL had become inextricably integrated with information services with the latter predominating. Notwithstanding the urge to deregulate, either on rational or doctrinal grounds, the Commission has had to confront the fact that competition alone will not ensure the achievement of all Congressionally mandated, or FCC identified public interest objectives. Even with actual or prospective competition, the wholesale abdication of regulatory oversight leaves the FCC in a precarious legal position, if and when it needs to reassert regulatory oversight as has occurred on four separate occasions for VoIP services and once for all types of broadband Internet access information services.

Necessary Evils: Unitarian Theodicy in "The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere"

What we have most to dread, is the almost irrecoverable debasement of our minds by looking off from God, living without him, without a due regard to his presence and providence, and idolizing ourselves and the world, considering other things as proper agents and causes; whereas, strictly speaking, there is but one cause, but one sole agent in universal nature. --Joseph Priestley, Illustrations of Philosophical Necessity NO QUESTION IN COLERIDGE STUDIES HAS RESISTED RESOLUTION MORE effectively than the question of the Christianity of The of the Ancyent Marinere. Contemporary readers often feel that no theological paradigm survives the nightmarish ironies of Coleridge's tale, of course, but that very feeling requires some assumption about the text's theological investments, so the issue of the poem's religious outlook remains a pertinent one. It is an issue that I will reconsider here by invoking Coleridge's Unitarianism. Critics tend to hurry the poet past his Unitarian period, convinced that the glib optimism of Joseph Priestley could accommodate neither Coleridge's visionary interests nor his responsiveness to injustice and suffering. I What troubles me about that conviction is that it seems so thoroughly at odds with the historical record. For in 1797-1798 Coleridge was still zealously engaged in the Unitarian cause: preaching to Unitarian congregations, corresponding with Unitarian ministers on theological questions, and revising his doctrinaire Religious Musings. He renounced his candidacy for the vacant ministry at Shrewsbury not on doctrinal grounds but simply because the Wedgwood legacy allowed him to act on his aversion to ministerial routine. (2) In turning from Coleridge to The moreover, we turn from a devout Unitarian to a conversion narrative organized around Christian motifs from the moment Coleridge introduces Crucifixion imagery into it. Is there no connection between the poet's religious beliefs and the poem's religious speculations? There is indeed, critics reply, but they defend the connection by denying or misrepresenting Coleridge's Unitarianism. For Robert Penn Warren, Coleridge's mythmaking reformulates the orthodox Fall occasioned by Original Sin, in the process ignoring Unitarian and Necessitarian doctrine. (3) For James Boulger, conversely, The Rime depends crucially on Necessity, but on a version of Necessity more reminiscent of Hume than Priestley. (4) Jerome McGann advocates reclaiming The Rime for historical understanding by looking not to Coleridge's Unitarianism but his interest in Higher Critical hermeneutics. (5) With William Empson, we at last encounter outright insistence on the Unitarianism of The thankfully. Yet we also encounter a reconstruction of Coleridge's Unitarian faith so tendentious as to create more problems than it resolves. My effort to negotiate these contending positions will appeal to the Unitarian convictions expressed in Coleridge's own letters and prose writings and Priestley's theological treatises. My essay will concede Warren's claim that The Rime celebrates the One Life, but then argue that the poem displays a typically Unitarian disinterest in Original Sin and the loss of Eden. I will agree with Boulger, against Warren, that the idea of Necessity shapes Coleridge's narrative profoundly, but I will also argue that Coleridge's conception of Necessity is providential rather than skeptical. While accepting McGann's case for a historicist Rime, with the Mariner as a figure of superstition, I will ignore the marginal glosses tie privileges arid concentrate instead on the 1798 text. My concern with The Rime as a Unitarian theodicy, finally, marks the divergence of my argument from Empson's reading. By looking narrowly at the poet's distaste for notions of a hereditary guilt demanding expiation, Empson concludes that Coleridge's Unitarianism disallowed the redemptive rationale of pain and evil--and there I cannot agree. …

A Triptych in honour of the cultural revolution

Here are three valuable books which sincerely try to understand the Cultural Revolution and make it understandable to Westerners. They avoid theoretical juggling as well as picturesqueness for its own sake. None of these books takes for granted what a certain rhetorical type of Chinese propaganda states with overflowing phraseology, nor do they indulge in the kind of trifling questions characteristic of many Western commentators, such as: Is Chou En-lai losing ground? Is there a rift between the Secretariat and the Politburo? A rebirth of regionalism? and so on. The authors' most obvious concession to Western “bourgeois-educated” readers is that they try to avoid jargonistic Marxism, and to explain even the doctrinal grounds of the Cultural Revolution with plain words; but maybe it could be argued. that they only apply Chairman Mao's teachings in opposition to the “eight-legged essay style.” As for the “socialist-educated” reader, I should add that the authors also escape flatulent psychoanalysis and sociology.

Some Thoughts on University Disciplinary Proceedings

CONSTITUTIONAL DOCTRINE is too often used to define what ought to be. Because the federal courts have refused to find de facto segregation covered by the doctrine of the Brown case, school superintendents conclude not only that nothing need be done to reduce racial concentrations in the schools, but that nothing should be done.' Or, in the salad days of urban renewal, the narrow scope of constitutionally defined just compensation was seen as the wise measure of damages for relocatees despite the evident inadequacy of this formula to compensate for the many harms imposed on those whose lives were disrupted for the benefit of society.2 Much of the debate at Berkeley concerning students' and institutional authority has similarly been couched in constitutional terms. Student attention is focussed too much on claims of legal rights to free expression which they assert must be honored on the campus as well as off. The Regents reply that their policies do not contemplate that advocacy or content of speech shall be restricted beyond the purview of the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution' without apparent support for a commitment to the merits of an open society. The General Counsel opines that a particularly ambiguous proposed general standard of conduct is permissible, citing a number of decisions in which judges, at various times in the past and on various doctrinal grounds, have refused to interfere with dismissal of students. Nothing is said about the dangers of a vague, open-ended standard (in this case that students are required to observe generally accepted standards of conduct);4 nor is any alternative language proposed which might better identify

The Neurosis in the Light of Rational Psychology by A. A. A. Terruwe, M. D.

BOOK REVIEWS 669 Two additional comments, based more on prudential then doctrinal grounds, may be advanced. Although Smith several times considers history , his analysis-in the light of the widespread acceptation of Dawson's views-appears too brief and understated. Finally, since each chapter underscores the necessity of including the subjects it treats in the liberal arts' curriculum, the cumulative effect is to choke the college with a mass of necessary subjects. The author should have applied the " principle of selection " he found valid for precollege education. " Subjects preparatory to all further knowledge should be emphasized at the expense of subjects that a student can handle on his own " (p. 146) . However, such purely practical points fall outside the aim and content of the school. These last Professor Smith has examined with his accustomed wisdom and clarity. Providence CoUege, Pru11idence, R.I. THOMAS CuNNINGHAM, O.P. The Neurosis in the Light of Rational Psychology. By A. A. A. TERRUWE, M.D., trans!. by CoNRAD W. BAARS, M.D. New York, P. J. Kenedy & Sons. 1960. Pp. xxii, ~00. Psychiatry and clinical psychology are not theoretical disciplines, although each presupposes and incorporates definite principles and assumptions which are essentially theoretical in character. Genuine progress in the sciences of mental and emotional health will not be made on the basis of a false epistemology or philosophy of human nature; more positively, the psychiatrist must recognize the need and value of a sound understanding of the nature of man, an understanding which rational psychology provides . Mortimer Adler has demonstrated with consummate skill the basically practical aim and import of psychiatry in general and psychoanalysis in particular. There remains a pressing need to isolate and evaluate the theoretical elements implicit in psychiatric practice, to provide both a critical check and an authentic guide to the therapeutic efforts of the professionals in this field. Dr. Terruwe is unusually well qualified to contribute significantly towards that ·integration of theory and practice which is a prime desideratum in psychiatric medicine. The author has for a number of years carried on a broadly diversified practice in the treatment of personality disorders. At a crucial point in her clinical training Dr. Terruwe became acquainted with Thomistic psychology and was able, under the direction of a renowned Dutch clinician, to discern in Thomistic doctrine insights and principles which she believed would aid greatly in the diagnosis and treatment 670 BOOK REVIEWS of neurotic and psychopathic disorders. This expectancy was fulfilled in remarkable fashion over a period of years, and the experience of success in actual practice has been translated into a reflective analysis of the disorders in question. In the present work, a remarkably complete and carefully documented theory of neurosis is worked up on the basis of this experience and in the light of Aristotelian-Thomistic doctrine of the passions . There are pitifully few studies of this kind, incorporating close and critical familiarity with both philosophy and medicine. The plan of Terruwe's book is of far greater interest and significance than even the results reported and conclusions reached-which are, in fact, important enough in themselves and excellently presented. Psychiatry is primarily and essentially a branch of medicine, but more than any other medical specialty it reveals strikingly the complete and complex nature of the human patient. Terruwe's work is notable above all in these three respects: 1) it recognizes the indispensable need of verifying and confirming a theory of mental and emotional disturbance through a number of clinical cases in which the theory's validity is thoroughly tested and rechecked ; 2) it brings to the fore, as an inescapable factor in a total explanation of neurosis, the role of reason, of the spiritual dimension in man, in constituting and preserving mental and emotional health; and 3) it offers an object-lesson in good, fruitful methodology, applying certain principles of intelligibility to the solution of vexing empirical problems. Psychiatry has attracted a number of Thomistic philosophers and theologians , increasingly so in the past decade or more. This interest and concern attest the willingness and even eagerness of Thomists to face contemporary intellectual and cultural developments, with a view to making contact between the profound and perennial wisdom of...