This statement by the late Franz Rosenthal is, in a sense, the uniting theme of the present volume's 35 articles by renowned scholars of Islamic Studies, Middle ...

This paper focuses on the issue of the death of migrants and invites us to recognise bodily vulnerability and precariousness when confronted with the faceless and nameless dead migrant. It explores...

A close reading of the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea (1st century CE), an anonymous captain's manual written in everyday Greek, provides ways of thinking about broader questions concerning the connectedness of the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean. It is located primarily in the Red Sea, an interstitial zone between the two large seas, and concerns long-distance networks of exchange between South Asia, the Arabian peninsula, the Horn of Africa, Alexandria, and beyond that the Mediterranean. Among the issues (...) to emerge are the linear nature of spatial experience and the means by which commodities are mapped. A goal of the article is to identify ways in which to link the practice and representations of travel. (shrink)

Sheep and the sea! At first glance there would seem to be very little relation between the ovine species and the realm of Thetis. Certainly it would be gratifying to attempt to justify this somewhat Hemingway-like title by recalling the sheep of Panurge who were forced by their gregarious instincts to throw themselves into the sea, following their leader. I could also allude to the woolly-looking froth that the wind provokes on the crest of gentle Mediterranean waves. But of (...) what value is such imagery? Instead I insist fully on the realism of the title. I really do intend to discuss sheep, young ones and not yet fully mature, and maritime travel. In short, I will show that the origin of the domestic sheep is closely linked to the question of early navigation in the Mediterranean Sea, particularly in its western basin. (shrink)

Mediterranean history, and the history of other closed seas, is seen here as the experience of those who traversed the sea and arrived as decentered aliens on the other side. Mainly these have been men, with merchants generally as pioneers who introduced the goods, ideas, and religion of one region to another. From antiquity onwards, port cities such as Carthage, Alexandria, Smyrna, and Livorno acted as links among the three continents facing the Mediterranean, and visitors from other lands (...) were sometimes free to roam, sometimes ghettoized. (shrink)

In the last seven years, close to twenty thousand people have died trying to reach Europe by crossing the Mediterranean Sea. Rescue missions by private actors and NGOs have increased because both national measures and measures by the EU’s border control agency, Frontex, are often deemed insufficient. However, such independent rescue missions face increasing persecution from national governments, Italy being one example. This raises the question of how potential migrants and dissenting citizens should act towards the EU border regime. (...) In contrast to the literature, which mainly addresses migration on the basis of justice requirements, this article focuses on the legitimate authority of the EU’s border regime. Focusing on the legitimacy criteria for states’ claims to regulate migration opens a fruitful normative perspective, given the pervasive disagreement over the content of justice in migration. What reasons for compliance and non-interference does legitimacy supply for potential immigrants and dissenting citizens? And what legitimacy standard may be appropriate for the power that individual states claim over potential immigrants? We argue that, even assuming a minimal legitimacy standard for the state-migrant relationship, the structure of the EU’s border regime exhibits unique features, which cause it to stand in tension with such a standard. By coordinating its Member States’ border regimes, especially through Frontex, the EU claims and exercises power over potential immigrants. However, the asymmetrical delegation of state powers to the EU means that the power involved in regulating European borders is, in core respects, unaccountable. This unaccountability, we argue, is significant for the legitimacy of the EU’s border regime. This article sheds new light on the morality of unauthorised rescue missions by assessing the permissibility of resistance to the EU’s border regime. (shrink)

The Sea as Mirror traces the pressing and repressed material and symbolic presence of the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean from Plato to Heidegger. To do so, Wu Yi employs the maritime as a lens to understand the drive of philosophy as both a response to and moment within the impetus of Western colonization. Yi examines how philosophy has again and again constructed itself as a genre in opposition to the movement of deterritorialization and fluidity of mimesis. She (...) does so via the method (meta, “after” + hodos, “way, journey”) of a series of essayings (in the original sense of trial, measure, attempt) across a geopolitical topography of discourses. These include philosophical texts drawn from a constellation of historical topoi at the critical moments of their encounter with the maritime: Plato and Euripedes’s work from fifth-century Athens; Augustus and Plautus’s writings from republican and early imperial Rome; Shakespeare’s creations from Elizabethan England; Kant and Rousseau’s texts from enlightenment continental Europe; and the thinking of Husserl and Heidegger from interwar Germany of the twentieth century. For each historical topos, Yi juxtaposes different representations of and responses to the maritime through the reading of a philosophical text vis-à-vis the reading of a literary text. In so doing, she lays bare the deep political and moral ambiguity attributed to the ocean in Western philosophical and literary imaginaries. (shrink)

Makings of the Sea is an inquiry into the makings of the Mediterranean imagination in the 20th century, focusing on specific cases in the visual and performing arts, music and literature. Following a thematic structure that falls broadly under the headings of journey, doubt and nostalgia, this is an essay on Mediterranean aesthetics.

In May 1965, in the midst of Franco's dictatorship in Spain, four bottlenose dolphins travelled from Miami to Barcelona Zoo. These became the inhabitants of one of the first dolphinariums in Europe. The arrival of the dolphins was preceded by two trips of the zoo's director, accompanied by an architect and a politician, to visit the installations at the Miami Seaquarium, Sea World San Diego, and Marineland of the Pacific in California. In this paper, I reflect on how knowledge and (...) practices about a completely new animal and its keeping were acquired in the Barcelona Zoo. This was a time when exhibitions, popular perception, and scientific research regarding marine mammals were being developed. The training and exhibition of dolphins was shaped by a mixture of circus-like practices and scientific knowledge. Dolphins arrived in Europe with “knowledges” and practices attached, but also with a lot of uncertainty. However, circumstances like geography, logistics, and the corporate character of American aquaria prevented a straightforward flow of information from the United States to Europe. How did Barcelona Zoo keepers manage to gather information on the building and maintenance of a dolphinarium? And how did they gather information on how to feed, care, train, and exhibit the dolphins? This paper seeks to understand how the particular setting of Barcelona Zoo, as well as its social, scientific, and political context shaped the exhibition of and creation of knowledge about animals at the zoo. (shrink)

This essay surveys the evolution of historical scholarship on epidemic diseases in the Mediterranean/Islamicate world with a particular focus on plague. Temporally, it covers the scholarship on plague epidemics during the last 1,500 years, surveyed in three major pandemics: first, second, and third pandemics of plague. Geographically, it addresses the Mediterranean basin and its hinterland, including the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), the Anatolian peninsula, the Balkans, and occasionally drawing on adjacent areas such as the Black Sea (...) region and the Persian plateau. It outlines major trends and turning points in the modern historiography; reviews prevailing paradigms, contested issues, and emergent consensuses; and identifies methodologies, sources, and approaches. Whenever possible, it highlights contributions from paleogenetic and other scientific studies, with special reference to the diversity of opinions, actors, and materials in this highly controversial but vigorous field of study. The major goal of this essay is to reunite the divided historiographies of the Mediterranean world, which are typically studied separately in the case of Europe and the Islamicate world, with a view to underscoring their shared epidemiological experiences. (shrink)

Taking inspiration from the legal doctrine of the freedom of the seas, this paper makes the case for No Borders. To do so, it revisits Grotius’s arguments for the freedom of the seas. Analysis of contemporary bordering practices in the Mediterranean Sea reveals the weakness of what appears to be Grotius’s most plausible argument, namely that the ocean cannot be occupied and should therefore be free. While Grotius’s argument for the freedom of the seas based on the idea of (...) divinely sanctioned sociability is clearly problematic for the twenty-first century, the paper retools it by shifting from theology to ontology with a turn to Deleuze and Guattari, and Nancy. The resultant argument, based on Nancy’s idea of being-in-common, not only justifies the freedom of the seas, but also more radically calls for an end to exclusionary political communities and their borders. (shrink)

Shortly after the Vandals took Carthage in 439, the city's Catholic bishop, Quodvultdeus, and a large number of his clergy were said to have been placed “naked and despoiled on broken ships” and put to sea, banished from Africa. By God's mercy, the exiles made their way safely to Naples, where Quodvultdeus quickly came to be regarded as a saint: a fifth-century mosaic from the catacombs of St. Januarius in Capodimonte seems to depict the African bishop, and by the middle (...) of the ninth century his feast day was celebrated in the local liturgical calendar. A similar story could be told of Gaudiosus of Abitina, another fifth-century African bishop who was said to have fled the Vandals and who also achieved sainthood in Campania. The flight of refugees like Quodvultdeus and Gaudiosus from the political turmoil that wracked North Africa between the fifth and the eighth centuries, however, has long been seen as having a far greater significance than the reinvention of exiled African bishops as southern Italian holy men. In late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, the cults of numerous saints who had been martyred in Africa and whose cults had originally developed there spread beyond the shores of the southern Mediterranean to the rest of the Christian world. In seeking to explain the diffusion of these cults, historians have long focused on the movements of refugees—and, above all, those who fled the Vandals' conquest of Africa and their subsequent persecution of the region's Catholic population—as displaced Africans such as Quodvultdeus are thought to have brought the relics of their local saints with them into foreign exile. (shrink)

This book investigates the chaotic end of the Bronze Age in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean through the lens of Homeric poetry, with an emphasis on the description of piratical activities described in the Odyssey’s “Second Cretan Lie,” and on the impact of revolutionary seafaring technology in this watershed period in Mediterranean history.

This is a multi-authored review of a book that is extremely rich and lengthy (43 chapters, among whose titles are: Chapter III, In the name of the Lord God, this round Earth of the Ancients becomes flat again. Or perhaps not? (In which - by way of preface - the story is told of how our great Sphere, which was measured and drawn by Egyptian Alexandria, became a Mystery, Sacrilege and dark until ten years ago); Chapter X, Strabo: ‘The Pillars? (...) Gibraltar or Cádiz! But none of us have ever really seen them’ (An impossible Interview with the great Greek historian/geographer who summarizes for us what was known by the great men who preceded him. Christ had not yet been born and the site of those famous pillars had already been lost); Chapter XII, With Herodotus in the Eldorado of silver. A voyage to Tartessos, the Andalusian Atlantis (In which it will be seen that neither the Bible nor Herodotus ever said Tartessos was Spain. But only that it was in the West and beyond the Pillars of Hercules: exactly like Sardinia...); Chapter XXVIII, The Peoples-of-the-Sea versus Ramses III or the Very First World War). The author writes on culture for the daily newspaper La Repubblica. (shrink)

Transformation of the sparrow and the butterfly -- Meeting the gods of poverty in a dream -- The greatest joys of the cicada and its cast-off shell -- The owl's understanding -- The centipede questions the snake -- The toad's way of the gods -- The mysterious technique of the cat -- Afterword by William Scott Wilson.

Water mattered in medieval Pisa. As it was not a natural port, Pisa had to protect, manage, and maintain its maritime landings and riverine passages to neutralize its Mediterranean competitors and ensure its prosperity. This paper addresses the three bodies of water and waterways most important to the Pisa - the Tyrrhenian Sea and the Auser and Arno rivers - and how architecture interfaced with hydrotopography. Architectural structures defined a unique visual culture in Pisa in practical, topographical, and symbolic (...) ways. The organization of the city, its key monuments, and their ornamentation all demonstrated the significance of the city’s complex relationship with water that was key to Pisa’s success in the Middle Ages. (shrink)

Machine generated contents note: Part 1 - The Constituent Disciplines of Cognitive Science -- Philosophical Epistemology -- Glossary -- 1.0 What is Philosophical Epistemology? -- 1.1 The reduced history of Philosophy Part I - The Classical Age -- 1.2 Mind and World - The problem of objectivity -- 1.3 The reduced history of Philosophy Part II - The twentieth century -- 1.4 The philosophy of Cognitive Science -- 1.5 Mind in Philosophy: summary -- 1.6 The Nolanian Framework (so far) -- (...) Psychology -- 2.0 Why is Psychology so difficult? -- 2.1 A brief history of Experimental Psychology -- 2.2 Methodologies in Psychology -- 2.3 Perception -- 2.4 Memory -- 2.5 Mind in Psychology -- Linguistics -- 3.0 Introduction -- 3.1 Why Linguistics? -- 3.2 Computation and Linguistics -- 3.3 The main grammatical theories -- 3.4 Language development and linguistics -- 3.5 Toward a definition of context -- 3.6 The multifarious uses of Language -- 3.7 Linguistics and Computational Linguistics -- 3.8 Language and other symbol systems -- 3.9 On the notion of context -- 3.10 Mind in Linguistics: summary -- Neuroscience -- 4.0 The constituent disciplines of Neuroscience -- 4.1 The methodology of Neuroscience -- 4.2 Gross Neuroanatomy -- 4.3 Some relevant findings -- 4.4 Connectionism (PDP) -- 4.5 The victory of Neuroscience? -- 4.6 Mind in Neuroscience: summary -- Artificial Intelligence -- 5.0 Introduction -- 5.1 Al and Cognitive Science -- 5.2 Skeptics and their techniques -- 5.3 Al as Computer Science -- 5.4 Al as software -- 5.5 The current methodological debate -- 5.6 Context, syntax and semantics -- 5.7 Mind in Al -- 5.8 Texts on Al -- Etholoqy and Ethnoscience -- 6.1 Etology -- 6.2 Ethnoscience -- 6.3 Mind in Ethology arid Ethnoscience -- Part II - A New Foundation for Cognitive Science -- - Symbol Systems -- 7.1 Characteristics of symbol systems -- 7.2 Context and the layers of symbol systems -- 7.3 Mind and symbol systems -- Consciousness and Selfhood -- 8.0 Introduction -- 8.1 Cognitive views -- 8.2 What is at stake? -- 8.3 Consciousness as treated in Philosophy -- 8.4 The Development of Selfhood -- 8.5 The minimal requirements for this theory -- 8.6 Self as a filter -- 8.7 Self and motivation -- 8.8 Conclusions -- 8.9 Recent developments -- Cognitive Science and the Search for Mind -- 9.1 Introduction -- 9.2 Review -- 9.3 A Theory of Mind anyone? -- 9.4 Foundational considerations -- 9.5 Coda: the Nolanian Framework. (shrink)

In this article we investigate how Latino immigrant farmers in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States navigate United States Department of Agriculture programs, which necessitate standardizing farming practices and an acceptance of bureaucracy for participation. We show how Latino immigrant farmers’ agrarian norms and practices are at odds with the state’s requirement for agrarian standardization. This interview-based study builds on existing historical analyses of farmers of color in the United States, and the ways in which their farming practices and (...) racialized identities are often unseen by and illegible to the state. This disjuncture leads to the increased racial exclusion of immigrant farmers from USDA opportunities. Such exclusions impede the transition to a “new era of civil rights,” as has been proclaimed by USDA leadership. Although efforts to address institutionalized racism on a national level may be genuine, they have failed to acknowledge this schism between rural Latino immigrants and the state, thereby inhibiting a meaningful transition in the fields, and continuing a legacy of unequal access to agrarian opportunities for non-white immigrant farmers. (shrink)

In this clear, accessible guide, Sean Hand sets Levinas's work in its intellectual and social contexts and examines: the influence of phenomenology and Judaism ...

North Korea references gender equality in its socialist constitution, but the de facto social and legal circumstances that women face in the country are far below the de jure status they are purported to enjoy. North Korean women endure extremely low public health standards and pervasive harassment. Yet their growing market power and social influence are underestimated. Women account for the majority of North Korean border crossers, and their informal economic activities are supporting families while modernizing the economy. This essay (...) examines the dangers of exploitation that North Korean women face and highlights the ethical and legal imperatives of supporting their roles in marketizing the economy and liberalizing the society in one of the worst human rights–violating states. Women are North Korea's most deserving recipients of international assistance and the country's most promising partners to the world. (shrink)

In this study international legal experts explore legal concepts and contexts from diverse national and disciplinary perspectives. Themes range from legal and normative pluralism to the development of state law and legal systems, and from law's rhetoric and the potential utility of alternative vocabularies to the polyjurality of the present. The study combines theoretical analyses and case studies to create a rich picture of present scholarship on laws and norms and the state of contemporary legal complexity, each crossing traditional boundaries.

Relying on textual, ethnographic, and environmental scholarship on Yemen and the comparative insights of research into fisheries in the premodern Mediterranean world, the present study surveys the types of marine resources that appear across a wide range of literary and documentary sources pertaining to Yemen during the reign of the Rasūlids from the early 7th/13th to the mid-9th/15th century. Although Rasūlid-generated texts pay relatively scant attention to fishing, they clearly demonstrate the interest of the Rasūlid state in both the (...) subsistence and commercial economy that fishermen procured. Moreover, when combined with the testimony of travelers and chroniclers and of iconography on a series of Rasūlid coins from the port city of Aden, these sources shed light on the inclusion of fish in Yemeni non-elite and elite diets, the place and roles of fisherfolk in Yemeni society, the maritime symbolism current in Rasūlid times, and ultimately the relationship between shores and inland centers of Rasūlid power. In aggregate this material suggests that the Rasūlid state maintained a symbiotic political and cultural relationship with fishing communities, which had direct access to and the primary role in harvesting and processing the resources in question, yet remain in the shadows of recorded history. (shrink)

This collection explicates Levinas's major contribution to these debates, namely the idea of the primacy of ethics over ontology or epistemology.

A graphic novel version of the classic book that first introduced Westerners to the samurai ethos. This graphic novel version of the cult classic Bushido brings the timeless secrets of the samurai to life. Originally published in 1905, Bushido was the first book to introduce Westerners to the samurai ethos. Written by Inazo Nitobe, one of the foremost Japanese authors and educators of the time, it describes the characteristics and virtues that are associated with bushido—honor, courage, justice, loyalty, self-control—and explains (...) the philosophy behind how samurai were educated and trained; the connection between the sword and the samurai; seppuku; and the position of women in samurai culture; among other themes. To this day,Bushido is considered a must-read for anyone who wants to understanding the soul of Japan and navigate their world with integrity and honor. (shrink)

Outlines the ethical code of the samurai in a time when the martial skills of the warrior became redundant and his role was subsumed into governmental service, in graphic novel form.

Unholy human beings and holy humanity in Kant's critical and practical philosophy -- Independence from nature : preparing the ground for perpetual peace in the third critique -- The problem of international politics : human beings within the mechanism of nature -- The instruction of suffering : Kant's theological anthropology for a prodigal species -- An "all-unifying church triumphant!" -- Conclusion : believing in the possibility of salvation -- Epilogue : Kant and contemporary cosmopolitanism.

Collection of papers delivered at a symposium held in Lausanne, 10-11 September 2009.".