The Origin of the ‘Paardekraal Vow’ Contrary to common belief that the ‘1880 Vow' was taken at Paardekraal, on the restoration of the Republic on 13 December 1880, the writer has documentary proof that this ‘Vow’ was in existence almost two years before that date. An agreement is said to have been signed by a number of the Boers at Wonderfontein, where they had gathered between 10 and 13 January 1879 to claim the restoration of the Republic. Both these minutes (...) and the Transvaal press ignored this agreement as it was feared that they would lead to premature armed resistance. The Paardekraal Festival Commission became aware of the agreement in 1945 and adopted it as the ‘Vow of 1880' in their 1946 programme. (shrink)

Twelve-year-old Kalman Gabriel wrote to hundreds of famous -- and infamous -- people to find out what kind of advice for life they would impart upon him. The response was overwhelming. Over two hundred people, from Mother Teresa to Mr. Rogers: from Ray Bradbury and Scott Turow to Naomi Judd and Drew Barrymore, responded to Kalman's letters. Leona Helmsley told Kalman, "Presevere," while Elie Weisel advised, "Study. Read. Share." Kalman's files are compulsively readable and infinitely quotable.

Conventional wisdom holds that Judaism is indifferent or even suspiciously hostile to the visual arts due to the Second Commandment's prohibition on creating "graven images," the dictates of monotheism, and historical happenstance. This intellectual history of medieval and modern Jewish attitudes toward art and representation overturns the modern assumption of Jewish iconophobia that denies to Jewish culture a visual dimension. Kalman Bland synthesizes evidence from medieval Jewish philosophy, mysticism, poetry, biblical commentaries, travelogues, and law, concluding that premodern Jewish intellectuals held (...) a positive, liberal understanding of the Second Commandment and did, in fact, articulate a certain Jewish aesthetic. He draws on this insight to consider modern ideas of Jewish art, revealing how they are inextricably linked to diverse notions about modern Jewish identity that are themselves entwined with arguments over Zionism, integration, and anti-Semitism. Through its use of the past to illuminate the present and its analysis of how the present informs our readings of the past, this book establishes a new assessment of Jewish aesthetic theory rooted in historical analysis. Authoritative and original in its identification of authentic Jewish traditions of painting, sculpture, and architecture, this volume will ripple the waters of several disciplines, including Jewish studies, art history, medieval and modern history, and philosophy. (shrink)

János Erdelyi: The Individual and the Ideal Individuality and ideality are the two principles according to which aesthetes yesterday and today interpret art. But individuality must have priority because the systems of ideality, established for instance by Winckelmann and Schiller, produce nothing but lifeless, abstract and uniform figures who represent a concept or the genus. Individuality, on the contrary, is an analogon to nature where everything has its end and sense in itself, and everything must be judged by itself. This (...) is the difference between the figures and works of Shakespeare and those of the idealizing authors. Individuality, however, does not simply mean the imitation of nature; rather it means a well-balanced synthesis of the material and the spiritual in something characteristic. This renders the objection of ugliness invalid, too, because it only pertains to the sensual perception, that is the beginning of perception. Those identifying the beautiful with the ideal are also at risk of insisting on objects which in the course of time lose their novelty and power. The study by the Hungarian aesthete and literary critic János Erdélyi, written in 1847, is an important attempt to enforce the principle ‘life as it is’ in the philosophy of art. (shrink)

Buber proclaims that 'in the beginning was relation'; that man is by his very nature a Homo Dialogus - incapable of realizing himself without communion with man, with the creation and with his Creator.Buber sought to anchor Zionism in what he defined as 'Hebrew Humanism': "the path of holiness" as opposed to "holy egoism".

Interest in the intersection between bilingualism and cognitive control and accessibility to neuroimaging methods have resulted in numerous studies with a variety of interpretations of the bilingual cognitive advantage. Neurocomputational Emergentism (or Neuroemergentism for short) is a new framework for understanding this relationship between bilingualism and cognitive control. This framework considers Emergence, in which two small elements are recombined in an interactive manner, yielding a non-linear effect. Added to this is the notion that Emergence can be captured in neural systems (...) using computationally inspired models. This review poses that bilingualism and cognitive control, as examined through the Neuroemergentist framework, are interwoven through development and involve the non-linear growth of cognitive processing encompassing brain areas that combine and recombine, in symbiotic and parasitic ways, in order to handle more complex types of processing. The models that have sought to explain the neural substrates of bilingual cognitive differences will be discussed with a reinterpretation of the entire bilingual cognitive advantage within a Neuroemergentist framework incorporating its neural bases. It will conclude by discussing how this new Neuroemergentist approach alters our view of the effects of language experience on cognitive control. Avenues to move beyond the simple notion of a bilingual advantage or lack thereof will be proposed. (shrink)

Condensed detachment is usually regarded as a notation, and defined by example. In this paper it is regarded as a rule of inference, and rigorously defined with the help of the Unification Theorem of J. A. Robinson. Historically, however, the invention of condensed detachment by C. A. Meredith preceded Robinson's studies of unification. It is argued that Meredith's ideas deserve recognition in the history of unification, and the possibility that Meredith was influenced, through ukasiewicz, by ideas of Tarski going back (...) at least to 1939, and possibly to 1930 or earlier, is discussed. It is proved that a term is derivable by substitution and ordinary detachment from given axioms if and only if it is a substitution instance of a term which is derivable from these axioms by condensed detachment, and it is shown how this theorem enables the ideas of ukasiewicz and Tarski mentioned above to be formalized and extended. Finally, it is shown how condensed detachment may be subsumed within the resolution principle of J. A. Robinson, and several computer studies of particular Hilbert-type propositional calculi using programs based on condensed detachment or on resolution are briefly discussed. (shrink)

In the Nordic countries, at a time when women have only recently won the right to their own bodies and to a sexuality of their own and for themselves, women nevertheless fake orgasms. Moreover, a .

A recurrent theme in contemporary narratives of grieving is that there is a gap between the griever’s more or less consciously chosen expression of, and acting out of, grief and loss and other people’s seeming lack of acceptance. Starting from the view that the social context of feelings and emotions are constitutive in making an emotional experience what it is, this article explores what is done and experienced in acts of grief. A phenomenological perspective is applied to analyze the conditioning (...) of these experiences, and what the acts of grieving may accomplish in relation to various aspects of the self, indeed selves—that is, in relation to the surviving relative as well as the deceased. (shrink)

Historians have recently used the Internet to circulate political statements about law. This paper explores the statements they issued against President Clinton's impeachment and President Bush's inauguration. It pays special attention to impeachment, comparing the position taken by historians with that taken by the law professors. While concluding that such statements can be useful, the author advises historians lacking the expertise to evaluate the positions taken in a statement to proceed carefully in signing it. She suggests that historians sign only (...) such documents whose scholarship they have made a preliminary assessment that they could individually defend publicly. She also urges historians to craft statements that give the public a sense of the methods they use in interpreting the past. (shrink)

In the first part of this paper we indicate how Meredith's condensed detachment may be used to give a new proof of Belnap's theorem that if every axiom x of a calculus S has the two-property that every variable which occurs in x occurs exactly twice in x, then every theorem of S is a substitution instance of a theorem of S which has the two-property. In the remainder of the paper we discuss the use of mechanical theorem-provers, based either (...) on condensed detachment or on the resolution rule of J. A. Robinson, to investigate various calculi whose axioms all have the two-property. Particular attention is given to D-groupoids, i.e. sets of formulae which are closed under condensed detachment. (shrink)

This paper explores the meaning of the word “felony” in thirteenth and fourteenth century England, i.e., during the first two centuries of the English criminal trial jury. To compile a working definition of felony, the paper presents examples of the language of felony drawn from literary and religious sources, in addition to considering the word’s more formulaic appearance in legal records. The paper then analyzes cases ending in acquittal or pardon, highlighting the factors that might take a criminal case out (...) of the realm of felony. It suggests that the very definition of felony and felonious behavior—and thus the essence of criminal responsibility—may be bound up with the idea of mens rea during this period. The paper aims to uncover broader societal understandings of the nature of guilt and innocence, and to highlight connections and disconnections between the formal criminal law of felony, with its heavy emphasis on capital punishment, and popular and ecclesiastical understandings of culpability. (shrink)

This article follows the formulation of a new Palestinian attitude toward the Holocaust memory. It presents it as a bold challenge to past Palestinian perceptions of and attitudes toward the Holocaust memory. This novel Palestinian stance connects the Holocaust memory to the memory of the Nakbah, the Palestinian catastrophe of 1948. It is part of a critical deconstruction of the manipulation of collective memory in the service of nationalism. The authors of this article respond by providing their own deconstruction of (...) the memory's manipulation on both the Israeli and the Palestinian side of the divide. This additional analysis is meant to contribute to a dialogue that would enable us to explore further the dialectical relationship between the Holocaust and Nakbah memory in the Arab-Israeli conflict. This is not a mere academic exercise. Like others who had already participated in this dialogue, the authors believe firmly that such an exposure is a precondition for the elimination of the violence, direct or symbolic, from Israeli-Palestinian coexistence. (shrink)

The paper sets out to offer an alternative to the function/argument approach to the most essential aspects of natural language meanings. That is, we question the assumption that semantic completeness (of, e.g., propositions) or incompleteness (of, e.g., predicates) exactly replicate the corresponding grammatical concepts (of, e.g., sentences and verbs, respectively). We argue that even if one gives up this assumption, it is still possible to keep the compositionality of the semantic interpretation of simple predicate/argument structures. In our opinion, compositionality presupposes (...) that we are able to compare arbitrary meanings in term of information content. This is why our proposal relies on an ‘intrinsically’ type free algebraic semantic theory. The basic entities in our models are neither individuals, nor eventualities, nor their properties, but ‘pieces of evidence’ for believing in the ‘truth’ or ‘existence’ or ‘identity’ of any kind of phenomenon. Our formal language contains a single binary non-associative constructor used for creating structured complex terms representing arbitrary phenomena. We give a finite Hilbert-style axiomatisation and a decision algorithm for the entailment problem of the suggested system. (shrink)

Words and phrases must be interpreted within the proper cultural and contemporary political and historical context. In particular, the language of politics is distinguished by the use of specific terms and phrases which often allude to other associated meanings. This means that caution must be exercised when interpreting the terms used not only within the context of the other language, but often also within its own linguistic context. The translator or commentator has to be familiar with the language code used (...) in the given environment and within the cultural biases of that particular society so that meanings are not lost and the often crucial connotations are not misinterpreted. Political rhetoric often employs words and language in a manipulative yet frequently subtle manner. This paper analyzes examples of shifts in language code by looking at a number of cases in Japan and their cultural construction where loss of integrity and backstage practices are at stake. (shrink)