The book under review examines how a number of key literary and cultural texts, spanning the nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries, from Britain and India, imagined the world after decolonization. The book, by an academic working in English and South Asian literary studies, uses literary and cultural geographical approaches, grounded in cultural and historical materialism. It also makes a fresh contribution to utopian studies, especially in the methods we use in this field. The book focuses on what the first (...) chapter evocatively terms, in its title, spatial desire in the age of empire. Taking inspiration from the work of scholars such as Edward Said and Raymond Williams who analyzed cultural... (shrink)

Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- Before Freud : the quarrel of the unconscious in late nineteenth-century France -- Flaubert : hysterical duality, hallucination and writing -- Maupassant, Charcot and the paranormal -- The unconscious female/the female unconscious -- Hypnotism, dual personalities and the popular novel -- Proust, the intellect and the unconscious -- Postscript -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.

Essai sur la lecture du monde par la philosophie, à la lumière de la pensée de Martin Heidegger et Günther Anders, à travers des commentaires et réflexions suscitées par des images du photographe M. Koch. Electre 2018.

Every day we make choices, but our degree of investment in them differs, both in terms of pre-verbal experience and verbal justification. In an earlier experimental study, participants were asked to pick the more attractive one among two human faces, and among two abstract figures, and later to provide verbal motivations for these choices. They did not know that in some of the cases their choices were manipulated. Against claims about our unreliability as conscious agents, the study found that in (...) about half the cases the manipulations were detected. In the present study, we investigated whether varying degrees of choice investment could be an explanatory factor for such findings. We analysed the verbal justifications of the participants along a set of semantic categories, based on theoretical ideas from phenomenology and cognitive linguistics, and formulated a matrix of eleven markers of choice investment. We predicted a greater degree of investment when motivating choices of faces than figures, manipulated than actual choices, and detected than non-detected manipulations. These predictions were confirmed, but with various strength. This allows us to argue for both consilience and differences between pre-verbal choice investment and the corresponding verbal motivations of the choices made, and thus for conscious awareness of choice making. (shrink)

This edited volume explores the previously underacknowledged 'pre-history' of mathematical structuralism, showing that structuralism has deep roots in the history of modern mathematics. The contributors explore this history along two distinct but interconnected dimensions. First, they reconsider the methodological contributions of major figures in the history of mathematics. Second, they re-examine a range of philosophical reflections from mathematically-inclinded philosophers like Russell, Carnap, and Quine, whose work led to profound conclusions about logical, epistemological, and metaphysic.

John Rawls is the most influential 20th century political philosopher, but critics have complained about the ahistorical character of his approach. The purpose of this book is to argue that these critics are, at best, only half correct._Pre-Liberal Political Philosophy_ concentrates on four pre-liberal thinkers who are major figures in the history of philosophy and who are surprisingly formative in the development of Rawls’s mature political philosophy: Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas.

Broaching an understanding of nature in Platonic thought, John Sallis goes beyond modern conceptions and provides a strategy to have recourse to the profound sense of nature operative in ancient Greek philosophy. In a rigorous and textually based account, Sallis traces the complex development of the Greek concept of nature. Beginning with the mythical vision embodied in the figure of the goddess Artemis, he reanimates the sense of nature that informs the fragmentary discourses of Anaximenes, Heraclitus, Parmenides, and Empedocles and (...) shows how Plato takes up pre-Socratic conceptions critically while also being transformed. Through Sallis’s close reading of the Theaetetus and the Phaedo, he recovers the profound and comprehensive concept of nature in Plato’s thought. (shrink)

Disorders of the self figure prominently in psychotic experiences. Subjects de­scribe that “alien” thoughts are inserted in their mind by foreign powers, can sometimes hear their thoughts aloud or describe complex voices interacting with each other. Such experiences can be conceptualized in the framework of a Philosophical Anthropology, which suggests that human experience is characterized by centric and excentric positionality: subjects experience their environment centered around their enlived body and at the same time can reflect upon their place in a (...) shared lifeworld from an excentric point of view. Pre-reflective self awareness has been suggested to ensure that subjects can identify their own thoughts or actions as belonging to themselves, even when they reflect upon them from an excentric point of view. This pre-reflective self awareness appears to be impaired during psychotic experiences, when subjects no longer identify thoughts in their own stream of consciousness as belonging to themselves and instead attribute them to an outside agent. Among several potential causes, it is suggested that such impairments can be due to discrimi­natory or traumatic experiences, which affect the enlived (centric) position of a person and make her feel encircled and deeply threatened by aversive powers. As a consequence, the afflicted individual may fundamentally distance herself from her current centric position in a hostile environment, at the price of experiencing her own thoughts or actions as alien. Philosophical Anthropology may thus help to explain how social exclusion, discrimination and traumatization can promote psychotic experiences and why social support is of primary importance for any treatment of psychosis. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to analyze the figure of the monarch presented in Dante's “De Monarchia”. The study of Dante's political project will provide us with an opportunity to see the shifts in intellectual environment of the late Middle Ages through the evolution or perhaps return from the theocratic model to the earlier pre-Christial concept of the ruler. The study of Dante's political lexicon will demonstrate the revival of the original meanings starting to challenge and shift the consensus (...) of the political philisophy at the time. (shrink)

Comment Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, auteur d'ouvrages sur la philosophie allemande et la "mentalité primitive", peut-il éclairer les enjeux des sciences sociales aujourd'hui? Pour actualiser cette grande figure de la Troisième République, il faut repenser les liens entre le socialisme français et le système colonial à partir de l'affaire Dreyfus. Celle-ci mit à l'épreuve la thèse de Lucien Lévy-Bruhl sur la responsabilité et le conduisit à étudier les formes d'anticipation de l'avenir dans les sociétés sans État. À partir d'archives inédites et d'une (...) hypothèse théorique nouvelle, ce livre retrace les engagements de Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, du soutien des ouvriers au cours de la Première Guerre mondiale à l'aide aux exilés juifs dans les années 1930, et replace l'ethnologie parmi d'autres sciences de la vigilance, comme les statistiques et l'épidémiologie. Il montre ainsi que l'étude des sociétés éloignées permet à la nôtre de se préparer aux catastrophes à partir de l'observation des sentinelles."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Evidence affirms that aesthetic engagement patterns our movements, often with us barely aware. This invites an examination of pre-reflective engagement within cities and also aesthetic experience as a form of the pre-reflective. The invitation is amplified because design has political implications. For instance, it can draw people in or exclude them by establishing implicitly recognized public-private boundaries. The Value Sensitive Design school, which holds that artifacts embody ethical and political values, stresses some of this. But while emphasizing that design embodies (...) implicit values, research in this field lacks sustained attention to largely unconscious background biases or values, rooted in cultural attitudes and personal interests, that lead theorists and planners—often too narrowly—to promote design organized around specific values such as defensibility. In examining these points, I draw on J. J. Gibson, a central figure for some writing on aesthetics and cities, and whom pragmatists and phenomenologists in turn influenced. Taking a cue from pragmatists in particular, I argue Gibson’s perceptual theory of affordances entails a theory of values, meaning our perception and therewith movements are inherently value-based. I advocate design that accounts for relatively constantly held values such as safety, while also handling the vast pluralism that exists and not crushing the aesthetic vibrancy of city life. (shrink)

Many pressing problems are of the following kind: some collection of actions of multiple people will produce some morally significant outcome (good or bad), but each individual action in the collection seems to make no difference to the outcome. These problems pose theoretical problems (especially for act-consequentialism), and practical problems for agents trying to figure out what they ought to do. Much recent literature on such problems has focused on whether it is possible for each action in such a collection (...) to make such a tiny impact on the world that it makes no expected difference to the outcomes with which we’re concerned. I argue that even if this is impossible, there are cases in which each action makes no difference, not because it has such a tiny effect on the world, but because if it were not performed, a similar action would be. This recognition allows us to connect these problems with discussions of structural injustice. (shrink)

RESUMEN Si bien la crítica antihumanista de la categoría de lo humano tenía un objetivo eminentemente emancipador, ha desembocado en los últimos años en una paradoja vinculada a la defensa del carácter construido y, por tanto, descualificado de lo humano. Para responder a esta paradoja, varios filósofos ubicados en el espacio teórico del antihumanismo se han visto forzados a repensar, y en cierto modo a recuperar, lo humano. Judith Butler ofrece uno de los tratamientos más sofisticados de esta cuestión en (...) la medida en que propone, según nuestra hipótesis, no un nuevo concepto de lo humano o un nuevo humanismo, sino distintas figuras de lo humano articuladas en torno a dos vértebras fundamentales: la impropiedad y la precariedad. Al explorar la tensión que modula la relación entre estas dos vértebras, sostenemos que Butler estaría sentando las bases para una antropología política crítica, antihumanista y no antropocéntrica. ABSTRACT While the antihumanist critique of the concept "the human" initially had a fundamentally emancipatory aim, a particular paradox -related to the thesis of the constructed and ultimately disqualified character of the human- eventually grew from it. To deal with this, subsequent thinkers working within and from this position have, therefore, re-thought and, to a certain extent, recuperated the notion of "the human." We argue that Judith Butler offers one of the most sophisticated treatments of this issue by proposing not a new concept of the human or a new humanism, but different figures of the human articulated around two axes: inconsistency and pre-cariousness. The argument defended is that, by exploring the tension that modulates the relation between these two axes, Butler establishes the parameters for a critical, political antihumanist and non-anthropocentric anthropology. (shrink)

Les études rassemblées dans cet ouvrage sont le fait de philosophes, de théoriciens des arts, d'écrivains et de plasticiens. Les auteurs ont voulu rencontrer Michel Guérin sur les chemins où il conduit sa pensée, et souhaité dialoguer avec lui à partir de leurs propres préoccupations ou présupposés. Michel Guérin s'intéresse au pouvoir des gestes de faire sens de manière intelligible et sensible d'un même tour; c'est ce qui explique sans doute pourquoi l'histoire des idées comme le regard porté sur les (...) ouvres d'art, et la conceptualisation des outils propres à l'aiguiser, ont sous sa plume un air de famille dont on rencontrera les effets dans ce recueil. Les contributions y reflètent l'étendue des domaines vers lesquels la Figurologie de Michel Guérin porte bénéfice, ainsi que la multiplicité des implications théoriques et pratiques de sa pensée transversale. Le chapitre initial regroupe des commentaires et des réponses au projet global du philosophe de générer des espaces par les Figures qu'il construit. Le second réunit différents gestes et coupes de sensibilité effectués par des amis artistes aussi bien que théoriciens, dont les intentions sont avant tout plastiques (différencier, donner rythme, donner forme). Dans la dernière partie, les auteurs tentent diversement de penser l'époque au sens où Michel Guérin l'entend, sur le plan éthique autant que sur les plans historique, esthétique et sociopolitique."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

The general editorial plan behind The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell calls for two parallel series, one concerned with Russell's work on philosophy, logic and mathematics, the other with his less technical contributions in areas such as politics, practical ethics, history and education. Volume 1, sub-titled Cambridge Essays, 1888–99, is in a sense the ancestral volume of both series, for it comprises both technical and non-technical subjects. Russell appears here as diarist, public speaker, political commentator, as well as apprentice philosopher (...) and expert on non-Euclidian geometries. The Collected Papers as a whole will span the more than 80 years of Russell's writings devoted to a formidable range of topics from the personal to the highly abstract but, large as it is, this publishing project will make no attempt to bring together the totality of his writings, since many of these remain in print and are readily available. Instead, the project's distinct emphasis will be on Russell's shorter writings, such as essays, articles, reviews and speeches, which are not so easily located, even when previously published. Grouped together in convenient subdivisions, these papers will chronicle for us Russell's intellectual and social growth to an extent even greater than that attempted by Russell himself in his three-volume Autobiography or in My Philosophical Development, and they will also serve to acquaint us with the thoughts, feelings and attitudes of the venerable figure behind the well-known major books. The project's essential aim, then, is to mine and refine the vast Russell Archives in a way that will yield a permanent foundation of study for anyone, whether mere admirer or life-long scholar, who has any interest in Russell's life and work. (shrink)

Owing to intensive development of the theory of self-organization of complex systems called also synergetics, profound changes in our notions of time occur. Whereas at the beginning of the 20th century, natural sciences, by picking up the general spirit of Einstein's theory of relativity, consider a geometrization as an ideal, i.e. try to represent time and force interactions through space and the changes of its properties, nowadays, at the beginning of the 21st century, time turns to be in the focus (...) of attention. It turns to be possible to represent space through time, because synergetics shows that historical and evolutionary stages of development of a complex structure can be found now, in its present spatial configuration. A whole series of paradoxical notions, such as "the influence of the future upon the present", a "possibility of touching of a rather remote future today", "availability of the past and the future now, in praesenti", "irreversibility and elements of reversibility in the course of evolutionary processes in time", "discrete unites, quanta of time", appear in synergetics. (shrink)

Pierre le Pesant Boisguilbert was considered by Marx as one of the founders of classical political economy. His writings contain a large number of concepts and ideas that reappear in the writings of Quesnay, Cantillon and Adam Smith. George Berkeley - a major figure in the history of philosophical idealism - was the author of 'The Querist', a treatise on the nature of Irish under-development and cures for Irish poverty. Baron de Montesquieu - one of the great 18th century polymaths (...) - is author of the masterpiece 'The Spirit of the Laws' (1748) which, while ostensibly a treatise on law, is actually a study of political organization, types of government, national character and the determining ethos of different societies. It enjoyed enormous success in the 18th century and was almost certainly read and studied by Adam Smith. Ferdinando Galiani was a leading critic of physiocracy and a major 18th century proponent of the subjective theory of value. In 1751 he published 'Della Moneta' which contains some notable chapters on monetary theory, and some brilliant pages on the utility theory of value. James Anderson was a Scottish farmer and a prolific author of tracts on the agricultural development of Scotland and the outstanding policy issues of the last quarter of the 18th century. Dugald Stewart was author of 'Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith LLD' (1793) which is one of the earliest, extended commentaries on the works of Adam Smith by one who knew him well. (shrink)

This article analyses the sign systems or semiotic models that make up the meaning of a double face or mask drawing in the pre-Columbian rock art of Colombia, also discussing two human figures with depicted faces associated with the main picture. The sample of rock art was detected on the walls of the Chicamocha Canyon at the Mirador de Barcenas site in the Santander Department in Northeast Colombia. Its origin is attributed to the Guane chiefdom. We hold as a central (...) argument that this face and its gestures were part of a sign system or visual semiosphere that spread along the banks of the Chicamocha Canyon. However, the image shared some semiotic models and visual communication strategies with societies that inhabited areas in central Colombia located hundreds of kilometers away from the site studied. We support this claim because the forms, the use of the space in the images, and the gestures of a hieratic character appear both in the faces of the petroglyphs of the Huila Department as well as in some pre-Hispanic gold masks from the Cundinamarca region. The images of the rock art faces were analysed using a visual semiotic model based on the suggestions of the Mu group and analyses by Felix Thurleman and Jean Marie Floch. The analysis was complemented by Jacques Fontanille’s proposal for the levels of semiotic relevance, with Juri Lotman’s concept of the semiosphere employed as a key concept. (shrink)

Jean Bodin was a figure of great importance in European intellectual history, known as a jurist, associate of kings and courtiers in sixteenth-century France, and author of influential works in the fields of constitutional and social thought, historical writing, witchcraft, and a great deal else besides. Best known for his contribution to formulating the modern doctrine of sovereignty, Bodin was a scholar of exceptional range, whose works provoked controversy in his own time and have continued to do so down the (...) centuries. Hugh Trevor-Roper described him as 'the Aristotle, the Montesquieu of the sixteenth century, the prophet of comparative history, of political theory, of the philosophy of law, of the quantitative theory of money, and of so much else'. (shrink)

Among theorists associated with the first generation of the Frankfurt School, Herbert Marcuse’s position is singular in that he provides us with an unabashedly affirmative theory of politics as liberatory practice. The article discusses Marcuse’s contribution to political thought by pointing out how, in particular, three aspects remain highly pertinent to contemporary thought: (a) his account of freedom as potentiality, to be actualized in political practice; (b) his conception of the political pre-figuration or pre-enactment of a liberated society; and (c) (...) his rehabilitation of the human faculty of imagination that allows us to overcome the reality principle of the status quo by venturing, qua practice, into the realm of the revolutionary surreal, thereby enlarging the horizon of what is politically imaginable. In a final step Marcuse’s contribution is contrasted with contemporary theories of the political. (shrink)

Inspired by research on the Rwanda genocide and the decapitation, in July 2008, of a passenger on a Canadian Greyhound bus, this occasional paper explores the shared agitation with which we may respond to two seemingly disparate instances of evil such as these. Arguing against discontinuous claims that distinguish between pre- and post-metaphysical conceptions of evil pivoting around the figure of Kant, the article identifies three logics suggestive of continuity in Western thought on evil: negativity, functionalism and the messianic. Focusing (...) on the theme of negativity, the article argues that the essentially apophatic doctrine of the privation of evil is reconstituted in postmodern thinking as the liminal nature of evil. While acts of evil relate to what is both/either mathematically or qualitatively sublime, and while this experience may account for our agitation, we nonetheless employ figures like ‘hubris’, the ‘uncanny’ and the ‘state of exception’ to traverse the liminal in order to interpret instances of human praxis which, given their liminal nature, will always remain brute fact. The article argues that these figures, in particular the temporal structure implicit in Freud’s account of the uncanny, can usefully be explored to account for the agitation with which we respond to instances of evil as diverse as the two that inspired this article. (shrink)

In everyday English usage, the words ‘literal’ and ‘figurative’ are normally taken to be opposite in meaning. It is an opposition with very ancient roots. One of its forbears was the medieval theory of Scriptural hermeneutics, which distinguished among the literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogic senses of Scripture. This itself had an ancestry in pre-Augustinian times: Augustine tells in his Confessions how he learned from Ambrose the trick of interpreting Scripture figuratively, thus eliminating the problems and contradictions created by (...) a literal reading. Earlier still, the distinction and the opposition were at least implicit in Poetics 21, where Aristotle differentiated between the standard or normal name for a thing, and various other types of name among which he listed metaphor. The antonymy of the literal and the figurative is therefore deeply embedded in our intellectual history, and it is perhaps for this reason that it has remained, to a large extent, unexamined and unquestioned. (shrink)

D'une grande figure de la philosophie à une école de pensée, des maîtres aux disciples, d'un discours sur sa méthode à une leçon d'histoire, Lucien Jerphagnon nous plonge aux sources les plus originelles de notre temps et de notre culture. Avec son érudition savoureuse, et cet art fulgurant d'exhumer le passé et d'incarner les textes, le grand historien nous rappelle pourquoi les penseurs de l'Antiquité - Platon, Plotin et saint Augustin en tête - ont porté jusqu'à nos jours une irréfutable (...) initiation à tout ce qui est la vie de l'esprit, et à tout ce qui rend vivant en général. En recréant, par-delà les siècles, la plus enthousiasmante des communautés d'esprit, Lucien Jerphagnon remplit tous les devoirs de la paideia, cet art d'enseigner et de transmettre qui, plus qu'un savoir, est une éducation de l'être. (shrink)

L’enjeu de ce recueil est de contribuer à repenser la notion de limite, en l’envisageant sous les différentes figures, philosophiques, écologiques, politiques, que lui confère notre présent. Comme le montrent, sous des modalités diverses, les contributions de ce collectif, la limite peut et doit être conçue en dehors des valeurs négatives – borne, restriction ou frontière –, qui en affaiblissent la portée. Elle peut alors être pensée sur le fond de cet illimité où s’ouvre la question même du dehors. Si (...) la finitude demeure la condition de l’existence, de l’art et de la pensée, assumer notre condition finie ne consiste donc pas à se murer dans le connu, mais bien à en transgresser les bornes, et ce faisant, à s’illimiter. Au plus loin de la fermeture des frontières que prônent certaines politiques, ou de la certitude dogmatique dans laquelle certains cherchent à réassurer leur pensée, la limite ne vit que de son rapport fécond à l’illimité. Interrogeant l’existence, la politique, l’art – autant dire, la pensée même –, les textes de ce recueil mettent au jour un certain don de l’illimité. (shrink)

Les auteurs réunis sous la direction de Bernard Mabille et Jean-François Kervegan appartiennent à la tradition « continentale » et à la tradition analytique (anglo-saxonne). Certes les rapports de Hegel à la métaphysique étaient ambigus. Ne prétendait-il pas à la fois rompre avec la métaphysique et la prolonger sous une figure rénovée? Mais dissocier les analyses hégéliennes de leur arrière-plan métaphysique, comme le tentent les tenants de la philosophie analytique, n’est-ce pas les priver de ce qu’elles ont de plus tranchant, (...) les priver de leur mordant, bref, les ramener au niveau de ce que Hegel nommait avec dédain la « pensée d’entendement ». A vouloir « actualiser » la philosophie de Hegel, ne la condamne-t-on pas à l’insignifiance? Une réflexion exigeante et une pièce majeure de la discussion contemporaine autour de la philosophie de Hegel. (shrink)

Plato. Aristotle. Augustine. Hume. Kant. Hegel. Every student of philosophy needs to know the history of the philosophical discourse such giants have bequeathed us. Philosopher C. Stephen Evans brings his expertise to this daunting task as he surveys the history of Western philosophy, from the Pre-Socratics to Nietzsche and postmodernism—and every major figure and movement in between.

The following pages, which deal with the pre-history of the concept of history from Homer to Herodotus, first propose to decenter and historicize the Greek experience. After briefly presenting earlier and different experiences, they focus on three figures: the soothsayer, the bard, and the historian. Starting from a series of Mesopotamian oracles , they question the relations between divination and history, conceived as two, certainly different, sciences of the past, but which share the same intellectual space in the hands of (...) the same specialists. The Greek choices were different. Their historiography presupposes the epic, which played the role of a generative matrix. Herodotus wished to rival Homer; what he ultimately became was Herodotus. Writing dominates; prose replaces verse; the Muse, who sees and knows everything, is no longer around. So I would suggest understanding the emblematic word "historia" as a subsititute, which operates as an analogue of the omnivision of the Muse. But before that, Herodotean "invention"- the meeting of Odysseus and the bard Demodocus, where for the first time the fall of Troy is told-can be seen as the beginning, poetically speaking at least, of the category of history. (shrink)

For more than a century the notion of a pre-established harmony between the mathematical and physical sciences has played an important role not only in the rhetoric of mathematicians and theoretical physicists, but also as a doctrine guiding much of their research. Strongly mathematized branches of physics, such as the vortex theory of atoms popular in Victorian Britain, were not unknown in the nineteenth century, but it was only in the environment of fin-de-siècle Germany that the idea of a pre-established (...) harmony really took off and became part of the mathematicians’ ideology. Important historical figures were in this respect David Hilbert, Hermann Minkowski and, somewhat later, Albert Einstein. Roughly similar ideas can be found also among British theorists, among whom Arthur Eddington, Arthur Milne, and Paul Dirac are singled out. Although largely limited to the period 1870–1940, the paper also considers Max Tegmark’s recent hypothesis of the universe being a one-to-one reflection of mathematical structures. (shrink)

Framed by theoretical perspectives on Black Feminist Thought, the life course, and the Generation X/Hip-Hop generation, I present findings from a subset of 10 Black women educators in Birmingham, Alabama who participated in a larger life story project. The participants, who came of age professionally across the pre- and post-civil rights movement (CRM), describe divergent and convergent social and historical contexts that shaped their professionalization, as well as their relationships with and perceptions of Black students and parents. Participants across generation (...) theorize that teaching and leading are activist practices in their own right, which entail clandestine support and silent protest, intergenerational bridge-building, and debunking the myth of Black inferiority. Post-CRM educators, in particular, expressed ambivalence about their urban students? futures. I conclude that multigenerational perspectives should figure more prominently in the scholarship on Black education in the US South. This emphasis could spark new directions and strategies for linking successive generations of Black educators, thereby maximizing opportunities for intergenerational dialogue and collaboration for transformative change in urban education. (shrink)

If we compare it with the fellow notion of liberty, equality has an ambivalent place in modern political thinking. Whilst it counts as one of the fundamental norms, many think that equality is valuable only as a way to realise some features of liberty. I take a historical perspective on this issue, and try to identify some of the pre-modern roots of such an ambivalent attitude towards equality. I do this by using Jacques Rancière’s political model as an analytical framework (...) and by taking a visual route, focusing on classical iconographic representations in which equality was present in the images’ subtexts. Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s allegory of good government is one iconic exposition of equality as a positive condition of civil peace. Already there, however, the positive value of equality is counterposed to the figure of violent retributive justice. Similarly, in the Christian narrative, equality is endorsed as the original condition of creatures under God, but is also associated with violent death. This signals one pre-modern root behind the ambivalence towards equality, particularly when the latter is understood dynamically, as levelling. Such a reversal of value finds an apotheosis, I suggest, in the revolutionary icon of the guillotine, a dramatic representation of equalisation that had a strong influence on modern political thinking. In J. E. Millais’ first painting, of Jesus in the House of his Parents, I find a more positive legacy of Christian equality in modern political thinking. (shrink)

Kant’s ‘Newtonianism’ has been rightly highlighted by figures like Friedman. The follow-up debates led to a more adequate view on Kant’s natural philosophy and in particular his relation towards Newton. But the discussion that evolved did not point to the asynchronicity that takes place in Kant’s struggle with the central Newtonian concepts. Newtonian space and gravity, in revised form, are of central concern to Kant’s critical philosophy. But Kant adapted and re-evaluated these two concepts in an asynchronous way. While Kant (...) tries to integrate a notion of gravity into his theory of matter in his very first published writing, he has at this stage no adequate notion of space. At this time, as in regard to space, he can neither be called a Newtonian nor a proper Leibnizian and misconceives the necessity of an independent space for the foundations of physics. This perspective changes under the influence of Euler at the end of the fifties of the eighteenth century and finally leads to his writing of 1768 and the adoption of transcendental idealism in 1770. In the following, I depict this asynchronicity by taking central pre-critical writings into account while discussing Kant’s concept of space and gravity. This sharpens the picture of Kant’s work and the different stages his philosophy of nature went through. Further, it helps to understand the influence of Euler on Kant’s development in natural philosophy and his critical philosophy in general, as Kant under the influence of Euler formed deeper-going reflections on Newton’s theory of space and these mark turning points of his development. (shrink)

This research aims to investigate the impact of learning lexical chunks on the English as a Foreign Language Saudi learners’ speaking fluency. The study uses an intervention with intermediate Saudi learners comprising lexical chunks based upon the books Collocation in Use and Common Idioms in English. Findings obtained from the post-test show that the experimental groups scored significantly better when compared to their performance in the pre-test of speaking fluency. On the contrary, the difference in the performance of the control (...) group between the pre and post-tests is not significant as far as speaking fluency is concerned. The findings also show that the experimental group participants had favorable sentiments regarding explicit lexical chunk training. The research has theoretical and practical consequences in teaching and learning a foreign/second language. (shrink)

This article shows the success of local cultural adaptation strategies in communicating the gospel to people of the Nias ethnicity in North Sumatra, Indonesia. This adaptation is the name Lowalangi, the name of the god of the pre-Christian era, to become the name of God, the creator and saviour of the world incarnated in the person of Jesus Christ. As a result, the use of this name was not limited to a translation process. Still, the whole concept of divinity for (...) the Nias people was transferred and transformed into a Christian understanding. They know him as Lowalangi, have faith in him and pray to him in that name. The author uses a comparative analysis with other places in Indonesia. The author tries to establish parallelism with methods used elsewhere, assuming that the methods used tend to be the same. Contribution: Churches and Christians in Nias are strengthened in their beliefs by praying and mentioning Lowalangi’s name, which imparts the same faith quality as the biblical use of God’s personal name. This adaptation can be a strategy for introducing the gospel in missiology and church planting in response to local culture as a wealth that cannot be negated. This research also has implications for the sociology of religion regarding the relationship between tradition and religious practice. (shrink)

Alexander Moritzi is one of the most obscure figures in the early history of evolutionary thought. Best known for authoring a flora of Switzerland, Moritzi also published Réflexions sur l’espèce en histoire naturelle, a remarkable book about evolution with an overtly materialist viewpoint. In this work, Moritzi argues that the generally accepted line between species and varieties is artificial, that varieties can over time give rise to new species, and that deep time and turnover of species in the fossil record (...) clearly support an evolutionary interpretation of biological diversity. Moritzi was also a gradualist and viewed relationships between taxa as best represented by a ramifying tree. Although Réflexions was the first full book to be written on the topic of evolution following Lamarck’s Philosophie zoologique, Moritzi’s evolutionist contribution was stillborn, read by almost no one in his lifetime and ultimately absent from the many historiographies of evolutionary thought. This is unfortunate since many of the arguments Moritzi marshaled on behalf of an evolutionary explanation of life can be found in subsequent transmutationist writings by Frédéric Gérard, Robert Chambers, Henri Lecoq, Baden Powell, Charles Naudin, Herbert Spencer, Alfred Russel Wallace, and Charles Darwin—none of whom is likely to have ever known of the existence of Réflexions. Finally, Moritzi’s arguments, along with those found in Darwin’s private essay on evolution of the same year, provide an excellent window into the state of evolutionary thought and debate over the nature of species at the beginning of the 1840s. (shrink)

In his Twilight of the Idols, Friedrich Nietzsche praises Heraclitus, the Greek pre-Socratic, for his “assertion that being is an empty fiction.” 1 The philosophical notion of being, which seems to refer to fixed entities or substances, is eclipsed (at least in the mind of Nietzsche [and perhaps other philosophers—Gilles Deleuze comes to mind]) by the notion of becoming. As a result of our innate nothingness—which I defend linguistically, via the structuralist concept of the arbitrary nature of the linguistic sign—it (...) would seem that we do, in fact, lack a fixed internal essence. Rather, we are constantly redefining (and free to redefine) our being, which is never fixed. It would seem that “un-fixed” being is becoming. In my paper, I aim to track this notion of becoming, as directly opposed to being, through two literary instances: the biblical Christ, and the philosopher-author Nikos Kazantzakis’ Zorba the Greek. (shrink)

Dans la région paphienne, le village d 'Amargetti (nom antique inconnu) a fourni à diverses reprises des antiquités et des inscriptions, des fouilles régulières n'ayant été exécutées qu'en 1888 (D. G. Hogarth). On reprend ici l'ensemble du dossier, en donnant un petit corpus des inscriptions (23 au total). Il s'agit surtout de dédicaces à un dieu local nommé Opaon Melanthios, sans doute une figure rustique, qui n'est pas connue par ailleurs et qui n'a certainement rien à faire avec Pan.

Past and Present brings together almost two dozen newly collected essays by the distinguished American historian and cultural critic, Gertrude Himmelfarb. Their common theme is the intriguing, often unexpected ways in which the past illuminates the present. The novelist William Faulkner wrote that "The past is never dead. It's not even past." In these essays, Himmelfarb shows the truth of this statement. She helps us find a new perspective on contemporary issues by bringing to bear a trenchant analysis of debates (...) and thinkers of the past. She allows the past to inform the present without distorting either past or present. The essays, unified by the common theme of present and past, are varied. The topics range from the disorders of modern democracy to the challenges of postmodernism, from the Victorian ethos to the Jewish question. The thinkers range from Edmund Burke to Leo Strauss, from Cardinal Newman to Lionel Trilling. The political figures range from Benjamin Disraeli to Winston Churchill, from the American founders to Queen Elizabeth II. The underlying premise and principle of the essays is the conviction that the pursuit of knowledge and truth, however difficult or discomforting, eminently matters, in the "practical life,"as Trilling put it,as in the "moral life."Past and Presentis a notable contribution to this endeavor-to understanding where we have been, where we are now, and where we may be-or should be-going. (shrink)

Muslim reformism, which emerged in West Asia during the closingyears of the nineteenth century, and the early twentieth, was spearheaded byJamal al-Din al-Afghani and Muhammad ‘Abduh. It responded to the socioeconomicand political challenges confronting the Muslim society. Muslimreformism was not only influential in West Asia but also in Southeast Asia.However, most studies on Muslim reform have privileged the “central Islāmiclands” at the expense of its “periphery”. As a result, Muslim reform inMalaysia has been marginalised. Thus, this article, discusses the historiographyof (...) Muslim reform in Malaya. An analysis of the major writings in Englishand Malay identified the major trends, issues, and gaps. It argues that theexisting studies tend to focus on the intellectual history of reform, while thesocial history of the diffusion of reformism has not been adequately analysed.Similarly, most works on reform in Malaysia focus on its development in thecountry alone without embarking upon comparative analysis with other areassuch as West Sumatra, Aceh and Java. Existing biographies of reformistsfocusing on prominent figures such as Syed Sheikh al-Hadi and Sheikh Tahirhave been thoroughly examined while other reformists such as Abu BakarAshaari, Abdullah Maghribi, and Abu Bakar Bakir have not been adequatelystudied. (shrink)

Il y a trente ans, évoquant la gynécologie dans l’Antiquité, Giulia Sissa écrivait que l’utérus, « dépositaire insensé et irritable de la reproduction sociale, est le seul organe qui a forcé la connaissance médicale hippocratique à définir en son sein une véritable spécialité ». L’ouvrage de Monica H. Green reprend, en les contextualisant dans un paradigme méthodologique beaucoup plus complexe, ses études précédentes sur la figure historique et littéraire de Trotula et sur la médecine féminin...

In this volume, Lloyd Strickland makes the key philosophical writings of maverick Enlightenment philosopher André-Pierre Le Guay de Prémontval (1716-1764) available in English for the first time. His writings contain many provocative ideas and arguments, and anticipate modern developments such as open theism, process theology, and animal theodicy.

Ce qui frappe chez Spinoza, c'est une volonté constamment manifestée de se rendre maître de son destin. Fils de notable, ses qualités intellectuelles laissaient augurer d'un brillant avenir dans la communauté judéo-portugaise d'Amsterdam. Mais il éprouva le besoin d'élargir son horizon intellectuel. La preuve en est son désir d'apprendre le latin, langue savante de l'Europe chrétienne. Ce fut alors la rupture avec les siens. En 1656, après avoir échappé au poignard d'un fanatique, il fut excommunié par le conseil des rabbins (...) pour hérésie. Devenu polisseur de verres optiques, Spinoza mena dès lors une vie simple et retirée, tout en restant attentif aux événements de l'époque, entouré d'un petit groupe d'amis sûrs. Spinoza fut le premier à proposer une exégèse rationaliste de la Bible, qui l'amena à formuler la distinction entre le croire et le savoir : Dieu n'est pas extérieur au monde, mais immanent à la nature, il est la Nature. Il réfuta également toute supériorité de l'âme sur le corps et substitua ainsi une éthique à la morale : il n'y a pas de Bien ni de Mal, mais du bon et du mauvais. Du Court traité à l'Éthique, en passant par le Traité théologicopolitique, Jean Préposiet a choisi de donner une vue panoramique du projet philosophique de Spinoza. Il suit pas à pas l'élaboration d'un système qui fut en même temps, pour son auteur, une manière de vivre. D'où la part centrale que tient dans l'ouvrage l'élément historique et biographique. Connu pour sa contribution à l'historiographie spinoziste internationale - Spinoza et la liberté des hommes, Bibliographie spinoziste -, Jean Préposiet est également l'auteur chez Tallandier d'une Histoire de l'anarchisme, ouvrage traduit en plusieurs langues. (shrink)