The romance customarily termed “classical” occupies a special place within Cambodian literature as a whole. The term betrays a certain Eurocentrism and is justified only because the written language of this type of text is neither the old Khmer of epigraphic inscriptions, nor modern Khmer, but the form of the language known as “middle Khmer,” which in theory designates the period from the fourteenth century through the end of the nineteenth century, and of which we have written records from the (...) eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in the romances as we know them. While these romances share one significant feature with Khmer literature as a whole, they are distinguished by other characteristics that are peculiar to them. (shrink)

The epic, one of the oldest forms of poetic expression, came into being and evolved in time immemorial, long before the appearance of writing - the advent of which, while helping to fix oral traditions since the dawn of history, has at the same time sapped these traditions of their freshness. Not until methods of recording and reproduction were perfected was the oral epic restored to its full compass as a work of enduring dimensions.

The Letter of Aristeas, a text written in Greek by a Jewish author of the Alexandrian diaspora, probably in the second century b.c., traces the circumstances under which a Greek translation of the sacred book of the Jews, the Pentateuch, was commissioned by King Ptolemy II Philadelphus. The letter situates this undertaking in the broader context of the foundation of the Library of Alexandria on the advice of Demetrius of Phalerum, who instigated the plan to gather together all the world's (...) books, both those in the possession of the Greeks and those “of other peoples.”. (shrink)

Informing the Superior General of the Society of Jesus that the cornerstone of the Jesuit mission in China – that is, Father Matteo Ricci – had passed away on 3 May 1610, Father Pasio wrote:Fu servito Nostro Signore di chiamare al paradiso il buon P. Matteo Ricci, tanto antico nella Cina, e che accreditò molto la legge di Dio e la Compagnia con la sua santità, prudentia e patientia, aprendo il cammino agli altri Padri in quella folta selva di gentilità.Approximately (...) three centuries later, a man whom Father Delattre unhesitatingly called “our indefatigable Sinologist” – Father Léon Wieger – also died on Chinese soil. (shrink)

The Reveries sur la nature primitive de l'homme are one of the important books of the dawn of the nineteenth century. In this text, Senancour limns an image of the world in accordance with the scientific thought of his time. It is a disenchanted image, dominated by mechanical necessity, and in it the distinction between good and evil no longer holds. God is absent; the world is not his creation. And Senancour expresses no regret:Everything in nature is indifferent, for everything (...) is necessary: all is beautiful, for all is determined. The individual is nothing, as a being apart: his cause and his end lie beyond him. Only the whole exists absolutely, invincibly, with no other cause, with no other end beyond itself, with no laws but those of its nature, with no other product than its permanence…. The beautiful, the true, the just, evil, and disorder exist only for the weakness of mortals…. The same earth contains happy orchards and ruinous volcanoes. The villain triumphs, the hero dies; the orchard withers, the volcano is snuffed out; one and the same destruction devours both the animate and the inanimate, shrouded in the same oblivion; and in a world reborn, there remains not a trace of what was abhorred or deified in a bygone world. (shrink)

From the jumping bean controversy, through his jousts with Malraux, to his charge against Picasso, Roger Caillois's attitude remained the same: a fear of the seductions of misunderstood originality, a condemnation of the fear of influence that characterized the moderns, and praise for imitation, conceived as the only true school of art. Originality, according to the formula he was fond of repeating time and again in the most varied contexts, consists not in refraining from imitating anyone else, but rather in (...) beine inimitable. (shrink)

The Ainu are still in existence, but their reduced numbers, now around 20,000, indicate how marginal their presence is even in Hokkaido, their ancestral territory. Moreover, they have undergone much metissage, in both ethnic and cultural terms. Legally, the Ainu do not yet constitute an indigenous ethnic minority; they have only recently obtained some gestures of recognition from the government, such as the interruption of a dam project on a ritual site. In 1994, for the first time in history, an (...) Ainu, Kay ano Shigeru, was elected to the senate. The legislation concerning the Ainu lands, dating from 1899, has finally been revised. And with a boost from the International Year of Ethnic Minorities, in 1992, Ainu organizations managed to inflect the official Japanese doctrine that Japanese soil is home to only one community, that of the Japanese. (shrink)

The very name of Bihar, a district in the eastern part of India, evokes images of anarchy, banditry, and disarray. Already traversed by distinct cultural zones - Bhojpuri, Mithila, Magadha, and the tribal zone of Jharkhand - Bihari society is characterized by bloody clan conflict over territorial rights. The doggedness with which the region's protagonists form militias is a perpetual source of front-page news. Pitted against the Brahmans and Bhumihar Rajputs, the large landowners, are the herding and soldier castes such (...) as the livestock-herding Yadavas, the farming Kurmis, and the former saltpeter miners, the Noniyas, whose economic, social, and political growth has given them real power. And although Magadha's rich Buddhist past attracts pilgrims and tourists, and Mithila's beautiful painted murals and villages draw art connoisseurs, Bihar ranks as one of the least safe regions of India. The rate of banditry and other crime reaches surprising levels. (shrink)

The account of the death of Patroklos occupies a strategic position in the narrative economy of the Iliad: before this event, Achilles has withdrawn from combat out of indignation against Agamemnon; afterwards, his anger turns against Hector, whom he holds responsible for his friend's death. Achilles returns to battle and kills Hector in an act of vengeance that, as we have known from the beginning of the poem, will lead to his own demise, which is not actually recounted in the (...) Iliad. This episode stands out because it is atypical both in the contents of the narration and in the means of expression used (what are generally termed “formulas”). I will give some examples of these oddities and then propose an interpretation. Here is the text, in the translation by Richmond Lattimore:So long as the sun was climbing still to the middle heaven, so long the thrown weapons of both took hold, and men dropped under them; but when the sun had gone to the time for unyoking of cattle, then beyond their very destiny the Achaians were stronger and dragged the hero Kebriones from under the weapons and the clamour of the Trojans, and stripped the armour from his shoulders. And Patroklos charged with evil intention in on the Trojans. Three times he charged in with the force of the running war god, screaming a terrible cry, and three times he cut down nine men; but as for the fourth time he swept in, like something greater than human, there, Patroklos, the end of your life was shown forth, since Phoibos came against you there in the strong encounter dangerously, nor did Patroklos see him as he moved through the battle, and shrouded in a deep mist came in against him and stood behind him, and struck his back and his broad shoulders with a flat stroke of the hand so that his eyes spun. Phoibos Apollo now struck away from his head the helmet four-horned and hollow-eyed, and under the feet of the horses it rolled clattering, and the plumes above it were defiled by blood and dust. Before this time it had not been permitted to defile in the dust this great helmet crested in horse-hair; rather it guarded the hear and the gracious brow a godlike man, Achilleus; but now Zeus gave it over to Hektor to wear on his head, Hektor whose own death was close to him. And in his hands was splintered all the huge, great, heavy, iron-shod, far-shadowing spear, and away from his shoulders dropped to the ground the shield with its shield sling and its tassels. The lord Apollo, son of Zeus, broke the corselet upon him. Disaster caught his wits, and his shining body went nerveless. He stood stupidly, and from close behind his back a Dardanian man hit him between the shoulders with a sharp javelin: Euphorbos, son of Pantho(s, who surpassed all men of his own age with the throwing spear, and in horsemanship and the speed of his feet. He had already brought down twenty men from their horses since first coming, with his chariot and his learning in warfare. He first hit you with a thrown spear, o rider Patroklos, nor broke you, but ran away again, snatching out the ash spear from your body, and lost himself in the crowd, not enduring to face Patroklos, naked as he was, in close combat. (shrink)

These are the words Achilles speaks to Hektor, whom he has just struck with a fatal blow. He reminds the son of Priam how, after stripping Patroklos’ fallen body, Hektor made off with the fallen man's armour, which is Achilles’ own.

The island of Palawan stretches northward from Borneo like a bridge to Luzon in the South China Sea. This tropical forest environment, rich in thousands of species of plants and animals, is home to about 50,000 people, known as the Palawan. Besides hunting with blowpipes, traps, spears, and dogs, these people also practice shifting cultivation. Hunting and gathering activities as well as work in the fields follow the alternation of two seasons, the “monsoon” and the “heat,” barat and bulag. As (...) an integral ecosystem, swidden places a high value on mobility rather than on land property. Land tenure, and recourse to physical violence of all kinds are considered unethical behavior. Social life among the Palawan is governed by a bilateral or undifferentiated kinship system, a complex customary law based on rules and values dictated by “the tradition of the Ancestors,” Adat ät Kägunggurangan. (shrink)

While the epic is absent from classical Arabic literature, the genre - although long ignored - plays an outstanding part in popular culture throughout the Arabo-Islamic sphere.

To be able to make “change” happen in the lives of patients entrusted to his care, Watzlawick says he tried to produce a theory about it. He was forced to acknowledge that the mechanisms of change resist systematization and, therefore, all wishes to elicit them as well.Well-being is to therapy what discovery is to thought and the event is to History: the position – unforeseen, unforeseeable – in reality of what did not hitherto exist. And heuristics would be, if not (...) a science, since there could be no science of change, then at least the name given to reflection on its mystery. (shrink)

What does “encyclopedic knowledge” mean to us today? I believe that, as in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, what we mean by this term is a knowledge that strives to embrace in detail the greatest possible number of sciences and bodies of knowledge. As Sainte-Beuve said in 1850 regarding Madame de Genlis:All these tastes, all these diverse talents, all these pleasurable arts, all these trades (for she didn't even omit the trades), made her a living Encyclopedia that prided itself upon (...) being the rival and the antagonist of the other Encyclopedia. (shrink)

By the end of the seventeenth century, high culture had banished astrology as a mixture of superstition and imposture. The great astrological treatises of the past - in particular the Ptolemaic Tetrabiblos (whose very authenticity was cast into doubt) - stopped being published; a hodgepodge of minor writings, mostly preserved in manuscript form, lay mouldering in oblivion in the far recesses of libraries. It was only in the latter decades of the eighteenth century that the learned world began once again (...) to pay attention to the ancient art, when historians of ancient religions and science began to realize the impossibility of exploring their subjects without taking into account a presence that could be neither denied nor underestimated. The history of astrology then began to take shape as a specific field of study, and historicophilological research was able to employ it as a tool for penetrating the tie between mythos and logos, at the origin of western civilization. Along with the image of the Greek miracle, an overly simplistic and schematic definition of reason and science began to decline. It was necessary to isolate, as Hermann Usener sought to do, the “wild germ of science” and to acknowledge the fact that logic and magic bloom on the same stem, as Aby Warburg has often reminded us, with reference to Jean Paul. (shrink)

Aristotle's endeavor, at least insofar as we can judge from the way it has been transmitted to us and from the titles of the lost works, is often presented as the first work of an encyclopedic nature, as it seems to embrace and order all of the elements of knowledge. Does Aristotle not advance a classification of sciences, in Metaphysics, E, 1, as well as a systematic outline of the “sciences of nature” in his Meteorologica, I, 1? And again, although (...) logic is often presented as not belonging to the system of sciences since it is not counted as a science in Metaphysics, E, 1, is Aristotle not generally considered the inventor of this discipline? The impression is all the stronger in that Andronicus of Rhodes, in the first century b.c., edited Aristotle's works by roughly adopting the threefold division of philosophy into Logic-Physics-Ethics, a division that had become common during the Hellenistic period though more particularly proper to the Stoic system. Since then, all the editions of Aristotle, in every language, have been made to serve the order in which Aristotle's treatises were thus edited. (shrink)

The history of encyclopedism seeks to trace the metamorphoses and various cultural adaptations of three essential components. The first of these is an intellectual endeavor, reflecting the conception, hierarchy, and articulation of knowledge in a given society: How is the map of knowledge organized and defined? How do human thought and memory gather together and master all accessible knowledge? The second component can take the form of a material object, the encyclopedia - whether conceived as a book that unites the (...) knowledge found in all other books, or again as the body of texts that, though not titled as such, belong nevertheless to an encyclopedic genre. The last constituent of the trilogy consists of the group of practices that fan out between these two poles, between the intellectual endeavor and the material object, and contribute to collecting, shaping, and transmitting the knowledge in a given society and time. (shrink)

There is a hint of paradox in opening this collection of texts on the procedures for totalizing knowledge in Antiquity by calling to witness the Platonic dialogues. What might they contribute, besides a critique of Sophistic polymathy, Socrates’ nescience, his way of jumping in and interrupting long discourses, the disconcerting interlude of preliminary questions, and the aporetic collapses? A host of questions does not make a book, much less a library - unless the Socratic stratagem defines some entirely new conditions, (...) or unless Plato's argument authorizes, beyond a program of study, a way of constituting knowledge with its hierarchized elements and the articulations called for by this program. A few remarks are in order here. (shrink)

Informing the Superior General of the Society of Jesus that the cornerstone of the Jesuit mission in China – that is, Father Matteo Ricci – had passed away on 3 May 1610, Father Pasio wrote:Fu servito Nostro Signore di chiamare al paradiso il buon P. Matteo Ricci, tanto antico nella Cina, e che accreditò molto la legge di Dio e la Compagnia con la sua santità, prudentia e patientia, aprendo il cammino agli altri Padri in quella folta selva di gentilità.Approximately (...) three centuries later, a man whom Father Delattre unhesitatingly called “our indefatigable Sinologist” – Father Léon Wieger – also died on Chinese soil. (shrink)

Contextualism (the view that ‘knowledge’ and its variants are context-sensitive) has been supported in large part through appeal to intuitions about Keith DeRose’s Bank Cases. Recently, however, the contextualist construal of these cases has come under fire from Kent Bach and Jennifer Nagel who question whether the Bank Case subject’s confidence can remain constant in both low- and high-stakes cases. Having explained the Bank Cases and this challenge to them, I argue that DeRose has given a reasonable reply to (...) this initial challenge. However, I proceed to argue that the current stalemate can be broken. Seeking to extend the Bach-Nagel critique, I offer a novel interpretation of the Bank Cases according to which the subject’s evidence changes between low- and high-stakes cases. If I am correct, then, given the amount of support the Bank Cases have been thought to lend contextualism, the case for contextualism is seriously weakened. (shrink)

Testimony is an invaluable source of knowledge. We rely on the reports of those around us for everything from the ingredients in our food and medicine to the identity of our family members. Recent years have seen an explosion of interest in the epistemology of testimony. Despite the multitude of views offered, a single thesis is nearly universally accepted: testimonial knowledge is acquired through the process of transmission from speaker to hearer. In this book, Jennifer Lackey shows that this (...) thesis is false and, hence, that the literature on testimony has been shaped at its core by a view that is fundamentally misguided. She then defends a detailed alternative to this conception of testimony: whereas the views currently dominant focus on the epistemic status of what speakers believe, Lackey advances a theory that instead centers on what speakers say. The upshot is that, strictly speaking, we do not learn from one another's beliefs - we learn from one another's words. Once this shift in focus is in place, Lackey goes on to argue that, though positive reasons are necessary for testimonial knowledge, testimony itself is an irreducible epistemic source. This leads to the development of a theory that gives proper credence to testimony's epistemologically dual nature: both the speaker and the hearer must make a positive epistemic contribution to testimonial knowledge. The resulting view not only reveals that testimony has the capacity to generate knowledge, but it also gives appropriate weight to our nature as both socially indebted and individually rational creatures. The approach found in this book will, then, represent a radical departure from the views currently dominating the epistemology of testimony, and thus is intended to reshape our understanding of the deep and ubiquitous reliance we have on the testimony of those around us. (shrink)

Mystic-activists; an introduction -- The just shall live by faith -- Dietrich Bonhoeffer; "the view from below" -- A worldview from the margins -- Malcolm X; "recognizing every human being as a human being" -- An identity rooted in humanity -- Aung San Suu Kyi; "a revolution of the spirit" -- The ethics of revolution -- A lived faith.

In this article, we argue that John Henry Newman was right to think that our passional nature can play a legitimate epistemic role. First, we unpack the standard objection to Newman’s understanding of the relationship between our passional nature and the evidential basis of faith. Second, we argue that the standard objection to Newman operates with a narrow definition of evidence. After challenging this notion, we then offer a broader and more humane understanding of evidence. Third, we survey recent scholarship (...) arguing that emotions, a key aspect of our passional nature, are cognitive. In this light, they plausibly have a proper epistemic role. Fourth, we defend Newman’s reliance on the passional nature in epistemic matters by showing how reasonable it is in light of this recent work on evidence and the nature of emotions. Newman’s insistence that the formation of a right state of heart and mind is crucial for epistemic success is far from untenable. (shrink)

How, in a secular world, should we resolve ethically controversial and troubling issues relating to health care? Should we, as some argue, make a clean sweep, getting rid of the Hippocratic ethic, such vestiges of it as remain? Jennifer Jackson seeks to answer these significant questions, establishing new foundations for a traditional and secular ethic which would not require a radical and problematic overhaul of the old. These new foundations rest on familiar observations of human nature and human needs. (...) Jackson presents morality as a loose anatomy of constituent virtues that are related in different ways to how we fare in life, and suggests that in order to address problems in medical ethics, a virtues-based approach is needed. Throughout, attention is paid to the role of philosophy in medical ethics, and how it can be used to clarify key notions and distinctions that underlie current debates and controversial issues. By reinstating such concepts as justice, cardinal virtue, and moral duty, Jackson lays the groundwork for an ethics of health care that makes headway toward resolving seeming dilemmas in medical ethics today. This penetrating and accessible book will be invaluable to students of sociology and health care, as well as those who are interested in the ethical uncertainties faced by the medical world. (shrink)

Why do we find agents less blameworthy when they face mitigating circumstances, and what does this show about philosophical theories of moral responsibility? We present novel evidence that the tendency to mitigate the blameworthiness of agents is driven both by the perception that they are less normatively competent—in particular, less able to know that what they are doing is wrong—and by the perception that their behavior is less attributable to their deep selves. Consequently, we argue that philosophers cannot rely on (...) the case strategy to support the Normative Competence theory of moral responsibility over the Deep Self theory. However, we also outline ways in which further empirical and philosophical work would shift the debate, by showing that there is a significant departure between ordinary concepts and corresponding philosophical concepts, or by focusing on a different type of coherence with ordinary judgments. (shrink)

Michael Devitt ([2006a], [2006b]) argues that, insofar as linguists possess better theories about language than non-linguists, their linguistic intuitions are more reliable. (Culbertson and Gross [2009]) presented empirical evidence contrary to this claim. Devitt ([2010]) replies that, in part because we overemphasize the distinction between acceptability and grammaticality, we misunderstand linguists' claims, fall into inconsistency, and fail to see how our empirical results can be squared with his position. We reply in this note. Inter alia we argue that Devitt's focus (...) on grammaticality intuitions, rather than acceptability intuitions, distances his discussion from actual linguistic practice. We close by questioning a demand that drives his discussion—viz., that, for linguistic intuitions to supply evidence for linguistic theorizing, a better account of why they are evidence is required. (shrink)