After several recent special issues, conceived and prepared successively by R. H. Robbins and E. M. Uhlenbeck (no. 153, ‘The Cultural Heritage: Languages in Peril”), Y. M. Coppens (no. 155, “From the Heavens to the Mind”), M. Matarasso (no. 158, “Shamans and Shamanism: On the Threshold of a New Millennium”), Diogenes turned to Julio Labastida, coordinator of the study of the social sciences at the National University of Mexico and contributing editor to Diogenes (he is in charge of the Spanish (...) edition), and asked him to gather together for the current issue a certain number of articles devoted to themes related to the five-hundredth anniversary of America's “discovery” and its entry into a unified world. (shrink)

For more than forty years, Diogenes has been striving, with the limited resources at its disposal, to mark the progress of the human sciences around the world. The journal emerged from the encounter between an institution and a person. The institution was the Conseil international de la philosophie et des sciences humaines (CIPSH) that was founded under the auspices and on the initiative of UNESCO with the aim of regrouping a variety of different international associations in the field of Geisteswissenschaften; (...) the person was Roger Caillois, then an international civil servant with UNESCO. The CIPSH wanted to equip itself with an organ of international scholarly communication that was capable of serving as a bond and link between its various member associations. (shrink)

Unesco's first Philosophical Encounters were held last year at Paris on the theme of “What Do We Not Know?” and they were a great success. Diogenes published some of the papers by participants in its No. 169. A second meeting was held from March 27-30, 1996, devoted to a question as simple and difficult as that of the first: “Who Are We?” Once again this journal will not be able to publish all contributions, but is fortunate enough to present at (...) least some of them to its readers. (shrink)

Where do we come from? Where are we going? In all ages, people have wondered about their destiny and their origins, and it seemed to them that knowing more about their past would allow them, at the same time, to know more about their future. The poetry of origins was intertwined with blind gropings, then with decisive steps forward in science. With the starry sky above them, the learned and the unlearned allowed themselves to be carried away by the same (...) metaphysical anguish in which space and time took the principal roles. We had to wait a very long time until science finally taught us a little more on the birth of the universe and of thought. Sometimes, on more than one point, science resembled primitive mythologies passed on through the darkness of time. (shrink)

The death of Roger Caillois was vividly felt by writers and intellectuals all over the world. Not only in France, where his work in sociology, surrealism, criticism and literature brought him into the Académie française, but also in Japan, Brazil (whose Academy elected him to the seat previously occupied by André Malraux), in Argentina (where he counted numerous friends whose works and thought he had made known in Europe) his passing profoundly saddened literary and intellectual circles. Struck to the heart (...) by his death also is the review Diogenes, which he founded and which has been formed by his perpetually needle-sharp curiosity, his creative imagination and his uncompromising precision. (shrink)