Polybius in a familiar passage, lists goods moving past Byzantium between the Mediterranean. world and the Black Sea region; among these goods, slaves are accorded a prominent place: …as regards necessities it is an unidsputed fact that the most plentiful supplies and best qualities of of cattle and slaves reach us from the countries lying round the Pontus, while among luxuries the same countries furnish us with an abundance of honey, wax and preserved fish; from the surplus of our (...) countries they take olive-oil and every kind of wine. As for grain, there is give and-take – with them sometimes supplying us when we require it and sometimes importing it from us. (shrink)

‘Mysticism means to isolate the eternal from the originated.’ This is not my definition of the word ‘mysticism’ but that of the founder of the ‘orthodox’ school of Muslim mysticism, Al-Junayd of Baghdad who flourished in the ninth century a.d . In actual fact it is not a definition of mysticism at all but of the Arabic word tawḥīd which means primarily ‘the affirmation of unity’; and that surely is an essential ingredient of any form of mysticism: it is the (...) affirmation through personal experience of unity either absolutely or in some qualified sense. (shrink)

As everyone knows, since the end of the Second World War there has been a sensational revival of interest in the non-Christian religions particularly in the United States and in this country. The revival has taken two forms, the one popular, the other academic. The first of these has turned almost exclusively to Hindu and Buddhist mysticism and can be seen as an energetic reaction against the dogmatic and until very recently rigid structure of institutionalised Christianity and a search for (...) a lived experience of the freedom of the spirit which is held to be the true content of mysticism, obscured in Christianity by the basic dogma of a transcendent God, the ‘wholly Other’ of Rudolf Otto and his numerous followers, but wholly untrammelled by any such concept in the higher reaches of Vedanta and Buddhism, particularly in its Zen manifestation. On the academic side the picture is less clear. There is, of course, the claim that the study of religion, like any other academic study, must be subjected to and controlled by the same principles of ‘scientific’ objectivity to which the other ‘arts’ subjects have been subjected, to their own undoing. But even here there would seem to be a bias in favour of the religions of India and the Far East as against Islam, largely, one supposes, in response to popular demand. (shrink)

The case for God -- Possibilities -- The illusion of Descartes -- Self-creation, part 1 -- Self-creation, part 2 -- Self-existence -- Necessary being -- The God of the Bible vs. the God of philosophy -- Kant's moral argument -- Vanity of vanities -- The psychology of atheism.

Knowledge of God -- In essence -- In person -- Incommunicable attributes -- Communicable attributes -- The will of God -- Providence.

The US neutrino community gathered at the Workshop on the Intermediate Neutrino Program at Brookhaven National Laboratory February 4-6, 2015 to explore opportunities in neutrino physics over the next five to ten years. Scientists from particle, astroparticle and nuclear physics participated in the workshop. The workshop examined promising opportunities for neutrino physics in the intermediate term, including possible new small to mid-scale experiments, US contributions to large experiments, upgrades to existing experiments, R&D plans and theory. The workshop was organized into (...) two sets of parallel working group sessions, divided by physics topics and technology. Physics working groups covered topics on Sterile Neutrinos, Neutrino Mixing, Neutrino Interactions, Neutrino Properties and Astrophysical Neutrinos. Technology sessions were organized into Theory, Short-Baseline Accelerator Neutrinos, Reactor Neutrinos, Detector R&D and Source, Cyclotron and Meson Decay at Rest sessions.This report summarizes discussion and conclusions from the workshop. (shrink)

In the novels of Tahsin Germiyani, who stands out as a narrator and novelist, dialogue was a basic technique for artistic work. Because he used the art of dialogue in a unique way to carry out communication and understanding and to fictionalize events. Such that Tahsin Germiyani's novels are considered to fill a gap in this aspect, especially in Iraq and in the Arab world in general. What makes him important is the writers he read and was influenced by. Such (...) that when we look at his works, this effect is noticeable. Rather than a reflection, this influence manifests itself in a new and different form with internalization. The new work now contains in itself his character, is far from alienation, and becomes compatible with the culture and values of the society in which he lives. It is possible to see this situation not only in dialogues, but also in the whole structure of the work. Tahsin Germiyani has written 7 novels. However, in this study, we will focus on his three novels (al-Huznu'l-vesim, Evladu'l-Yahudiyye and Zaknemut) to reveal how the dialogue is used as a technique. After giving basic information about the concept of dialogue and Tahsin Germiyani's life and works, we will try to reveal how he used dialogue in these three novels that we will take as a field of application and his artistic connections in the storylines. Germiyani used both forms of dialogues in different stages. In his novel Zaknemut, he performed the internal dialogue mostly in the forms of monologue, pleading and reaction. While the external dialogue is mostly includedin the novel al-Huznu'l-Vesim, he used both dialogues to convey his thoughts, to effectively present his reaction and his opinionson the social phenomena in Iraqi society. Because he wanted to bring to light the mistakes and deficiencies that he saw and experienced in the society. He did this with an artistic task, by describing situations that trigger interpersonal conflict, sometimes using the inner and external dialogues of the protagonists and sometimes of the deuteragonists. One of his prominent features during this fiction is hisability to make the dialogues more vivid and permanent in the mind of the reader by using the cinema technique and to make the reader a partner in this fiction. We also witness that he makes this ability more effective by using the folkspeech. We will try to put forward the relevant issues practically within the framework of his 3 novels. (shrink)

Hawthorne and Magidor's criticisms of the model of presupposition and assertion that I have used and defended are all based on a rejection of some transparency or introspection of assumptions about speaker presupposition. This response to those criticisms aims first to clarify, and then to defend, the required transparency assumptions. It is argued, first, that if the assumptions are properly understood, some prima facie problems for them do not apply, second, that rejecting the assumptions has intuitively implausible consequences, and third, (...) that the 'margin of error' argument against the principle of positive introspection has a false premiss. The paper concludes with a response to a criticism of what Hawthorne and Magidor call 'the uniformity principle' that is used in the model to explain some pragmatic phenomena. (shrink)