Zu den kulturgeschichtlich interessantesten und textgeschichtlich gefährlichsten gehören Veränderungen im System des Datenträgers, um einen ganz modernen Ausdruck zu verwenden. Die Geschichte der europäischen Literatur hat mehrere Perioden aufzuweisen, in denen sich grundlegende Änderungen dieser Art vollziehen: der Übergang von der Rolle zum Buch-Codex im 4. Jahrhundert, bei der sich der materielle Träger, aber nicht (unmittelbar) die Schriftform ändert, die Umschrift von der Majuskel in die Minuskel (bei unterschiedlichen Ausgangspunkten in Byzanz und im Westen im 9. und den folgenden Jahrhunderten), (...) wobei der Codex als Träger unverändert blieb, die Einführung des Buchdrucks und schließlich die elektronische Speicherung von Texten und ihre beliebige Weiterverarbeitung, deren Bedeutung und Folgen erst spätere Generationen beurteilen und einschätzen können. (shrink)

After delimiting the topic by reflecting on the heuristic function of the concept of “theory” in “Delimiting the Topic” section, the paper considers the literary aspects of karman-theory in the Mahābhārata in “Literary Characteristics” section. “Axioms, Theorems, Domains” section then lists the elements or axioms that fall under the umbrella term “karman-theory.” Next, dealing with contexts and collocations, “Contexts, Collocations” section combines the consideration of literary and theoretical aspects of the matter. “Historical Perspective” section then argues for the inclusion of (...) a historical perspective in the study of karman-theory. The “Conclusion”, section, formulates provisional results and poses further questions. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Byzantinische Zeitschrift Jahrgang: 112 Heft: 1 Seiten: 261-266.

Article Paul Géhin/Michel Cacouros/Christian Förstel/Marie-Odile Germain/Philippe Hoffmann/Corinne Jouanno/Brigitte Mondrain avec la collaboration de Dominique Grosdidiers de Matons. Les manuscrits datés des XIIIe et XIVe siècles conservés dans les bibliothèques publiques de France was published on April 1, 2007 in the journal Byzantinische Zeitschrift (volume 100, issue 2).

Swami Sahajananda, the founder of the Swaminarayan Movement, considered by his followers as an embodiment of Krishna, let Swami Shatananda write the Satsangijivanam in order to vouchsafe that his presence and teaching live on among his followers in and through this text. The extensive work is composed in Sanskrit and is here presented in an English summary. The text describes the biography of Swami Sahajananda and is an important document for the religious situation in the Gujarat of its time; it (...) testifies to the religious practices by which Swaminarayan wanted to replace practices that were considered as abuses. The content of the text is made accessible through a detailed index. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Byzantinische Zeitschrift Jahrgang: 109 Heft: 2 Seiten: 943-994.

Dem bei Trikkala gelegenen Kloster kommt in der Geschichte der Handschriften der Klöster in Griechenland eine besondere Bedeutung zu: Mit dem Anschluß Thessaliens an den griechischen Staat im Jahre 1882 mußte das Kloster 532 Handschriften an die Nationalbibliothek Athen abgeben, die neben 100 Handschriften aus dem Metamorphosis-Kloster der Meteora den Grundstock der Athener Bibliothek bilden, darunter allein über 30 aus dem 10./11. Jh. Die reiche Sammlung geht auf den Metropoliten Bessarion von Trikkala zurück, der das aus Ruinen des 14. Jh.s (...) wieder gegründete Kloster zwischen 1527 und 1533/34 mit Handschriften ausstattete, die im Laufe der späteren Jahrhunderte noch vermehrt wurden. (shrink)

Der einzige aus Byzanz erhaltene (fast) vollständig illustrierte Historikertext ist nun endlich durch eine Facsimile-Ausgabe in Originalgröße der Forschung zugänglich, während das Original leider für immer dem Tresor anvertraut wurde. So war es dem Rezensenten auch nicht möglich, die farbliche Qualität der Ausgabe mit dem Original zu vergleichen. Auf diese Weise stehen nun auch alle Textteile und die verschiedenen Randscholien (die in der Ausgabe von Thurn nicht vermerkt sind) der paläographischen und kodikologischen Forschung zur Verfügung. Ein Rückgriff auf die Illustrationen (...) bei S. Cirac Estopañan (Barcelona-Madrid 1965) und A. Grabar – M. Manoussacas (L'Illustration du manuscrit de Skylitzès de la Bibliothèque Nationale de Madrid, Venedig 1979) und die in der Literatur fast gänzlich vergessene Teilausgabe von A. Božkov (Miniatjuri ot Madridskija rŭkopis na Ioan Skylica, Sofia 1972) sind nicht mehr nötig, sofern die mehr als 400 € teure Ausgabe erreichbar ist. (shrink)

Der Herausgeber der BZ gibt in jugendlichem Elan einen gewichtigen Anstoß, um endlich über das sechsbändige Quellenkompendium von Phaidon Kukules (1948–55) hinauszukommen, das freilich mehr einer enzyklopädischen Kultur- und Alltagsgeschichte gleichkommt und von den kulturhistorischen Konstellationen der Zwischenkriegszeit in Griechenland geprägt ist. Für die kulturhistorische Auswertung ekklesialer und profaner byzantinischen Quellen wäre vielleicht auch das «Dokimion» von K. Sathas zu nennen (1878) und noch manch andere ältere oder auch neuere Arbeit, die in Griechenland selbst veröffentlicht worden ist. Es sollte dem (...) kulturhistorischen Verständnis heute aber nicht schwerfallen, zu akzeptieren, daß Kukules von «unseren byzantinischen Vorfahren» spricht, waren doch weite Teile der neugriechischen und «philhellenischen» Wissenschaft in ganz Europa (vor allem Deutschland) nach dem Fallmerayer-Schock bemüht, das Kontinuitätstheorem besser zu untermauern, dem immerhin die offizielle Staatsideologie aus heute einsichtigen politischen Gründen verpflichtet war, unter anderem eben auch die Historiographie und Volkskunde (vgl. G. Veloudis, «Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer und die Entstehung des neugriechischen Historismus», Südost-Forschungen 39, 1970, S. 43ff. und W. Puchner, «Ideologische Dominanten in der wissenschaftlichen Beschäftigung mit der griechischen Volkskultur im 19. Jahrhundert». Zeitschrift für Balkanologie 35/1, 1999, S. 46–62.). Schreiner's gewichtiger Anstoß ist vor allem ein Vorschlag und ein Versuch, eine historische Volkskunde von Byzanz methodisch auf die Beine zu stellen, ist doch die Kultur, die sich in den Quellen niederschlägt und von der Forschung behandelt wird, vorwiegend eine Elitekultur, die kaum ein Prozent der Reichsbevölkerung betrifft. Aber mit der Quellensituation beginnen auch die Schwierigkeiten: wo endet das Byzantinische Reich (Misch- und Randkulturen) und wer ist das «Volk» dieser Volkskunde? Aus der eher profillosen Bevölkerungsmasse (ein Produkt der Quellen) hebt sich nur die Hofkultur und die monastische und ekklesiale Kultur ab; deutliche Standes- und Klassengrenzen sind nicht auszumachen, eine eigene Stadtkultur beschränkt sich auf Konstantinopel und ist in anderen Städten erst spät nachzuweisen bzw. wird von der osmanischen Landnahme im Keim erstickt. Schreiner macht sich einige Grundgedanken der rezenten Volkskunde und Kulturtheorie zu eigen, die die Alltagskultur als Grundlage ihres Forschungsgegenstandes betrachtet, nachdem das «Volk» der traditionellen Volkskunde sich schon lange in die Museen zurückgezogen hat. Somit geht es um die Dokumentation der Alltagkultur von Mittel- und Unterschichten, wobei auch die Elite duchaus miteinbezogen wird, da sich ihr Alltag kaum unterschiedlich gestaltet. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Scars of the Spirit: The Struggle Against InauthenticityChristopher S. SchreinerScars of the Spirit: The Struggle Against Inauthenticity, by Geoffrey Hartman; xii & 260 pp. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. $17.95 paper.Geoffrey Hartman is now an emeritus faculty member at Yale. All but the youngest readers of this journal will recognize him as a member of the now defunct Yale School of Criticism, which in its glory days included (...) Harold Bloom, Hillis Miller, Paul de Man, and Jacques Derrida. Among these accomplished individuals, Hartman distinguished himself as the one most engaged with discussing the role of style in theoretically propelled criticism, and this remains his lasting contribution. The question he kept asking was the following: what demands do the books we read and the theories we use make on our own critical practice, and in particular, on our style? Works such as Criticism in the Wilderness (1980) and Saving the Text (1981) were concerned with promoting a philosophical criticism that is as creative as the literature it seeks to criticize, in opposition to the Arnoldian standard of a disinterested criticism that respects and preserves the canonical hauteur of literary classics and doesn't seek to imitate them. Yet over the decades Hartman's own prose, except when it lapsed into copying Derrida's, seemed more that of the Doctor and less the Explorer, to borrow the terms Lionel Trilling used to describe Matthew Arnold's criticism. This is an irony we are grateful for.Hartman's most recent book, Scars of the Spirit, takes up the problem of authenticity in the context of postmodern culture, seeking to reestablish its legitimacy as a serious topic and unmask what merely poses as authentic in the global marketplace. Today his agenda ignominiously crosses paths with the likes of Jane Fonda, whose autobiography is replete with New Age claims to recover "the authentic me." One of the issues never resolved by Hartman's book and which taunts his project behind its back is whether his Continental erudition makes his project any more authentic than Fonda's celebrity psychobabble. Authenticity was the Heideggerian concept that Adorno ruthlessly and ironically attacked in his The Jargon of Authenticity, and it has an old-fashioned existential ring to it to this day. For those readers who haven't read Being and Time lately, authenticity (Jemeinigkeit) was the resolute impetus of making time one's own, taking it back from the instrumental public world that had appropriated it so that one can live a sincerely mortal life and die one's own death, as it were properly. Professors valiantly conjured an ethic out of this retrieval of selfhood, of one's personal property of time and destiny in the Lost and Found of culture, not fully cognizant of its Nietzschean roots. The absence of altruism in this existential ethic inspired Emmanel Levinas's patient attempt to persuade us to demote our egoism in an insatiable responsibility to and for others, for whom we can never do enough.There is surely irony in the fact that the anachrony of authenticity as a concept was accelerated by the deconstructive theory that Hartman helped [End Page 501] promulgate. Hence his new book reads a bit like someone having to gingerly retrace his steps in a field of landmines planted by the Yale School of Criticism. The question of propriety, what is right and proper, what is one's own, stamped with one's unique or authentic properties, was deconstructed by Derrida, and Hartman reverently recorded the results in the incongruously titled Saving the Text, an analysis of Derrida's attempt to promote textual intercourse between Hegel and Jean Genet by setting them in parallel columns on one page. In a nutshell, the original source of an event or text, its material advent, is untraceable due to its derivativeness, the forces of semiosis (or textuality) at play in and between texts. In parallel to this discovery, Jean Baudrillard spoke of the simulacrum as a media-generated version behind which the original "thing itself" was forever irrecoverable. The very idea of authenticity came to sound illusory, denoting a mirage sought in a hopeless regressive inquiry or Ruckfrage which Husserl (with... (shrink)

Certainty : a contemporary question -- Beginnings: questions and debates in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries -- Abba Father: the certainty of salvation -- The spiritual man judges all things: the certainty of exegetical authority -- Are you alone wise?: the Catholic response -- Experientia: the great age of the Spirit -- Unmasking the angel of light: the discernment of the spirits -- Men should be what they seem: appearances and reality.

As I write this, in November 1971, people are dying in East Bengal from lack of food, shelter, and medical caxc. The suffering and death that are occurring there now axe not inevitable, 1101; unavoidable in any fatalistic sense of the term. Constant poverty, a cyclone, and a civil war have turned at least nine million people into destitute refugees; nevertheless, it is not beyond Lhe capacity of the richer nations to give enough assistance to reduce any further suffering to (...) very small proportions. The decisions arid actions of human beings can prevent this kind of suffering. Unfortunately, human beings have not made the necessary decisions. At the individual level, people have, with very few exceptions, not responded to the situation in any signihczmt way. Generally speaking, people have not given large sums to relief funds; they have not written t0 their parliamentaxy representatives demanding increased government assistance; they have not demonstrated in the streets, held symbolic fasts, or done anything else directed toward providing thc refugees with the means to satisfy their essential needs. At thc government level, no govcrmmcnt has given the sort of massive aid that would enable the refugees to survive fm: more than a few days. Britain, for instance, has given rather more than most countries. It has, to date, given £14,750,000. For comparative purposes, B1~itain’s share of thc nonreccverabla development costs of the Anglo-French Concorde project is already in excess of £275,000,000, and on present estimates will reach £440,000,¤00. The implication is that the British government values a supersonic transport more than thirty times as.. (shrink)

This paper argues that a set of questioning attitudes are among the foundations of human and animal minds. While both verbal questioning and states of curiosity are generally explained in terms of metacognitive desires for knowledge or true belief, I argue that each is better explained by a prelinguistic sui generis type of mental attitude of questioning. I review a range of considerations in support of such a proposal and improve on previous characterizations of the nature of these attitudes. I (...) then broaden their explanatory scope to include a number of forms of exploratory search. The paper has three main goals: to characterize the nature of the questioning attitudes, outlining their causal role and type of content; to argue that they are fundamental components of the mind, being widespread among animals and not constructed during ontogeny out of other attitudes; and to suggest that they explain a great deal more behavior than one might think. (shrink)

We propose a solution to the problem of logical omniscience in what we take to be its fundamental version: as concerning arbitrary agents and the knowledge attitude per se. Our logic of knowledge is a spin-off from a general theory of thick content, whereby the content of a sentence has two components: an intension, taking care of truth conditions; and a topic, taking care of subject matter. We present a list of plausible logical validities and invalidities for the logic of (...) knowledge per se for arbitrary agents, and isolate three explanatory factors for them: the topic-sensitivity of content; the fragmentation of knowledge states; the defeasibility of knowledge acquisition. We then present a novel dynamic epistemic logic that yields precisely the desired validities and invalidities, for which we provide expressivity and completeness results. We contrast this with related systems and address possible objections. (shrink)

What is ethics? Where do moral standards come from? Are they based on emotions, reason, or some innate sense of right and wrong? For many scientists, the key lies entirely in biology---especially in Darwinian theories of evolution and self-preservation. But if evolution is a struggle for survival, why are we still capable of altruism? In his classic study The Expanding Circle, Peter Singer argues that altruism began as a genetically based drive to protect one's kin and community members but (...) has developed into a consciously chosen ethic with an expanding circle of moral concern. Drawing on philosophy and evolutionary psychology, he demonstrates that human ethics cannot be explained by biology alone. Rather, it is our capacity for reasoning that makes moral progress possible. In a new afterword, Singer takes stock of his argument in light or recent research on the evolution of morality.--Publisher's description. (shrink)

Narrative thinking -- Narrative thinking about one's past -- Grief : a case study -- Narrative thinking about one's future -- Self-forgiveness : a case study -- The narrative sense of self -- Narrative, truth, life, and fiction.

Single-premise epistemic closure is the principle that: if one is in an evidential position to know that P where P entails Q, then one is in an evidential position to know that Q. In this paper, I defend the viability of opposition to closure. A key task for such an opponent is to precisely formulate a restricted closure principle that remains true to the motivations for abandoning unrestricted closure but does not endorse particularly egregious instances of closure violation. I focus (...) on two brands of epistemic theory that naturally incorporate closure restrictions. The first type holds that the truth value of a knowledge ascription is relative to a relevant question. The second holds that the truth value of a knowledge ascription is relative to a relevant topic. For each approach, I offer a formalization of a leading theory from the literature and use this formalization to evaluate the theory’s adequacy in terms of a precise set of desiderata. I conclude that neither theory succeeds in meeting these desiderata, casting doubt on the viability of the underlying approaches. Finally, I offer a novel variant of the topic-sensitive approach that fares better. (shrink)

This chapter provides an introduction to higher-order metaphysics as well as to the contributions to this volume. We discuss five topics, corresponding to the five parts of this volume, and summarize the contributions to each part. First, we motivate the usefulness of higher-order quantification in metaphysics using a number of examples, and discuss the question of how such quantifiers should be interpreted. We provide a brief introduction to the most common forms of higher-order logics used in metaphysics, and indicate a (...) number of questions which can be raised in such systems using logical vocabulary alone. Using a further example, we return to applications of higher-order logics in metaphysics. We also mention key developments in the history of higher-order logic as it pertains to metaphysics. Finally, we mention certain arguments which have been raised against the use of higher-order logic, and some ways of responding to them. (shrink)

Introduction These essays have been written over a period of about ten years and have already been published separately in various places. ...