SummaryThe relationship between travel, travel narrative, and the enterprise of natural history is explored, focusing on activities associated with the early Royal Society. In an era of expanding travel, for colonial, diplomatic, trade, and missionary purposes, reports of nature's effects proliferated, both in oral and written forms. Naturalists intent on compiling a comprehensive history of such phenomena, and making them useful in the process, readily incorporated these reports into their work. They went further by trying to direct the course of (...) travel to suit their ends, but the complex story of how travel influenced the direction of study cannot be told without acknowledging the influence of objects acquired in a random fashion, arriving in a miscellany off returning ships. Travel writing complemented the activity of documenting nature's history, supplementing the range of available testimony. Such accounts of travel became an accepted source for information, cross-references, and queries, ostensibly eliminating error and advancing knowledge. The difficulty of identifying and classifying objects added to the importance of these reports; furthermore, the scope for attending to prodigies created the grounds for accepting tales of marvels and monsters. The fluid exchange between travel, narrative, and natural history often masked rather than exposed problems of belief, testimony, and evidence, perpetuating an economy of error in which knowledge was both advanced and retarded. (shrink)

From the perspectives of foreign-Chinese bilingual law dictionaries, Chinese-foreign bilingual law dictionaries, and monolingual Chinese law dictionaries, this paper reviews the compilation and publication of law dictionaries in China over the past six decades following the founding of New China in 1949, especially over the past three decades after the policy of reform and opening up was adopted in 1978. This paper reevaluates the translated legal terms covered and defined in the Legal Dictionary of the Soviet Union, Law Dictionary, (...) Oxford Large Dictionary of Law, Chinese-English Glossary of Terms of Laws and Regulations of People’s Republic of China and English-Chinese Dictionary of Anglo-American Law to analyze the roles of law dictionaries on the standardization of the translated Chinese legal terms. (shrink)

Studies of the form and textual history of various Buddhist texts show that they tend to undergo three types of developmental processes. First, some texts, especially verse compilations, are expanded by the insertion of pattern variants, sometimes at great length. Second, shorter texts such as sūtras are prone to be absorbed into larger compilations and thus lose their status as independent texts. Third, voluminous texts sometimes come to be represented in manuscripts in abbreviated forms, for example containing only the first (...) text unit, which are evidently considered to sufficiently represent the entirety of the text. These patterns are discussed with reference to texts such as the Udānavarga, Anavatapta-gāthā, and Mahāvastu, and on the basis of evidence from Sanskrit and Gāndhārī manuscripts. (shrink)

Recent work in the history of science has questioned the Eurocentric nature of the field and sought to include a more global approach that would serve to displace center–periphery models in favor of approaches that take seriously local knowledge production. Historians of Iberian colonial science have taken up this approach, which involves reliance on indigenous knowledge traditions of the Americas. These traditions present a number of challenges to modern researchers, including availability and reliability of source material, issues of translation and (...) identification, and lack of systematization. This essay explores the challenges that emerged in the author’s attempt to compile a pre-contact Nahua pharmacopeia, the reasons for these challenges, and the ways they may – or may not – be overcome. (shrink)

Index to the Dhammasangani. Compiled by Tetsuya Tabata, Satoshi Nonome and Shoko Bando. Pali Text Society, London 1987. vii, 128 pp. £8.75.

Index to the Visuddhimagga. Compiled by Y Ousaka and M. Yamazaki. Pali Text Society, Oxford 2004. vi, 505 pp. £26.50. ISBN 0 86013 414 8.

Indexes to the Dhammapada. Compiled by Moriichi Yamazaki, Yumi Ousaka and Masahiro Miyao. Pali Text Society, Oxford 1995. vii, 139 pp. £12. ISBN 0-86013-337-0.

Buddhist Scriptures: A Bibliography. Compiled by Edward Conze, edited and revised by Lewis Lancaster. Garland Publishing, Inc., New York 1982. xvi + 161pp. $25.00.

In mediaeval Arabic belles-lettres (adab), accounts of lives are usually made up of quite short reports akhbár. These akbar are arranged in different ways, one of which is chronological order, but the compilers of such accounts apparently accord relative insignificance to chronological order. This paper examines some "biographies' compiled by al-Suli and Abú l-Faraj al-Isbaháni, showing that temporal progression can exist in a "biographical" presentation, either alone or more often combined with other ways of organising the material. It then focuses (...) on the placing of subjects' deaths in life accounts and on bow they are integrated with the rest of the material. In conclusion, 1 suggest that when temporal progression is absent in "biographical" presentations, this should be seen as reflecting a mediaeval Arabic approach to life writing which differs from modern expectations but has its own rationale. (shrink)

The Florilegium Coislinianum, from which we are editing the chapter dealing with words beginning with the letter ?, is a large Byzantine anthology, dating back to the 9th-10th cent. Its manuscript tradition has been exhaustively explored for the first time in this article and our edition is based on 11 manuscripts, dated from the 10th to the 14th cent. We also compared the Florilegium Coislinianum with the Sacra Parallela and the Loci Communes.

A tacit assumption in the field of consciousness studies is that the more empirical evidence a theory can explain, the better it fares when weighed against competitors. If one wants to take seriously the potential for empirical evidence to move forward debates in consciousness studies, there is a need to gather, organize, validate, and compare evidence. We present an inference to the best explanation (IBE) process on the basis of empirical support that is applicable in debates between competing theories of (...) consciousness. Our proposed IBE process consists in four steps: Assimilate, Compile, Validate, and Compare. Until now, the vast majority of the work in the field has consisted in gathering empirical evidence for theories i.e., the assimilation step. To illustrate the feasibility of our proposed IBE process, and what it may look like when applied in practice, we deliver a complete collection (the compilation step) of empirical support for the distinction between A-Consciousness and P-Consciousness and the overflow hypothesis. Finally, we offer an example of the validation step, by scrutinizing the interpretation of aphantasics’ performance on retro-cue paradigms offered in the literature in support of the overflow hypothesis. The compilation we deliver here is the first effort in the IBE process, the end result of which — hopefully — will be the ability of the research community to carry out side-by-side comparisons of theories and the empirical phenomena they claim to explain, i.e., the comparison step. (shrink)