bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Two Times, Three Movements
Authors: Auger Pierre
Published: March 2007

The arrow and the wheel have both been used to represent time, which has been measured by the flowing of water or sand, unilateral and definitive, or by the movement of a needle on a dial, an ever recurring cycle. These two aspects of time—the unlimited advance without stop or return and the cycle which passes again and again through exactly the same states— have for various reasons preoccupied both philosophers and astronomers. A universe of infinite duration which never returns to any of its preceding states, the sort suggested by application of the second principle of thermodynamics, has little appeal for certain thinkers and leads them to a sort of cosmic pessimism. A cyclical evolution, on the other hand, with an eternal return to states, if not identical, at least very similar, to the one in which we live, gains more sympathy by providing the mind with a sort of repose, a vague consolation for death. This preference can be observed in action whenever the progress of astrophysics presents a new hypothesis on cosmic evolution. The expansion of the universe, an irremediable evolution, met with a hostility which, under cover of scientific arguments, concealed an affective malaise induced by metaphysical anguish in the presence of this final fading-away, far as it might be from our day.
Some Attitudes Toward Death
Authors: Orlans Harold
Published: March 2007

The massive literature of modern psychology, which embraces so many important and unimportant subjects, fails conspicuously to deal with one fundamental human problem—many would term it the fundamental human problem—death. Why, when there are libraries of books on every aspect of normal or abnormal character in infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and (more recently) old age, is the human adjustment to death ignored? An essay by Freud, several articles by Schilder, a volume by Anthony, and a few other scattered papers virtually exhaust the scientific literature on the subject. Does the vain Faustian spirit, searching ever for the light, fear to examine the heart of darkness? Or has society, uncloaking sexuality, put death in its place as a secret rite not to be discussed in public? Has psychology, like so much of physics, become a kind of dignified engineering, forsaking truth for utility and therefore disinterested in a matter about which nothing can be done? Or is it felt that inquiry can disclose no more than what has always been known—that all men are mortal?
The Good Shepherd Francisco Davila's Sermon To the Indians of Peru (1646)
Authors: Dumézil Georges
Published: March 2007

à Mauritz Friisen souvenir des soiréesde Görväln et de Pampachica

Francisco was born in 1573 in the old capital of the Incas, a pretty town stretching along a high valley of the Andes 11,000 feet above sea level but close enough to the earth's breast to enjoy a gentle springtime throughout the year, even in winter. 1573: forty-two years since the first Spaniards, three of them, reached the city as emissaries of the conqueror, who was then especially occupied with the last Inca whom he held prisoner in a northern village and of whom he demanded an enormous ransom. Guided and protected by officers of the empire, they came to hasten the despoiling of temples and palaces and to collect vases and plaques of gold ordered by Atahualpa, who vainly hoped to gain his freedom. Three years later, on March 23,1534, before an astonished crowd of Indians, opening a new era in the name of the king and the pope, the founding of the new Spanish and Christian order in Cuzco solemnly took place. Then, one after another, material catastrophes occurred: in 1536 the conqueror's brother, the first governor, endured the siege of an army of twenty thousand Indians commanded by a phantom Inca, the second Manco, and the city, its thatched roofs ravaged by fire, was blown up by mines and countermines; in 1538 the newly rebuilt houses were destroyed by the rivalry of Pizarro and Almagro; in 1541, after the assassination of the former, new troubles caused new ruins.
National Character: an Old Problem Re-Examined
Authors: Brodersen Arvid
Published: March 2007

Human groups, such as families, tribes, and nations, are often perceived as possessing mental qualities and characteristics more or less common to the group as a whole. This ancient tendency to attribute properties of personality or individuality to human aggregates is particularly strong nowadays with regard to nations, the basic units of political action in this age of nationalism and internationalism.

In the recent UNESCO study by W. Buchanan and H. Cantril, How Nations See Each Other (1953), based on an eight-nation sample, few findings are more revealing than the low frequency of respondents who declare themselves unable to characterize their own nation. All but a very small proportion gave their views freely when asked to describe the character of their countrymen. When this same question was asked with regard to a series of other nationalities, the “Don't know” responses (“impossible to characterize”) were in some cases much more frequent—up to 71 per cent as in the case of the German sample in regard to the Chinese; in others again very low—down to 3 per cent as in the western European responses regarding the United States. These variations are assumed to reflect differences in the degree of familiarity of nations with each other, depending on their mutual relationships over time, their physical proximity or distance, and so on.
The King, the Traitor, and the Cross: An Interpretation of a Highland Maya Religious Conflict
Authors: Mendelson E. Michael
Published: March 2007

Holy Wednesday, 1953, was a great day for Santiago, a village of the Highland Maya Indians in the Central American Republic of Guatemala. On the church porch, strung up on a post decorated with lush tropical leaves, hung a four-foot puppet clothed in Indian costume with a large sombrero and a wooden mask, into whose mouth a long cigar had been planted by his worshipers. This, I had learned, was Judas Iscariot—but a strange Judas it was, for, instead of being burned, stoned, or otherwise reviled and derided as is usually the case with village Judas figures, it was cared for by Indian priests constantly on guard, presented with gifts of fruit, candles, and incense, and altogether made far more fuss of than the saint whose fiesta this bright Eastern week should have been: Jesucristo, the Mayanized Christ. The thousand bananas and hundreds of cocoa beans and other tropical fruit, for instance, which the young Indian municipal officials had gathered in a three-day trek toward the Pacific coast, had been presented to the puppet before being hung up among the gilded wooden columns of the main altar inside the church.
The Renaissance and the Sources of the Modern Social Sciences
Authors: Voisé Waldemar
Published: March 2007

The possibility of the development of comparative thought made the Renaissance an era particularly favorable to the awakening of the scientific understanding of social phenomena. Isolated elements of such an attitude had already appeared, but now their accumulation became of decisive importance.
Aspects of African Growth Before A.D. 1500
Authors: Davidson Basil
Published: March 2007

Not many of the answers, true enough, are known: what is really new in the study of recent African history—the two millenniums, let us say, before A.D. 1500—is not so much that the answers are being supplied as that the questions are being put. That in itself is something of a milestone. Few may have denied the eventual possibility of tracing firm outlines for that place and period; all but the merest handful have had other fish to fry. These fish have been, and are, extremely important—as important as the study of human origins through the slow millenniums of the Pleistocene or, at the other end of time, as the story of colonial beginnings through the scurried decades of the last century. It is no small thing that Dart, Breuil, Leakey, and their colleagues can now assert with solid evidence behind them that Homo sapiens first saw the light in Africa; while in another direction the astonishing continuity of the African story has acquired spectacular emphasis from the recovery in southeast African waters of coelacanth, a most ancient creature whose latest known fossils had occurred in rocks that are older than seventy million years. Compared with that majestic gap in time, the centuries before European preoccupation with Africa may have seemed small and unimportant; they were in any case, and for one reason or another, largely ignored.
Frederick II and the Moslem Culture
Authors: Gabrieli Francesco
Published: March 2007

The starting point of any inquiry into the relationship between Frederick and the Arabic-Islamic culture goes back to the Arabic-Norman Sicily to which he was bound by the great Constance, by his infancy, by his early adolescence, and by his crown. Despite the fact that he was born by chance in the Marche region and had preferred to spend his adult years in the flat land of Puglia, where he died, it was in Sicily that he first formed the elements of his intellectual personality and culture. The first question to be answered, therefore, is: How much of the Arabian culture of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries was still alive in Sicily after the survival of both the Moslem domination and the political, religious, ethnical, and social crises by which the last Mohammedan influence upon Sicily had been completely eliminated under the last Norman kings?
Philosophical Thought in India
Authors: Murty K. Satchidananda
Published: March 2007

There has been no uniform conception of philosophy in the West. The Greek conception differs very much from that of Kant, and Kant's philosophical thought is in turn altogether dissimilar from that of a man like Ayer. However, there are certain broad characteristics which distinguish the philosophy of European culture from philosophies of Hindu and Chinese cultures. Within the same culture, of course, there are a number of clear-cut directions. It may, for example, be pointed out that philosophy, as conceived in Germany, Spain, and Italy, differs very much from the philosophy that has evolved in Britain and Scandinavian countries. There are, certainly, exceptions. Britain has produced Bradley and Whitehead; and Denmark, Kierkegaard. Still we are not far wrong in thinking that there is something which distinguishes the philosophy of one tradition from that of another. This difference is inevitable because philosophical activity takes place not in a vacuum but within a historical setting. History is influenced by the geography of the country and the racio-cultural patterns that have been established. Again, foreign impacts produce currents of far-reaching change in habits of thought as well as action. To cite an instance, but for the German influence sweeping through Coleridge, the Cairds, and Green, Bradley or Bosanquet would be unexplainable. I will therefore assume that the philosophy of a tradition can be taken as a historic and continuous phenomenon with a special genius of its own and, perhaps, a destiny as well.
Abstract Art: Its Origin, Nature, and Significance
Authors: Brion Marcel
Published: March 2007

To define abstract art, which occupies such an important place in contemporary aesthetics, merely as a plastic mode of expression that makes no attempt to seek its own forms among those already existing in reality is to give a very inadequate notion of it. The term “non-figurative art,” which is sometimes used to describe it, arbitrarily restricts its range by stressing as peculiar to it this elementary fact alone and by characterizing abstract art solely as a controversial or even as a revolutionary art, as opposed to traditional aesthetics, which is itself figurative. Abstract art at times has also been called “concrete” or “non-objective” art. All these definitions have as little validity in themselves as those that are made use of in the history of art and are acceptable only at their “face value,” to use the monetary term, because they have no absolute value but merely a conventional one based on the principle of exchange (Baroque, Gothic, Rococo, Cubist). However, they are not to be ignored, since they do express the state of uncertainty, uneasiness, and indecision that afflicts most amateurs and even historians of art in regard to abstract art. At the same time, these definitions also indicate an awareness that we are dealing with a very important and complex phenomenon, enriched by extensive projections into the domain of social psychology, sociology, and probably even metaphysics.
The Regulation of American Industry
Authors: Adams Walter
Published: March 2007

The relation between government and industry is a problem not of economics but of political economy. It is a problem of controlling and civilizing economic power in order that it may be used for the public good within the framework of democratic institutions. It is a problem of striking a delicate balance between individual freedom and centralized control. It is a problem for which there is no monistic solution and which transcends the clichés of popular controversy between conservatives and liberals.
Turkology: A Preliminary Report
Authors: Bazin Louis
Published: March 2007

The development in modern times of the scientific study of the languages and civilizations called “oriental” (actually those outside western and central Europe) has of necessity been followed by a division of research into disciplines essentially delimited by linguistic boundaries. Thus experts of classical Arabic and of spoken Arab dialects, whether they study these idioms for their own sake, for their spoken or written literature, or even, making use of Arabic texts, to elaborate the history of the peoples of Arabic language, their nations, or their culture, have found themselves tending to work more or less together and to consider themselves under the name of “Arabists” as the artisans of a common science. Likewise, the experts of classical or modern Chinese and of Chinese dialects—linguists, philologists, historians, ethnographers—are conscious of working in the same corps of studies, known as “Sinology.” In both cases the linguistic definition is reinforced by a fairly precise geographical definition; the Arab countries, or China, are easily found on the map, and the educated public understands without much difficulty the sphere of interests of the Arabist or the Sinologist.
Ethnic Groups and Culture
Authors: Freyre Gilberto
Published: March 2007

In a very penetrating paper on “The Concept of Jewish Culture,” presented to the World Congress of Sociologists held in Zurich in 1950, Professor Henrik F. Infield pointed out that “some people born in one culture may find attractive the offerings of another culture.” Men born into some European cultures have for centuries experienced a special attraction not only toward tropical cultures but also toward tropical existence, life, and nature, with tropical women subsumed in nature and culture.
Some Reflections on the Philemon and Baucis Episode in Goethe's Faust
Authors: Rather L.J.
Published: March 2007

Goethe resisted all attempts on the part of his critics and admirers to draw oversimplified and final messages from Faust—an understandable reaction, since why should anyone bother with the dramatic trappings if the meaning can be summed up in a few abstract statements? He told Eckermann that people constantly came to him asking the meaning of Faust—as if he knew! It was not in his line, he said, to try to embody anything abstract. Goethe's thought process is dialectical, and for almost every one of his aphorisms which seems to illustrate one side of a matter there is another illuminating the opposite side. Goethe carried this tendency so far, in fact, that he once remarked to Eckermann that his Philemon and Baucis had nothing to do with the traditional couple. He added, almost in the same breath, that the persons and the situation were nevertheless similar. Before examining the meaning of Goethe's verse in detail, a brief summary of the action taking place in the fifth act of the second part of Faust is necessary:

A Wanderer returns to a land, now Faust's kingdom, where he had been ship wrecked long ago and had found shelter in the home of Philemon and Baucis. He learns from the old couple, who are still alive, that their house on the hill now stands in the shadow of Faust's castle. Faust wants them to move to the lowlands, which he has reclaimed from the sea with the aid of Mephistopheles, but they have so far refused to obey him. Faust's animosity toward the old couple is then depicted. In the end he assigns to Mephistopheles the task of eviction. Philemon and Baucis resist. They are killed, the Wanderer is dispatched along with them, and the house is burned down. Faust's blindness and death soon follow, but not before he attempts a final project, the construction of a canal.
The Case for Collective Musical Creation
Authors: Brailoiu Constantin
Published: March 2007

The cultivated Westerner has such a strict conception of the nature and the ends of artistic creation that even the hypothesis of a collective creative act seems aberrant to him. In a word, our official music is the property of an informed milieu or an elite. It is transmitted by writing; and, if this writing becomes more and more detailed and elaborate as one approaches the present, that is because it has the task of conserving intact (one might say forever) the thought of the creator, whose “personality,” as Schumann has already remarked, is the supreme good.
The Ambiguity of the Sciences of Man
Authors: Gusdorf Georges
Published: March 2007

At the conference on scientific psychology held in Strasbourg in the autumn of 1956, Professor Leontiev of the U.S.S.R. gave a highly anticipated report on the present trends of Russian psychology. He emphasized the now recognized necessity of going beyond the simplistic schemas of Pavlov and of studying complex systems of adaptation, which are the constitutive elements of the mental life in its richness and which are expressed particularly on the speech level. The elite of the French scientific psychologists listened to him in a kind of anguished confusion, mixed with admiration. One of them, expressing the general feeling, exclaimed: “You tell us that we must not hesitate to approach that formidable domain, before which we shrink back—the conscious ….” And one knew not whether to laugh or to cry at the sight of psychologists thus confronted with a subject so unusual for them as to be quite out of the question.
Western Rule Versus Western Values: Suggestions for Comparative Study of Asian Intellectual History
Authors: Keddie Nikki R.
Published: March 2007

Cross-cultural comparisons are more difficult in intellectual than in economic or social history both because patterns of belief vary even more than patterns of society and because there is no valid way to prove the relative importance of different ideas. In Asia, perhaps even more than elsewhere, the borders between intellectual history and political expediency are also often cloudy, so that it may be necessary to deal on the same terms with new ideas and with political propaganda which may not even be firmly believed by its author. The particularly close ties between intellectual, political, and social issues in modern Asia, however, mean that analytical studies of intellectual history can shed light on the whole transformation of Asian society. The very difficulty of finding valid comparisons should encourage attempts to do so in order to help explain the bewildering series of intellectual changes which have occurred in each Asian culture. A scholarly comparative study of intellectual history would require extraordinary linguistic ability and patience. The growing number of works on various aspects of modern Asian intellectual history and of translations of sources, however, enables scholars to attempt generalizations regarding the basis of material available in Western languages. Such generalizations can illuminate specific problems of intellectual history and can indicate basic similarities and differences in the Western impact on different Asian countries.
The Land of Competition: Observations On the Sociology of Games in Finland
Authors: Ahokas Jaakko
Published: March 2007

Although I am by no means a specialist in this field, I was struck with the ideas presented in Roger Caillois's work, Les feux et les hommes. In it he has attempted to classify games according to their basic character and the principles from which they stem. He has also tried to demonstrate that a certain kind of society corresponds to a certain category of games. In chapter viii of his book we encounter the transition from primitive societies, where games that Caillois classifies as mimicry and ilinx (“mimicry” and “vertigo”) are the rule, to highly developed societies characterized by agôn (“regulated competition”) and alea (“chance”). The ideal toward which all modern, democratic societies aspire is total achievement of the requisite conditions for the proper evolution of agôn, not only in the realm of games, but in all of life, by guaranteeing equal opportunities to all citizens in their competition for wealth and power. However, as we can readily understand, this ideal can never be truly achieved, even in societies that are, theoretically, the most egalitarian. To this fact the author attributes the extraordinary passion for all forms of alea, which we witness today almost everywhere in the Western world. Chance offers compensation for the disappointments inherent in agôn, for the inevitable inequalities among members of any human group. Caillois provides a penetrating analysis of all the forms that alea asumes in our times (games of “double or quits,” betting, lotteries, beauty contests, infatuation with movie stars), and he cites examples to illustrate the passions they arouse. I was all the more impressed because they are practically non-existent in Finland. This is due, in my opinion, to the fact that in Finnish society opportunities for agôn are equally distributed among its members; thus they do not feel the need to seek compensation in the whims of alea.
Human Thought: New Orientation Due to Automatism
Authors: van Egten Robert J.
Published: March 2007

The modern engineer, because of his tendency to express himself in language which, even in reference to very simple things, systematically retreats into mathematical symbolism—strictly incomprehensible to the average man—enrols himself, unconsciously or deliberately, in a jealously closed caste in which those we call “technocrats” shut themselves up. This is the caste which seeks to be the sole elite and necessary heir of the former nobility in the new social “pattern.”
Technical Methods in the Prehistoric Age
Authors: Cazeneuve Jean
Published: March 2007

There has often been criticism of the use which was made by certain sociologists toward the beginning of the century (Lévy-Bruhl in particular) of the adjective “primitive” to characterize the level of culture of peoples whom we formerly called “savage.” The term “archaic” perhaps creates fewer difficulties, but its etymology nevertheless involves the inconvenience of intimating that the societies in question might be closer to the origins than ours. Certain anthropologists, attempting to find an objective criterion which would permit us to draw a line of demarcation between the so-called primitives and ourselves, use the term “peoples without writing” to designate the former—that is, they refer to a technique. It is true that there might be good grounds for specifying this criterion. Indeed, graphic representation can consist of rudimentary signs such as one sees on the messagesticks of the Australians or in the sketched stories, such as those with which the North American Indian covered animal skins. We can speak of writing from the moment that definite characters of precise conventional meaning appear; but from the pictogram to the abstract sign there are still many transitions. For example, in the pre-Columbian epoch, the writing system of the Aztecs “constituted a compromise between the ideogram, phonetism, and simple drawing.” Egyptian hieroglyphics were not yet totally freed from their pictographic origins. In the evolution which led to our modern system, the first step was taken when syllabic representation was adopted. But writing ceased to be reserved for specialists and truly became a widespread institution when the alphabet was invented; and that discovery, made no doubt toward the year 1800 b.c. by the Semitic peoples, came more than three thousand years after the first step. In general, the term “peoples without writing” does not in itself specify that it must be understood as meaning “peoples without an alphabet”; thus there is some doubt about civilizations like that of the Aztecs, endowed with a rather elaborate pictographic system. There would be good reason, moreover, to ask ourselves if the technique of writing really constitutes a reliable criterion for establishing a distinction between societies which stagnate in archaism and those which open up to history. Certain writers, such as Marcel Griaule or M. Gurvitch, would be inclined to refute it and to seek other technical criteria, such as the use of machines or reference to creative characteristics.
The Difficulty of Reading
Authors: Ortega y Gasset José
Published: March 2007

To read, to read a book, is, like all the other really human occupations, a Utopian task. I call “utopian” every action whose initial intention cannot be fulfilled in the development of its activity and which has to be satisfied with approximations essentially contradictory to the purpose which had started it. Thus “to read” begins by signifying the project of understanding a text fully. Now this is impossible. It is only possible with a great effort to extract a more or less important portion of what the text has tried to say, communicate, make known; but there will always remain an “illegible” residue. It is, on the other hand, probable that, while we are making this effort, we may read, at the same time, into the text; that is, we may understand things which the author has not “meant” to say, and, nevertheless, he has “said” them; he has presented them to us involuntarily—even more, against his professed purpose. This twofold condition of speech, so strange and antithetical, appears in two principles of my “Axioms for a New Philology,” which are as follows:

1.

Every utterance is deficient—it says less than it wishes to say.

2.

Every utterance is exuberant—it conveys more than it plans.
Birth and Rebirth of Tragedy: From the Origin of Italian Opera to the Origin of Greek Tragedy
Authors: Kerényi Charles
Published: March 2007

There are two pitfalls which constantly threaten the literary historian who seeks the origins or beginnings of works of the mind such as species of literature or forms of religion, as well as the examples which partake of both. One danger is that the study may become an artificial construction without sufficient concrete basis in proved historical facts; the other is that the author may prefer experience to such constructions and may be too much influenced by what he has known and been impressed with as origin and beginning in his own time. The latter has at least one advantage: where there is no experience at the outset of an investigation, not even that minimum of empeiria which I shall call, with the Greek poet Aleman, peira (peira toi mathesios archa, “experience is the beginning of knowledge”), then there can be no scholarship in the fields of literature, art, and religion. In the history of those three fields we can be competently guided only by “veterans”—not mere theoreticians but men who in a sense are also “practitioners” in the creating of works of the mind. Experience takes first place not only in the natural sciences but also in modern scholarship in these areas, even with the risk that it may be too personal, too time-bound, too small in scope.
The Irreversibility of History
Authors: Stern Alfred
Published: March 2007

One of the characteristic features of our time is the growth of its historical sense. The reason for this development is clear : we have lived more history than any other epoch in the evolution of mankind. In the past, during that short period of historical stability which—cum grano salis— characterized the forty-three years between the French-German War of 1870-71 and World War I, a person could live without being interested in history. In our days such an attitude is no longer possible. We may try in vain to take no interest in history. History takes interest in us, in each of us. The last half-century showed us that to understand history is of equal importance to those who make it and to those who endure it. After having gone through two world wars and being confronted with the threat of a third one, people of my generation finally learned to understand that history is a perpetual collective becoming, of which each individual is, willy-nilly, a part. At the cost of great sacrifices we have acquired a new sense unknown to our fathers : a historical sense which guides us in life. As the seagull has a sense for meteorological storms, man, in the middle of the twentieth century, has developed a sense for historical storms : he feels the coming of wars and revolutions.
The Enigma in the Ancient Literature of India
Authors: Renou Louis
Published: March 2007

Following the Grammarians, the Poets in ancient India concerned themselves with certain problems of semantics, the solution of which, they felt, would make possible a better perception of the relationships between language and thought. Thus they distinguished the meaning of words, depending upon whether it was directly expressive or indirect and allusive. The indirect meaning, they said, is introduced whenever the primary meaning has been hampered by some sort of incompatibility. At times it retains its connection with the primary sense : this is precisely what is termed “metaphoric” meaning; at others, it frees itself from the primary sense entirely or in part, and this constitutes the gamut of “implicit” meaning. In addition, the indirect meaning is “internal”; the other is “external.” This, to be sure, can signify that one is concealed and the other apparent; but what is indicated above all is that one is profound or essential while the other is superficial or minor.
Political Morals in the Medieval West
Authors: Fichtenau Heinrich
Published: March 2007

It would be romanticism to evoke the Middle Ages from its tomb to serve as a model for our own thinking about political morals. However, quite apart from the specific and characteristic medieval features, there is another element which goes back to antiquity and forward into our modern epoch—the great continuity of ideas embraced in the terminology and the practical rules which make for their efficiency. It may be worthwhile to study these ideas instead of dismissing them as unimportant generalities.
Parthian and Sassanian History Since World War I
Authors: Frye Richard N.
Published: March 2007

There is a periodic need for a general survey and stock-taking in almost every field, but in the domain of the pre-Islamic history of Iran, to my knowledge, there has been little scholarly assessment of the picture of the past in light of changes wrought by new source materials. One important reason is that the sources for this history have increased considerably in the past few decades, and scholars have devoted the bulk of their time to the elucidation of these sources, with little time left for a study of their historical consequences. Another point which should be made is the difference between the requirements, on the one hand, for the work of ancient and medieval historians and, on the other hand, for that of modern colleagues. Historians of more recent times like to emphasize the homogeneity of the historical profession and the continuity of methods in the entire field. But in practice it is the classicist who, in our universities, concerns himself with ancient history. I mean by this one who is trained in the methods of textual analysis and the tools of the classicist, and it is the Orientalist or philologist who writes the history of the pre-modern Orient. Given the difficulties of ancient oriental languages and the need to gather source material from the archeologist, epigraphist, numismatist, and art historian, one can understand the great demands on these specialists who would write history. It is no wonder that the methods of the modern historian, evolved from work with an abundance of material and the need for comparison of various sources in evaluating a multitude of factors and roles played by individuals in a given situation, are of a somewhat different nature from those of the scholar who investigates the more distant past. The modern historian is dependent on the economist and political scientist for aid in reconstructing his story. This is the result, of course, of the differentiation and great expansion of knowledge in modern times. The disciplines become defined, and specialization is a necessity in view of the great mass of documentation. Before the advent of writing, archeology, history, and other disciplines are undifferentiated. With its invention, however, the process of ordering subjects and fields at once begins. With the increase of material remains, archeology, for example, divides into the history of architecture, with art, epigraphy, numismatics, the history of technology, and so on. This is inherent in the process of understanding.
Reflections On the Subject Matter of the History of Philosophy
Authors: Ingarden Roman
Published: March 2007

The expression commonly employed, “history of philosophy,” often seems either inexact or incomplete, depending on whether the term “philosophy” is understood to mean a system of the sciences or whether it is taken in the historic sense. In the first case, what is in question is a certain ideal system of well-founded questions and of exact and logically demonstrated affirmations relative to the objects of a certain domain. So defined, philosophy is not the object of this study. In the second case, the historic sense, the term “philosophy” designates a collection of questions and affirmations growing and changing in time, effectively expressed in a given time and by specific men. They ought to concern the objects of the domain of philosophy in the sense of systematic exposition, whose content, however, itself underwent notable changes in the course of the development of philosophy in the historical sense—particularly of European philosophy. In the spirit of their authors they ought to be true. However, according to all probability, many of them are false or at least insufficiently founded. They are, moreover, the intentional products of a certain number of cognitive, human acts. But they result at the same time—in their properties, their content, their formulation, the mode of their justification—from the influence of other states and extra-cognitive attitudes of philosophers: various sentiments, desires, religious beliefs, etc. It is therefore improper to speak of the “history of philosophy” in the sense of a philosophic system, for, in this sense, philosophy insofar as it is an ideal, extratemporal product can have no kind of history. If, on the other hand, this expression is intended to involve a question of philosophy in the historic sense, it is necessary to complete it by specifying that in the given historic consideration we are dealing with the evolution of a given philosophy—for example, of Greek philosophy from Thales to the death of Aristotle. So understood, the history of philosophy is an empirical discipline relative to certain empirical facts which occur in time. It is necessary to bear clearly in mind the nature of these acts: Is it a question only of a certain collection of phrases, or of something more?
Rural Exodus and Industrialization
Authors: Mendras Henri
Published: March 2007

Are country people destined to disappear in the near future as a result of the constant advance of technical and urban civilization? Having discovered that three-fourths of mankind are country people, American ethnologists and sociologists are studying their “urbanization” and their “industrialization” throughout the world in an effort to see to what extent there is compatibility—or incompatibility—between their traditional “cultures” and the demands of industrial production and of life in a mass society. European writers appear to be less perturbed by this dilution of peasant civilizations through contamination from the cities. They are concerned rather with the gradual disappearance of country people themselves, drawn into the cities by the rural exodus.
The Consecration of History: an Essay On the Genealogy of the Historical Consciousness
Authors: Papaioannou Kostas
Published: March 2007

How did it become possible to philosophize about history? Man has generally sought to locate himself in natural space rather than in historical time. The various oriental philosophies give no place to history. “Humanistic” Greece herself, in other respects so eager to explore human conduct in all its characteristic dimensions and in all its aspects, prudently recoiled from anything which might give value to time or cause history to appear as the specifically human mode of existence. No other culture, perhaps, carried so far the concern for harmonizing human relationships, and yet the idea of progress was completely lacking in it. The organization of the terrestrial city always remained the central point of the reflection of Greek poets and philosophers, who were almost all teachers and law-givers—but they never thought to situate the true destiny of man in the historical world, much less to grant man a place in the universe which would make him forget the precariousness of his condition and his subordination to that which surpasses him. And, if we listen to Aristotle: “The life of moral virtue,” he says, “is happy only in a secondary degree. For the moral activities are purely human, ανθρωπικαι.” Naturally, “it is true that, being a man and living in the society of others, he chooses to engage in virtuous action, and so will need external goods to carry on his life as a human being, πρos τo ανθρωπɛνɛσθαι.” But we must take care not to assert “that man is superior to the other animals … since there are other things far more divine in their nature than man, for instance, to mention the most visible (ϕανɛρωτατα), the things of which the things of which the celestial system is composed.” Aristotle was referring to the stars—and, indeed, it was in the circular motions of the luminaries, much more than in the human domain, that the classic Greeks saw that which is manifested in being with the greatest splendor. If we limit ourselves to the specifically human—as do those whom Plotinus designates under the frankly disdainful term oι ανθρωπικωτɛρoι—we risk losing contact with the Good that revolves in the cosmos and is our sole guaranty against the senseless non-being which threatens us from every side. Under these conditions the question of knowing whether or not history has meaning, and whether or not it is provided with an appropriate logic which expresses the profound structure of our being, appears meaningless.
Three Comments On the Near Future of Mankind
Authors: Fourastie Jean
Published: March 2007

It seems impossible to foresee man's future. However, we do see clearly that the past determines our present in many realms : language, concept of the world, religion, science, law. Moreover, certain biological and physiological conditions appear to be so characteristic of the human species that we would not really be concerned with humanity if men managed to free themselves of these conditions.
Historical Significance
Authors: Levenson Joseph R.
Published: March 2007

Intonation matters, in English as well as in Chinese. We may describe an item in the human record as historically (really) significant, or as (merely) historically significant. The distinction is between an empirical judgment of fruitfulness in time and a normative judgment of aridity in the here and now.
Indian Contacts With Western Lands— Medieval
Authors: Nilakanta Sastri K.A.
Published: March 2007

The rise and rapid progress of Islam in the seventh and eighth centuries a.d. drew the East and West much closer than any force had yet done and opened out numerous channels of intrecourse, material and spiritual. Travel and trade increased when the first shocks of war and hostility subsided, and, thanks to the writings of Arab travelers, geographers, and historians, we possess a more than usually complete record of the transactions of the age. The early Arab geographers gained from India the notion that there was a world center which they styled arin, a corruption of the name of the Indian town of Ujjayinï, where there was an astronomical observatory and on the meridian of which “the world cupola” or “summit” was supposed to be located.
The Psychology of the Roman Imperial Cult
Authors: Gagé Jean
Published: March 2007

By its method of posing problems successively, the curiosity of modern historians towards antiquity may sometimes give the impression of snobism or of complaisance towards a “fashion,” even when it is actually following a logical bent : just before the last war the multiplication of works on the “imperial cult,” or the “imperial mystique” of the first centuries of our era, presented dangerous temptations for exploitation in interpretations favorable to the rule of personal authority. Notably in Germany, the most serious and objective study of the notion of “principat” among the first Caesars found itself compromised even by the vocabulary with which the Latin words were translated: how many dissertations of articles appeared at that time on ancient “Fuehrertum”!
The Study of Comparative Civilizations
Authors: Olagüe Ignacio
Published: March 2007

Scientific thought today is dominated by the spirit of synthesis, in contrast with eighteenth and nineteenth century works which were characterized by their analytical impulse. However, this movement is still lurking in the collective unconscious, and not having achieved as yet its complete flowering, it remains ignored by most of the intellectual élite. Not only because it is impossible to see the forest for the trees, but especially because, influenced by an academic tradition inherited from the great masters of past centuries, the élite today is loathe to open its eyes to the reality of our own times. Official science, most universities and specialists have been trained to feel a horror for general ideas. It would, therefore, seem that this intellectual tendency is not likely to favor the creation of vast conceptions, were it not for the fact, as we shall see later, that despite themselves, scholars and researchers are carried along by the same movement of ideas. For, in order to advance into the most varied domains of scientific thought in our time, it is sometimes necessary to establish such intimate relationships among special fields, widely separated from each other in terms of their subject matter, that actually the sketching out of veritable syntheses is taking place to some degree everywhere. It is really very simple; in the absence of such generalizations, one would be pawing the ground.
Cinema and Language
Authors: Dreyfus Dina
Published: March 2007

This study does not claim to be an exhaustive critique of the contemporary cinema, whose abundance and diversity defies any attempt to unify it. It has no other purpose than to clarify the underlying meanings of certain productions which are typical of the medium (as for example, L'Avventura by Antonioni and A bout de souffle by Jean-Luc Godard), and to show that the “learned” cinema, that is, the cinema conscious of the ends pursued and the means employed, cannot but fail when it undertakes to introduce new connnections between the sign and the sense.
On Precision of Expression
Authors: Schaff Adam
Published: March 2007

Both in the case of colloquial language and in the case of specialized scientific language we always have to face the essential issue : what must we do in order not to be misled by an incorrect use of language? When we refer in general to being misled by some use of language we have two cases in mind: primo, when the language in question wrongly performs its communicative function so that the speaker is unable to convey his ideas to the listener, and, secundo, when the language by means of which we think imposes on us, through its structure and forms fixed by tradition (in the case of natural languages), incorrect ideas about reality (cf. the issues of hypostases). The causes of such and similar difficulties are varied. These difficulties, among other things, suggest the idea that language is not only an instrument, but also an object of research, an idea which induced twentieth century philosophers to engage in the study of language in its ontological, gnosiological, and methodological aspects. The method of semantic analysis, understood as a method of analysis of meanings of words, is directed precisely against these shortcomings of language. That method is meant to prevent semantic and logical errors that encumber the process of thinking with difficulties and hamper communication both with others and with oneself. Among other causes, these errors are due to the ambiguity and vagueness of words.
The Machiavellian Revolution
Authors: de Corte Marcel
Published: March 2007

It is impossible to understand the significance of Machiavelli's work if one does not understand, to begin with, the concept of man and of the world which dominates it.

Too frequently the image of Machiavelli is limited only to a study of the procedures, tricks, string-pulling, ropes (and even ropes around the neck) which he prescribes for the attainment and maintainance of power, all of this well embellished with a psychology which is either praised or deprecated.
Shakespearean Studies in the USSR
Authors: Anikst Alexander
Published: March 2007

There is no need to explain the difficulties connected with the scholarly study of Shakespeare in a foreign country. In this respect Soviet scholars are in much the same position as other scholars outside England and the USA, which possess the most source material, books and manuscripts. However, thanks to the rich collections in the public libraries in Moscow—the Lenin Library—and Leningrad—the Saltykov-Schedrin Library—and in the Arts faculties of the universities as well, practically all of world Shakespeareana is available to Soviet students. They also profit by communication with such important centers of scholarship as the Shakespeare Institute at Stratford-on-Avon and the Folger Shakespeare Library at Washington.