bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Elections in the Ancient World
Authors: Barker Ernest
Published: March 2007

It is with the Greeks that I shall be mainly concerned. I know much less about those sons of Aeneas, the Romans, whose mother was Venus (so legend and Lucretius tell us), but with whom, for all that, I have never fallen so much in love as I have with the Greeks. In speaking of elections among the Greeks I shall be concerned with their ideas about principles, mainly as those ideas are recorded by Plato and Aristotle, rather than with the methods which actually they used: in other words, I shall attempt an analysis of the general political thinking that lay behind their behaviour, rather than a description of the working of their particular electoral systems. But I must first of all lay a foundation—a foundation of distinctions and definitions—before I attempt that analysis.
The Last Fuegians
Authors: Emperaire J. , Laming A.
Published: March 2007

The spread of Western and Christian civilisation all over the world, during the last four hundred years, has been marked, on all continents, by the disappearance of large numbers of technically less advanced peoples, or by their numerical regression, which in turn was accompanied by the decadence and crumbling of their cultural inheritance. But such feats of extinction are not the prerogative of the white man of modern civilisation. Every point on the globe, at all times, has witnessed struggles for life, where victory went to the stronger. The extinction of Neanderthal man, some thirty thousand years ago, was probably due to the appearance of Cro-Magnon and Chancelade man, who entered Europe at that time and had attained a more advanced technical civilisation than their predecessors. In historic times, we know of several cases in which peoples were driven back and annihilated by neighbours whose civilisation was more advanced and who were endowed with a greater expansive force. The Negritos of South-east Asia had been ousted from a part of their original territory by the Malayans and Chinese long before the arrival of the Europeans. Several Melanesian tribes were exterminated in the course of the ancient Polynesian migrations. These examples could be multiplied. They are in fact so numerous that it has become customary to consider them almost as manifestations of a biological necessity, against which human will remains impotent.
Dante Humaniste
Authors: Michel Paul-Henri
Published: March 2007

In the vocabulary of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance the term ‘humanist’ literature refers only to profane, as opposed to sacred, writings. However, the greatness of the ancient authors appeared such that a certain confusion was created between profane and classical writings. Thus the idea arose of what was much later called humanism, and the feeling of a mission ‘to revive dead things’ (in the words of Machiavelli) gained ground. Today we like to give a wider meaning to the word humanism: to be a ‘humanist’ is to have faith in Man, to believe in his eminent dignity and in the potentialities of his genius. Such humanism is of all times, but it seems (and this is no mere chance) that its golden age coincides with that of the renaissance of antiquity and that it has remained inextricably linked with classical culture—culture understood here in the two-fold sense of ‘knowledge’ and ‘cult’ of Graeco-Roman antiquity. The reason for this correspondence between certain ideas on the potentialities of Man and admiration for the ancients is founded not only on the fact that these latter were admirable because of their wisdom, their virtues and their arts, but also, and primarily, because in the eyes of the Christians (who had good cause to believe themselves their equals), these ancients, whether Latin or Greek, not having received the help of Revelation and Redemption, had to accept on their own account the authority of moral law and to procure for themselves all the benefits of a truth envisaged only imperfectly. How could such triumph of Man, incomplete though it might have been, be arrived at ? This was a crucial question, ever since the first centuries of Christianity, a question to which the Fathers of the Church, particularly the Greek Fathers, had found various answers. Some of them denied that the pagans had any knowledge whatever of Truth, others admitted that whatever they had learned or divined of Truth could be due merely to chance Hebraic influence or to the grace of partial revelation.
Modern Poetry and the Pursuit of Sense
Authors: Bell Charles G.
Published: March 2007

When Dante climbed on the devil's flank from the hell-center of earth he was puzzled and disturbed. He could not understand, since he had never changed direction, how he was going up now where he went down before. We have lived through a similar experience. In the old world of rational absolutes one could move indefinitely in the right direction. That was the nature of progress. But in our interwoven and tensile fields we escape one vortex only by slipping into another, and the right when followed leads always more or less to the wrong. It is like running a beast around a tree—there is the critical moment at which the pursuer becomes the pursued.
The Origins of Modern Science: a New Interpretation
Authors: Koyré Alexandre
Published: March 2007

Since the heroic age of Pierre Duhem, to whose amazing energy and learning we owe the revelation of medieval science, much work has been devoted to the study of that subject. The publication of the great works of Thorndyke and Sarton, and, in the last decade, of the brilliant studies of Anneliese Maier and Professor Marshall Clagett, not to mention countless other monographs and papers, has tremendously enlarged and enriched our knowledge and understanding of medieval science in its connection with medieval philosophy—toward whose understanding and knowledge even greater progress has been made—and of medieval culture in general.
Problems of Artistic Creation
Authors: Michel Paul-Henri
Published: March 2007

In his Trattato di Pittura, written in 1435, Leon Battista Alberti recalls Zeuxis, who, judging his own paintings invaluable, refused to put a price on them. The nobility of art and the artist's interests are thus defended in a work which expressed above all the tendencies of a new generation. But it was also the first manifesto in a propaganda campaign whose fruits were to be fully realized a century later. The artist would finally come to be respected, paid for his pains on an equal basis with the man of letters (until he surpassed the latter), be renowned and assured of meriting his fame. Michelangelo rejoiced in the hardness of marble and bronze because these materials would assure the survival of his works over a long period. When Vasari sent him a copy of his Vite, he thanked him with a sonnet, in which he congratulates Vasari for his work on behalf of artists —and not only contemporary artists, since he also refers to those who, having lived in less fortunate times, had fallen into, or risked falling into, oblivion: Or le memorie altrui già spente, accese…
The Nature of the Experience of the Primitives
Authors: Zuckerkandl Friedrick
Published: March 2007

Is the experience of the primitives fundamentally different from ours, or is there only a difference of degree? What is striking at first is that this experience presents two aspects. On the one hand, the primitives understand and think as we do; they distinguish objects and their relationships by localizing them in the space and time of the exterior world, by separating them from the subjective “I”, in short by objectifying them in a rational manner. This is the “natural” aspect of primitive experience.
The Role and Significance of Technique in the Medieval World
Authors: de Gandillac Maurice
Published: March 2007

In chapter 79 of his Doctrina pueril Raymond Lull, a professional educator whom Jaime the Conqueror engaged to tutor the future king of Majorca, describes “the mechanical arts” at about the middle of the 13th century as “sciences” peculiar to men who “do physical work.” Here the treballan in the Catalan text has obviously lost all reference to the tripalium, the instrument of torture reserved for slaves, and the word is no more pejorative than the Latin laborant. For Lull the mechanical arts were not the exclusive province of a lower class of society (the class that Plato had placed on the margin of his “Republic”).
Islam: Experience of the Holy and Concept of Man
Authors: von Grune Gustav E.
Published: March 2007

Very rarely does the statement of its basic doctrines and demands truly define the individuality of a religion. It certainly does not in Islam. The particulars by which both believer and outsider will identify the Muslim faith are hardly of a kind to account for its striking distinctiveness. This distinctiveness is customarily circumscribed in terms of the so-called “pillars of the faith;” but to repeat for the thousand and first time that, to the Muslim, there is but one God whose Messenger is Muhammad, that five daily prayers are enjoined as are one month of fasting, an alms-tax and, when possible, the pilgrimage to the central sanctuary at Mecca, the Messenger's birth-place, will not convey much of the uniqueness and the unmistakability of Islam. Even when we realize that originality is not a value specific to the religious life—where innovation to be valid must always mean uncovery of, or recourse to, an eternal verity—the formulation of the “pillars” contains nothing that could have startled the world into which Islam was born long accustomed as it was to the ideas of monotheism and the prophetic messenger and the devotional practices of prayer, fasting and pilgrimage.
Historiography and the Disarmed World: A Problem in the Study of an Unprecedented Future
Authors: Waskow Arthur I.
Published: March 2007

Many scholars who have thought hard about the problems of peace and war in the thermonuclear age have concluded that mankind is faced with an unprecedented situation. Thus Kenneth Boulding (Conflict and Defense, p. 336) has remarked that “Our hope for the future of mankind… lies first in the human imagination, which can create the forms of things unknown and so create the image of possible futures that have not been previously imagined.” Thermonuclear war and world disarmament are both thought to be unprecedented possibilities. And from this belief has sprung the notion of many war-peace researchers that study of the past is unlikely to contribute much to understanding of an unprecedented future. Perhaps partly for this reason, few professional historians have become involved in the kind of peace research that has interested many economists, political scientists, and—perhaps preeminently—psychologists.
The Element of Play in Twentieth Century Art
Authors: Chastel André
Published: March 2007

In approaching contemporary art it is useless to try to determine to what extent it conforms or not to a previously conceived notion of art acquired from past centuries. It is more advisable instead to understand what idea, perhaps even an original one, this art imposes on us. In other words, when faced with a new experience, we should draw from it the original “problematic,” that is, formulate appropriate ideas to explain it. If we limit ourselves to the first years of the twentieth century, we can observe both in its content and style one particular characteristic: the importance of play. Artists have sought in related activities, such as dance or music, an image analogous to their own. They have sometimes looked for it in activities like those that interested Vermeer: The Weigher of Pearls or Lady with a Spinet (in Buckingham Palace), or in this inscription of the artist in one of his paintings relating to music: Musica laetitiae comes, medicina dolorum, which we are tempted to take as a motto and to apply to the activity of the painter himself. The same impression is given by some of the paintings of Watteau, the Musician or the Indifferent, in which we feel that the painter wanted to say something about himself. Through this catalogue of images of music or dance the artist seems to have acquired with particular pleasure an awareness of the possibility of his own art. These somewhat remote images are the ancestors of a family of buffoons, harlequins and clowns, which multiply to an extraordinary extent at the beginning of the twentieth century.
The Coming Supremacy of the Aesthetic
Authors: Aschenbrenner Karl
Published: March 2007

Is our title as paradoxical and unrealistic as it sounds? More than a little argument and persuasion would no doubt be necessary to convince anyone that a world wracked by economic conflict and distress, by the aftermath of war and by war itself was on the verge of any kind of Golden Age. But it is not Utopia that is in the making, nor, whatever it is, will it be born suddenly. What we are aware of in the significant changes of direction in human affairs is not the infant's first wail but the first shocking deed of what is already a youth, who strides to the center of the stage and will not thereafter be silenced. The Renaissance is a classic example. We do not know the ultimate origins of that change which is already mature in Sir Francis Bacon's Novum Organum. In hindsight it reads like something already far advanced and in fact like a protocol of conspiracy by scientists to make over the world in a new image, a world in which the pursuit of knowledge will be justified by its being a pursuit of power. To achieve this “I have submitted my mind to things,” says Bacon.
Unilateral Initiatives: a Strategy in Search of a Theory
Authors: Horowitz Irving Louis
Published: March 2007

“We must remember that we have reached our present tense international situation through a long series of unilateral steps in the building up ot armaments: the arms race itself is the result of unilateral initiatives by each side, Russia responding to increase in missiles by the United States and the latter deciding to increase its armaments whenever it learns (or suspects) that the Soviet Union has been doing so. The present competition in arms was not the product of international agreement but rather the fruit of a series of unilateral acts which stepped up tension and made a negotiating atmosphere more and more unlikely. The crucial question is not whether to act unilaterally but whether unilateral initiatives for peace can be as effective as unilateral armaments initiatives have been for war.” (Mulford Sibley).

I

Unilateralism is a big word. Like Moliere's comment on prose, it is something we have been using all of our lives without knowing its exact nature. Perhaps this is because unilateralism is a notion which we have measured in terms of degree rather than kind. The rub seems to be in the word “degree.” Thus, to understand the significance of “unilateral initiatives,” and perhaps to appreciate the complexities in working out an intelligent strategy for winning international peace, it might be worthwhile to explain the varied aspects that attach to a concept of unilateralism.
Form and Function of Poetic Language
Authors: Fónagy Ivan
Published: March 2007

An attempt is made here to consider poetry as one of the aspects of language. It is not the first attempt and certainly not the last.

At first glance we are startled by the multiplicity of additional formal laws restricting the poet's free choice of expressions: intricate rhyming schemes, equal number of syllables in a line, regular distribution of short and long, stressed and unstressed syllables, alliteration, prevailing in both ancient Germanic and modern American poetry:

Paler be they than daunting death the sleek slim deer the tall tense deer.

(E. E. Cummings, All in green)
The First Expansion of Islam: Factors of Thrust and Containment
Authors: von Grunebaum Gustav E.
Published: March 2007

Viewed from Mecca, its place of origin, or from Medina, its first capital, the expansion of Islam is impressive not least because it extended in every direction. There is one area of limited failure nearby, in the Ethiopian highlands across the Red Sea; otherwise a cohesive Islamic belt stretches with only minor interruptions or enclaves into India, Central Asia, past the Bosporus, throughout North and much of West Africa into the center and down the Eastern coast of the Black Continent—not to mention, apart from minor concentrations elsewhere, for example in the Western hemisphere, the solid blocks of Muslims in Indonesia, parts of China and the Southern Philippines.
The Consumption of Astrology in Contemporary Society
Authors: Maître Jacques , Becker Chris
Published: March 2007

“Look again at the disorder of the heavens... The courses of these little lights give rise to the idea of an order. Man has not yet recovered from it.”

Valéry, Mon Faust

“I am filled with thoughts of industrial might, I hear the voice of human forces. We've had enough of all the stars of heaven! We can do all that better here on earth.”

Yesenin, Stansy

The widespread and increasing vogue of astrology in France offers the spectacle of scientific popularization and esoteric speculation in full swing, with the two frequently intermingling. Disconcerting at first sight, this process must be placed within the framework of the social contradictions that have given rise to the rationalistic trends of “modernity.” As early as the Age of Enlightenment, occultism, as it spread, associated itself with natural science. In the nineteenth century this association continued, taking on new forms; it was now in connection with the history of religions and with Oriental studies that many magazines gave considerable space to occultism. From the Revue de Paris, where Nerval published his Aurélia, all the way over to the dignified Revue des deux mondes, the current seeped in a little everywhere. In our own day, while Planète is in the forefront, one must not lose sight of the outpouring of books and periodicals among which this publication is merely a particularly prominent commercial success. In this regard, astrology takes first place among all similar forms of speculation and occult practice that are merchandised in such fashion, in terms of its mass diffusion.
Biology and Cognition
Authors: Piaget Jean
Published: March 2007

This article is a summary of the conclusions of a work in progress on “Biology and Cognition;” from this stems the rather general character of the following observations. In order to compare cognitive and biological mechanisms, we must first state that the former are an extension and utilization of organic auto-regulations, of which they are a form of end-product. To demonstrate this, one can begin by noting the close parallels between the major problems faced by biologists and those faced by theoreticians of the intelligence or of cognition. Secondly, one can analyze the functional analogies and especially the structural isomorphisms between organic life and the means of cognition: “nested” structures, structures of order, multiplicative correspondence, etc. One can also attempt a sort of comparative epistemology of the different levels of behavior (the “logic” of the instincts or of the learning processes, etc.). Finally, one can examine the explanations current among biologists to account for the formation of intelligence. But if these various analyses bring into relief the continuity between organic life and cognitive mechanisms, on the other hand it still remains to be seen that the latter constitute differentiated and specialized organs for reacting physiologically to the external world. Or in other words, that at the same time that they are an elaboration of organic structures in general, they fulfill particular functions, although still of a biological nature. The following pages are based on this premise, but it should be understood that it is not a question of contrasting cognition with organic behavior but rather of placing the functions of the former within the framework of the latter.
Time, Leisure and the Arts
Authors: Freyre Gilberto
Published: March 2007

We are living today at such a pace of technological development that it is no longer enough for the businessman or the intellectual, when they consider the problems related to their specific interests, work, politics or specialization, to look just at what these problems mean in present, immediate, strictly modern terms. In fact, the very prestige of this word—modern—is in a state of crisis.
Photography and Beauty
Authors: Gilson Étienne
Published: March 2007

In advocating the difficult art of defining concepts Socrates started a revolution which continues to our day. The implementation of this art is both difficult and thankless because it deprives man of the pleasure of talking without knowing what he is speaking about, a factor which contributes a good deal to the art of conversation. Let us begin, therefore, by making clear that our reflections do not aim at modifying experience as such. All photographers, professional or otherwise, who believe they have the right to the title of artist, are not only justified in their claim to a certain degree, but may reserve the right to say they are artists in any sense they may wish to give the word. One simply begs permission for the philosopher, meticulous in his use of words, to ask himself whether photography is truly an art and if so, in what sense?
Three Myths About Indian Philosophy
Authors: Krishna Daya
Published: March 2007

Indian Philosophy, like Indian culture, seems peculiarly prone to arouse either violent antipathy or violent enthusiasm. Rarely does it engender an attitude which tries to present and assess it coolly and calmly, without positive or negative emotion. Nothing perhaps stands more in the way of such an attitude than the universally accepted ideas which I wish to explore in this paper. These three ideas are treated as indubitable facts about Indian philosophy. They seem so self-evident to enthusiasts and detractors alike that to question them seems to question the very concept of Indian philosophy as it has been traditionally conceived and presented by almost every writer on the subject. Yet, it seems to me that the time has come to question the traditional picture itself, to raise doubts about the indubitable, to investigate the sacrosanct and the self-evident. Myths have always masqueraded as facts and many a time the emperor's nudity has only been discovered by a child's disingenuity.
Orderliness and Freedom as Influenced by Scientific Method
Authors: Denbigh Kenneth G.
Published: March 2007

“What essential things are happening to us in the foundations of our existence, now that science has become our passion?” The modern sensibility is still greatly disturbed by this question of Heidegger's. We realize well enough the great value of science and the benefits obtainable from industry and medicine. Yet there remains in our hearts a certain disquiet. What indeed are science and technology doing to us at the roots?
Economic Disequilibrium—the Generator of Economic Growth
Authors: Bancal Jean
Published: March 2007

“Growth is the result of instability, development is the result of instability:” with this simple statement the great economist François Perroux announced one of the greatest revolutions to have taken place in the science of economics since Quesnay and Adam Smith founded the discipline that dominates our present civilization.
The Scientific Representation of Reality: Its Difficulties
Authors: Gorski Dimitri P.
Published: March 2007

Material reality, constantly variable and constantly in movement, dialectic in its nature, is reflected in the sciences which at specific stages of their development possess an univocal form: the results of knowledge are expressed in a language which uses terminology and symbolism, its ideas and its statements have a precise and definite sense.
Dialectic Aspects of Belief
Authors: Ruyer Raymond
Published: March 2007

Is there a specific form of dialectic reason as distinct from reason in the strict classical sense? It is very doubtful, and dialectic reason is very probably a myth. I will not discuss this point here. But there is no doubt that dialectic aspects of conscience do exist; they exist not only in the conscience of the scholar, but in conscience in general which, according to Gonseth, is always open, ever ready to revize itself, to doubt its provisional principles, to abandon the positions it had taken up.
Dialectic and Logic
Authors: Kopnine Pavel V.
Published: March 2007

Before bringing out the relationship between dialectic and logic, we must define as precisely as possible the sense in which we shall use these terms. It is well known that the words “dialectic” and “logic” have taken on very different meanings in the history of philosophical and logical thought. This ambiguity is also characteristic of their use in contemporary publications.
The Technics of Rational Civilization
Authors: Palmaers Martin
Published: March 2007

The question whether western civilization as a whole constitutes a structured and coherent unit poses insoluble problems for any pure historiography. It is, however, a real problem for history, and in our day and age when this civilization is constantly in contact with the civilization of other continents, this question becomes daily more important. In what does the essential structure of the European universe reside? What, in relation to oriental civilization, are its specific characteristics? By producing an insurmountable disproportion between this problem, produced by history, and empirical historiography, this question leads necessarily to a philosophy of history.
The Information of Machines and of Men: Wizards and Technocrats
Authors: Sauvy Alfred
Published: March 2007

Thirty years ago, if one were to speak about the “treatment of information, “ the best one could expect would be politely smiling indifference. It goes without saying that this expression, until recently meaningless, refers to the information of machines.

As for human information, it also arouses some interest, but for a very different end. Whereas machines are questioned as though they were oracles, in the majority of cases men are given information so as to be subjected to other men, either directly, or thanks to a kind of neutralization.
Black Gypsies, White Gypsies
Authors: Kochanowski Jan
Published: March 2007

Our predecessors Pott, Miklosich, Woolner, Grierson, Jules Bloch, Barannikov, Ralph Turner and others, have established from diachronic facts (comparison of the Romany with the old Indian) the Indian origin of the Tsiganes, or Gypsies. Their divergencies originate from the exact place of the primitive homeland of the Gypsies, the majority inclining to the north-west of India.
Marxist Sociology and Marxist Ideology
Authors: Rodinson Maxime
Published: March 2007

We readily use the term Marxism. The assumption underlying the use of this term is that a whole coherent well-knit body of ideas exists forming a system whose guiding principles, at least, were discovered by Karl Marx. This system would embrace, by right if not in fact, the whole body of intellectual, moral and even aesthetic problems that beset mankind. It would introduce a method by which to resolve them, at least to a great extent. Marxist protestations of fidelity to an open concept, according to which much is still to be discovered and even revised, are often contradicted by their opposition in matters of fact to continuation and revision. Consequently, one cannot see what fundamental distinction exists between Marxism and the classic philosophical systems, despite anything Marx and the Marxists may have said against the pretentions of the previous systems of this kind.
Audacity in Conteporary Art
Authors: Lanuza Eduardo Gonzalez
Published: March 2007

The aim of this article is to examine the growing predominance of audacity, or that which audaciously seeks to be taken as such, in all the manifestations of the art of our time. To do that, and to be able to agree or disagree with any meaning, it would be best to start by limiting ourselves to a definition which sets certain boundaries for the word audacity, which, by its very nature, defies that kind of qualification. The Petit Larousse can't help us out because it very cautiously defines audacity with such synonyms as boldness and daring, and for boldness and daring gives the definition of audacity, which once again proves that a dictionary is no more than an ingenious collection of tautologies. In order to break that vicious circle I venture to propose, without much rashness on my part, that we understand by audacity that attitude which consists of ignoring what is expected of you and daring to what no one else dares to do.
Witches and Ghosts
Authors: Pellizzi Francesco
Published: March 2007

In the character of witchcraft as a universal phenomenon of human beliefs, though also as a manifestation of behaviour and social institutions, there is something indistinguishable that for a long time has interested and intrigued many authors concerned with widely differing spheres (historians, sociologists, anthropologists, writers, poets, etc.). Already in the 16th and 17th centuries the new humanism, begun by the Middle Ages, was accompanied by a renewal of interest in “occult sciences,” “white” or “black,” and the positivism of the last century itself was transformed without eliminating the fascination for witchcraft indicated in the researches on satanism.
Phenomenology of Journalism
Authors: Bensman Joseph , Lilienfeld Robert
Published: March 2007

In a previous essay, the authors attempted to define, in phenomenological terms, the artistic and critical attitudes.

The artistic attitude was seen as the attempt to create the image of a total world, which could be enjoyed or viewed in terms of an attitude of everyday life; that is to say, that the created image was so all-encompassing, so total, and so complete, of a concreteness and vividness, such that the viewer could suspend perceptions of all other worlds and respond directly and immediately to the world created as a work of art.
Symmetry Physics and Information Theory
Authors: Hutten Ernest H.
Published: March 2007

There are three main issues I wish to discuss here. First, I want to point out the changing pattern of scientific explanation in physics. Briefly speaking, the model of Nature underlying the explanatory schemes has become more realistic. Communication is substituted for causality, or information flow for the simple energy flow described by the equation of motion. The second point I want to make is to explain modern symmetry physics in terms of information theory. Finally, last and not least, my third issue is to show how this new conception of scientific method can help us to understand the human (or life or social) sciences.
On the Cinema and the Disruption of the Arts System
Authors: Toeplitz Jerzy
Published: March 2007

The problem of knowing how to define art, and how to divide it into categories, has always been a serious one for theoreticians and aestheticians. In his major work entitled The Concept of Art in the Past and in the Present, Professor Wladyslaw Tatarkiewicz, a distinguished Polish aesthetician, studies the origins of the concept of art and the successive modifications which it has undergone from antiquity to today.

In Greece, Rome and the whole of the West in the Middle Ages, art was considered either as a profession or as a science. Together with grammar, rhetoric or geometry, the second category, known as “artes liberales,” also included music, which thus became what we call today musicology, or the science of music. The other category-that of “artes vulgares”-had a more practical character and included among other subjects agriculture, medicine and architecture. In the 12th century, the philosopher Hugh of St. Victor counted among the seven “artes vulgares” a discipline to which he gave the name “theatrica” and which, Professor Tatarkiewicz tells us, comprised not only the theatre but in a general way the art of amusing the people in public, in fact all stadium games, races and circus entertainment. Poetry came under the heading of philosophy.
The Time of Reality and the Time of the Logos
Authors: Noico Constantin
Published: March 2007

Logic is the science of pure time, just as geometry is the science of pure space.

In the past one would not have dared make such a statement. Just as geometry seemed to deal only with stable shapes and not with transformations and deformations, logic seemed to deal with the static modalities of thought and among its connections only with the syllogistic—and that as a matter of privilege. But geometry has become the science of moving spatial shapes; everywhere mathematics has brought in the fluxional element; on the whole, science considers rest as an extreme instance of motion. Logic too—even leaving aside mathematical logic— cannot keep its classical image. For thought cannot confine itself— and confines itself even less than mathematics does—to reflecting the static. While a circle can still be looked upon as a simple circle and not deformed by topological vision, a form of thought is always condensed time.
“Modernity” and the Evolution of Literary Consciousness
Authors: Marino Adrian
Published: March 2007

The difficulties inherent to any analysis of the concept of “modernity” have been frequently emphasised: irregular and approximative semantics, pushed to the limit of totally meaningless, and harmless convention; constant tautology and instability; a whole succession of oppositions, followed by inevitable shifts of meaning and terminological errors; in a word, an endemic and periodically verified crisis. For all these reasons, “modernity” defines (this, however, is only a manner of speaking) one of the most paradoxical of literary ideas: the more widespread it becomes, the more it lacks clarity, the more it grows blurred. And yet—for the paradox to be complete—the phenomenon is clearly inevitable: in one form or another modernity emerges with every important mutation or revolution of literary thinking. Either partially or totally, and also within the framework of new theoretical syntheses, it accompanies or redefines all the decisive stages of European aesthetics. As a real framework concept, “modernity” tends to associate, crystalise or reformulate—with regard to “what is new”—all the essential transformations of literary consciousness. It embraces the complete cycle of the ideal moments of creation and, implicitly, of literature: from the negation of old-style creation, codified and dogma-ridden, to the affirmation of new-style creation, made liberal, and freed from all aesthetic constraint. Modernity breaks a tradition, it disputes the conservative order of art and literature, with a view to instituting and installing its own tradition—this is a cyclical situation, which has perhaps been inadequately discussed. In a similar light, modernity is devoid of all precise chronological determination and becomes a constant which, in the various historical phases and on different semantic levels, expresses the inner movement of literature. This immanent dialectic of the history of literary thought goes through certain essential moments: one day, perhaps, there will come a time when the task of putting these moments in a pattern will be assured of scoring a success.
Myth and Literature in Africa
Authors: Ongoum Louis-Marie
Published: March 2007

Myth is like religion: both present one and the same fundamental problem—that of the whole of existence.
The Myth of Age, Symbol of Wisdom in African Society and Literature
Authors: Awouma Joseph Marie
Published: March 2007

Two ideas have been linked in human thought for millenia: age and wisdom. Until now, no one has questioned their close relationship. A myth common to all humanity is that of the wisdom of the elder, which certainly answers a human need for security. It is also an intellectual response to observation based on experience. So why does one call this “myth”? One means here by myth a concept or idea which, having been given value by a group, a society, or indeed, humanity, guides their attitudes and behaviour. It appears that old age is a condition attached to the notion of wisdom by human agreement. This determines the attitude of the individual toward himself and his environment —his conduct, motivation and life-style. At first glance, wisdom would seem to be compounded from a lifetime's observation and experience. Thus the biological factor of longevity is the basis of wisdom. Other psychological, intellectual and moral phenomena are balanced on this physical structure. It remains to be seen if today the myth of age as symbol of wisdom can maintain its integrity in the midst of socioeconomic and political transformations, in a world of expanding scientific knowledge and in an age of mass communication. What are the consequences in a changing world for values based on longevity and experience?
Einstein and Epicurus
Authors: Kousnetsov Boris
Published: March 2007

Atoms and space. Clinamen. Individual existence. Isotachy. The contemporary epilogue to Epicurus's physics. The problem of death and fear of death in Epicurus and Einstein. The gods of Epicurus and Einstein's God.

In 1923 a new edition of Lucretius's De rerum natura was published in Germany. The second volume—a translation of the poem into German—was prefaced by Einstein. In it one reads that “Lucretius's book will enchant anyone who is not yet completely dominated by the spirit of our time, and who feels able to take a step back to take stock of the present age, and judge our contemporaries' spiritual attainments.”
The Instruments of Oracular Expression
Authors: Moore Arthur K.
Published: March 2007

Romanticism fabricated a poet of vast oracular powers largely from superstitious notions and suspicious philosophies which the Renaissance had gathered up somewhat by chance with the rational part of the Graeco-Roman legacy. The model was surely an imposture and, historically considered, a scandal. Seer, sage, prophet, mage—the pretensions varied, but all were titles to transcendent disclosure in times increasingly committed, at least officially, to a unified scientific view. That the poet could be confirmed to any degree in this anachronistic role was probably owing to the circumstance that the general cultural reflex following the Enlightenment reawakened widespread interest in those dark and excluded passages of the human spirit which mystics and seers were thought to frequent. Poets who pretended to voyance benefited from the muffled but persistent rumor of profound mysteries accessible to the high priests of Kabbala and the Corpus Hermeticum, to Illuminists, Rosicrucians, and Neopythagoreans. Western Europe had never ceased to acknowledge, even in such unlikely periods as the later Middle Ages, the aboriginal priestly and prophetic functions of the poet; but romanticism contrived—out of occultism and neoplatonism, antirationalism and anticlassicism—such a warrant for unabashed oracular saying as Antiquity had scarcely imagined. While perhaps none of the romantic was actually prepared to grant the poet his ancient powers in full measure, few seemed inclined to diminish the stature of the heroic abstraction, who symbolically contested the claims of naturalism and positivism.
Saving the Phenomena and Scientific Change
Authors: Lalumia Joseph
Published: March 2007

Scientific astronomy began with the Greeks. The background for it was a knowledge which the Greeks had in common with older peoples such as the Babylonians and Egyptians of certain celestial regularities: the apparent daily movement of the sun from East to West, the apparent annual motion of the sun in the foreground of different constellations of stars and around the earth, the apparent nightly movement of the moon and visible stars from East to West, the periodic waxing and waning of the moon, and the different periodic displacements of the visible planets, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. All of this antecedent astronomical knowledge and more was knowledge that was sought, acquired, classified, transmitted, and improved because it had practical importance or was deemed to have practical importance, as for calendar-making, time-keeping, and advice to rulers of society concerned about making state decisions under auspicious conditions.
Power and Weakness of the Utopian Imagination
Authors: Schlanger Judith E.
Published: March 2007

Utopian literature is fascinating but impossible to summarize. Of course it is easy to see where its charm lies. We enjoy the “play” aspect of the Utopian convention, the common certainty— essential to both the author's intentions and the reader's pleasure—that we are dealing with a supposition described as a fact. In a Utopian text, we enjoy the power we have of imagining, and especially formulating, another overall framework for human experience—a framework which is specifically defined as being different and described as if it had concrete existence. This is the underlying attraction of a mode of expression which permits the author to talk of serious things in the protected and detached manner permitted by play. Why, then, are summaries of utopias so disappointing? Why does a re-transmitted utopia convey only the idea of an insipid world and an arbitrary creation? Why is it so hard to write about works of this type?
Negative Utopia and Religion
Authors: Caillois Roland
Published: March 2007

At the time of Plato's Republic, the citizens lived in a unity of religion and politics. Hegel refers to this life, prior to the rending of the conscience into the exterior modern State and interior religion, as beautiful, free, and happy.

Perhaps the nostalgia for the beautiful, free, and happy unity presides today over the confused attempts to “change life,” where politics and religion exist side by side and intermingle. But this unity was not possible except in the ideal of the Republic; the current confusion takes place rather in the name of a utopian non-city.
Reconquest, Djihad, Diaspora: Three Visions of Spain At the Discovery of America
Authors: Lafaye Jacques
Published: March 2007

Thus Spain has two frontiers: one bordering on the region of the Infidels, the other with the Ocean.

Ibn Hauqal, Kitab Surat al-Ard (t. l, p. 108)

A crusading spirit colors the vision that most European historians, especially the Spanish, have of the Iberian peninsula's past. The classical conception of the Reconquest of the territory invaded by the Moors and redeemed for Christianity at the end of a secular war (in which the legendary figure of El Cid and Ferdinand the Catholic found glory) has been greatly qualified without ever having been abandoned entirely. Leaving aside the modern controversies, we shall try to throw some light upon the origins of the ideology of the “Reconquest”; for it is just that: an ideology whose aim was to justify a certain political action. We can better understand its meaning if we compare it to the two other ideologies then competing for the Iberian peninsula, the Islamic holy war (djihad), and the Judaic eschatological hope linked to the diaspora of the Sephardim.
Current Problems of the Biosphere
Authors: Dorst Jean
Published: March 2007

Ecology shows that living beings, with all their diversity, make up a homogenous system on the earth's surface, with rules that are no less exacting than those applicable to gravitational astronomy (celestial mechanics). The physical energy coming from the sun in the form of radiation is attracted by green plant-life, be it vegetation growing on the land or microscopic algae floating on the surface of the ocean; this energy is then transformed into chemical energy, with, incidentally, a modest yield, due to the process of chlorophyllian synthesis. This stage is the only one to include a productive process—an anabolism. Other sorts of living beings derive their energy and the elements necessary for their sustenance and multiplication from organic matter devised in this way. Some vegetarian animals feed on them and are in their turn prey to predators which are themselves devoured by other predators. Food chains, grouped in bunches or network systems, are thus established on the principle of a complex pyramid. Each consumer occupies a place at a trophic level, which is clearly defined, where he guarantees the conveyance of matter and energy which are degraded in accordance with the laws of thermodynamics. These biological mechanisms entail numerous species, ranging from the most elementary forms of life to birds and mammals. Decomposition agents then recycle the mineral elements and make them available to plants. In any given area, the inert chemical elements and the community of living beings (embracing all species) together constitute a biological entity or ecosystem, this is a kind of supraspecific organism which functions with a certain flexibility, and yet is ordered down to the last detail. Just as a man consists of a heart, lungs, a liver, so a natural community consists of “organs” which are each made up of one of the various constituent species. These ecosystems are the fundamental units of the living world and they are relatively independent of one another, although exchanges do occur between them. They all come together to form a balanced system which encompasses the whole complex of living beings. This is the biosphere, a gigantic mechanism with innumerable cogs and gears which have evolved in harmony with each other throughout the whole of history, going as far back as the first trace of life on earth.
The Comic and the Serious in Religious Literature of the Middle Ages
Authors: Gourevitch Aron I.
Published: March 2007

A history of the comic has not yet been written. According to historians, the comic had very different, and sometimes even opposite causes, in relation to different ages and cultures. What provoked laughter in one civilization could be taken quite seriously in another. The comic has always had a particular function and its nature, its internal composition, has not been immutable. It could be kept within the limits of a single sphere that was assigned to it in particular (the comic, as opposed to the tragic), but it could also be elevated to a conceptual vision of the world, and in this case, it embraced much more universal domains of human history. Nevertheless, nothing has been written on the history of the comic throughout all ages and encompassing all peoples. Serious studies concerning the place it occupies in the history of civilizations are, however, of great interest.
The Word Reaction: From Physics to Psychiatry
Authors: Starobinski Jean
Published: March 2007

Reagere, reactio does not belong to classical Latin. Reagere appears, as late as the fourth century A.D., in Avienus, but not reactio. Nonetheless, antiquity was not unaware of the concept of reciprocal action, where the “patient” reacts in return on the agent. The Aristotelian doctrine of antiperistasis occupied physicists up until the time of Galileo: “All movers, as long as they move, are at the same time moved.” The Latin authors dispense with reagere and reactio. It is the verb pati, designating the passive state to which the prefix re is added in the aphorism attributed to the Scholastics in the 18th century dictionaries: omnis agens agendo repatitur.
Writing, Myth and Creativity in Pharaonic Egypt
Authors: Scriabine Marina
Published: March 2007

The first term in the title of this study might give some surprise. As I hope to prove, however, hieroglyphic writing happens to be the only key enabling us to gain entry to the Egyptian universe. Not only art and mythology, but also the laws, institutions and even daily life itself were “thought hieroglyphically” on the banks of the Nile.