bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Nomad as Empire Builder: a Comparison of the Arab and Mongol Conquests
Authors: Saunders John Joseph
Published: March 2007

History records innumerable assaults by the barbarian nomads of the steppes and deserts on the realms of civilization. In some cases, the invaders overturned an organized state, as the Hyksos did Egypt, the Ephthalites northern India, and the Kin northern China. In others, they were thrown back, as the Huns were from the Roman Empire and the Avars from Byzantium and Frankland. Some shed their barbarism and acquired the arts of civilization, like the Magyars and the Ottoman Turks, others remained illiterate pastoralists to the end, like the Scythians and the Cumans. Two created world empires as a result of conquests the scope and magnitude of which still grip the imagination. These were the Arabs of the seventh century and the Mongols of the thirteenth, whose spectacular achievements pose problems concerning the interrelationship of nomadic and sedentary societies and of the nature of the “drives” which impel pastoral peoples to burst out of their homelands not simply to raid and plunder but to establish political domination over their civilized neighbors. The Arab and Mongol conquests also raise the question why the former cleared the ground for the erection of a distinctive new world culture and the latter did not.
Einstein and Dostoevski
Authors: Kuznetsov Boris
Published: March 2007

Why did Einstein say of Dostoevski: “He gives me more than any other thinker, more even than Gauss?” What could Dostoevski give to the originator of the theory of relativity?

It is certain that it is not a question of the philosophical, moral or social ideas with which he filled the thoughts and utterances of his heroes. Einstein drew from artistic literature the driving force for his research and not the elements of a scientific concept of the world. The influence of artistic creation on scientific creation was the result not of any positive answers but of the common aesthetic ground in the problems and contradictions of the earlier representation of the world and in the intensity of the artistic conception of the infinite contradictions and complexities of the origin of the world.
Cybernetics as a Discipline and an Interdiscipline
Authors: Ceccato Silvio
Published: March 2007

There are various ways of defining cybernetics. (1) Some recognize it in the so-called problems of information, when they are concerned with the transmission, elaboration and conservation of information. (2) Some consider it as the science of command and control in machines and in animals. (3) Some refer to it in studying the two aspects of automatism. (4) Finally some see in cybernetics the study not so much of the mechanisms which provide results that were previously provided by man, but rather of the superior and intelligent activities of men themselves, in order to analyse and describe them in terms which make possible their reproduction in a mechanical model; cybernetics being in this case the study of the mind.
The First Megamachine
Authors: Mumford Lewis
Published: March 2007

Until the nineteenth century, history was largely a chronicle of the deeds and misdeeds of kings, nobles, and armies. In revolt against a general obliviousness to the daily life and affairs of ordinary people, democratic historians swung to the opposite extreme: so the part actually played by kings has, during the last half century, been grossly under-rated, even though most of the attributes of kingship are now exercized, on a larger scale than ever before, by the all-powerful sovereign state.
Society in the Technical Age
Authors: Volkov Heinrich N.
Published: March 2007

In his book Der Mensch und die Technik (Zurich, 1953, p. 18), the Swiss engineer Gustav Eichelberg painted a humorous picture of the overall development of society, which he represented as a 60 km. marathon race, with each kilometer representing 1,000 years.
The Black Serpent Who Opened the Eyes of Man
Authors: Merlo Christian , Vidaud Pierre
Published: March 2007

“Few African Gods have attracted the attention of travellers as has Dangbé, the Good Serpent,” writes Pierre Verger in the introduction to the chapter he devotes to the Dahoman Python. At the end of the 17th century Guillaume Bosman attributed to the Serpent the rank of “divinity.” He describes the “House of the Serpent” (the Temple of the Serpents which still exists in Ouidah); the offerings that are brought to him; the pilgrimages that the Kings of Fida (Ouidah) made there every year and the punishments meted out to Europeans or Africans who failed to pay him due respect. In the preface to his Voyage du Chevalier des Marchais the Reverend Father Labat relates how this “great Serpent” came out of the ranks of the army of Ardres (Aliada, south of Abomey) to enter those of the army of Juda (Houéda, from which Ouidah). He describes the Serpent as being one and a half arms in length, or seven and a half feet long, with a very beautiful skin “ marked by wavy stripes in which yellow, blue and brown combine in a most agreeable way.” The animal, quite innocuous as are all pythons is “ extremely patient and never attacks people.” He concludes: “The Serpent is in Ouidah a superior and excellent Divinity. He looks after and into everything, everybody appeals to him for advice, for rain, for good weather or in case of sickness or war, for trade, for harvest, for weddings.” It is possible to perceive already in this confusion of heteroclitic attributes the divinity that in our time has come to symbolize, and is said to procure fertility, fecundity, good health, wealth, peace, wisdom and happiness.
Economic Growth and Its Price
Authors: Lassudrie-Duchêne Bernard
Published: March 2007

Economic growth and progress are the two major themes of our society, representing mankind's wish for well-being and for greater, true equality. It is a spiritual hope as well, because the idea is well-established that a rise in the standard of living is related to a society's cultural, moral, and spiritual progress. If there were doubts about the beneficial character of wealth at other times, such doubts cannot be taken too seriously today when the wealth is that of the society. Starting from this general direction, previous social beliefs have tended to lose their focus or to reorient themselves. Let us take some examples:

For the moment at least Socialism seems to be deserting its original model and some of its values. It is really only a question of organizing the economy in a more or less Socialist fashion to provide the maximum of economic efficiency with the speediest rise in the standard of living of the largest number of people.
Primary Reification and Primitive Mythology
Authors: Krader Lawrence
Published: March 2007

The expression of the nature and identity of mankind in the abstract, however clear it may be as a concept, is neither well thought out nor fully explored; hence it is at once the triumph and defeat of speculative and empirical anthropology. To be human is to participate in mankind in general, and to participate in a particular culture; it is the latter which is known best. Objectively, the individual achieves his human nature only through the channel of the particular culture, not through that of mankind in general; in this sense we speak of particular human nature. The unity and uniqueness of mankind as the culture-bearer, while having gained formal expression, has been given little substantial content. Moreover, the concept of the abstract concept, the totality as unity, has few consequences in relations between peoples and between social classes. The individual identity of man is engendered by the expression of his being of his own kind as opposed to the being of those other nations and classes, and as opposed eventually to the being of the other; this mode of achieving identity is counterposed to the concept of the unity of man, and the unity of the separate human group with mankind as a whole.
The Course of Social Change: A Hypothesis
Authors: Deva Indra
Published: March 2007

During the last five years or so there has been a happy revival of interest in social change and evolution. The remark by Talcott Parsons: “Slowly and somewhat inarticulately, emphasis in both sociological and anthropological quarters is shifting from a studied disinterest in problems of social and cultural evolution to a ‘new relativity’ that relates its universais to an evolutionary framework,” epitomises the direction of the trend. Of course such recognition has not altogether banished the emphasis on static studies that has reigned in the fields of sociology and anthropology for the last four decades. Under the influence of this insistence on the study of societies as they are at a point in time, all serious endeavor to understand the broad course of social change has been at a discount. Attempts in that direction have been looked upon with suspicion and discarded as “unscientific,” “metaphysical,” or “architectonic.”
The Imagination and What Philosophers Have to Say
Authors: Theobald David W.
Published: March 2007

My purpose in this paper is to consider the reaction of certain literary artists to the ways in which language is used by philosophers. Such an investigation is I think worthwhile for the light it throws both upon the nature of philosophical thinking itself and upon the preoccupations of certain workers. In particular it makes us enquire what it is about philosophical thinking which can be exploited imaginatively.
Mysticism and Society
Authors: Scholem Gershom
Published: March 2007

If we wish to discuss mysticism and society in their mutual relationship there is one astonishing fact which should be pointed out from the outset. In the infinite welter of literature on mysticism which, especially during the last two generations, has taken on quite extraordinary proportions, the problem of mysticism and society has received but scanty attention. The way of the mystic in trying to attain his goal of union or communion with God or however we may define his goal, the peculiar spiritual universe in which he lives, the intricacies of mystical theology, which has the formulation of mystical experience in a conceptural framework and the establishment of an acceptable connection between these experiences and traditional forms of theology—all these have been discussed in full detail. Even the history of such developments in different systems and religions has always aroused the interest of the historian. The social context of mysticism and its implications, however, have, as far as I am aware, only a marginal place in these discussions.
Creative Evolution
Authors: Dobzbansky Theodosius
Published: March 2007

We have hesitated in choosing this title because it is identical with that of Bergson's masterly work. Bergson was perhaps the most eminent philosopher to build his philosophical views in part on the basis of biological evolutionism. The biological knowledge which was available in Bergson's time is however now out of date. Our present understanding of evolution is rather different from his. This is as it should be. Science is cumulative knowledge. A scientist works to make the knowledge whith which he started obsolete. In a very real sense he works to make his own work obsolete as well. In so far as a philosophy has science as one of its components, or supports, philosophy must be rethought, reconstructed, and reformulated from the vantage point of each generation. If all conclusions based on scientific knowledge of a half century ago were still valid, this could only mean that the study of the evolution of life is no longer profitable. Such however is not the case.
The First Philosophic Contacts Between Europe and China
Authors: Demiéville Paul
Published: March 2007

Until now the history of the first contacts between China and Europe in modern times has been studied principally from a Politica! Point of view or from an economic and commercial one, as well as from its religious aspects. The cultural aspects and more particularly the philosophical consequences of these contacts have hardly been touched upon except by Chinese scholars with little knowledge of European sources, or inversely by European historians who have not made sufficient use of Chinese sources. For about fifteen years I have devoted two or three of my courses at the Collège de France to studying the Chinese thinkers of the Ch'ing period, and this has led me to touch upon certain questions which the introduction of European ideas in China by Jesuit missionaries at this time poses. Occupied with other research in recent years, I have not followed at close hand the many studies which have been devoted to these questions by Chinese and Japanese scholars, notably by Professors Fang Ho of Taipei, Saeki Yoshiro of Hiroshima, and Goto Sueo of Tokyo, and I am not familiar with the recent Marxist interpretations, those of Hiu Wai-lu, of Kwan Fong, or the recent ideas of Fong Yiu-lan or the other collaborators of the Pekinese magazine “Philosophic Studies” (Tcho-hiu yen-kiou). I must apologize for using documentation which is not up-to-date or not according to the fashions of the day and which at any rate is very incomplete, for I am not a specialist in this subject. I would especially like to address myself to the Chinese reactions to the first Sino-European contacts rather than the European reactions, which—in Europe at least— are better known and which still more so are outside my field of competence.
New Tendencies in Economic History
Authors: Bergier Jean-François
Published: March 2007

When I was at the lycée, I listened with passion to the lessons of my history professor and I eagerly enlarged upon his lessons by doing a great deal of reading. On the other hand, I disliked mathematics. For me, equations, theorems and logarithms were no more than cumbersome baggage for the historian I aspired to become. Worse than that, it was an obstacle which inevitably I had to surmount in order to obtain my baccalauréat. Having surmounted the obstacle, I simbolically sold my table of logarithms, for had I not freed myself forever of that which for too long had been a nightmare?… Now, about twelve years later, without my ever having deviated from my original course, I find myself once again confronted with mathematics. Of the same sort? Certainly not. What I am now confronted with is infinitely more complicated and beyond my comprehension as I lack the basis which I erstwhile ignored. What then has happened? Why is it that the historian that I became in the meantime now needs mathematics today?
Psychoanalysis and the Problem of Value
Authors: Daley James W.
Published: March 2007

This paper deals with the problem of value in the psychoanalytic theory of human nature and culture. In particular, it is concerned with this problem in the theory as it was expounded by Freud. First, I shall show how the problem of value is an integral part of the therapeutic situation which Freud encountered. In regard to Freud's own assessment of the problem, I shall point out some difficulties of a cognitive and a moral nature for which his theory must, but cannot, account. In the second part of the paper I shall show how the problem of value is an indispensable component of Freud's overall theory of man and culture, what may be called his “general theory.” This part will be concerned with its peculiar normative and scientific status. I shall try to show how descriptive and prescriptive ethics are (1) confused in Freud's theory and (2) that it is a confusion that cannot be avoided if the theory is to serve the purpose that Freud seemed to believe it must serve, namely, as a science not only of what man is but also of what man ought not to be.
The Dialectics of the Talmud and the Kabbalah
Authors: Vajda George
Published: March 2007

André Lalande's classic Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie thus criticises the term “dialectics”:

“This word has been interpreted in so many different ways that it can be employed usefully only when the precise meaning attributed to it is specified. Even with this reservation there is yet reason to be on guard against the inappropriate association which might thus arise.”
The Concept of Race
Authors: Hersch Jeanne
Published: March 2007

I remember a seminar held at the University of Heidelberg, soon after Hitler came to power. Karl Jaspers, who was shortly to lose his professorship because he had committed the crime of Rassenschande—in other words, because he had married a Jewess—was discussing a student's essay on Hegel's philosophy. He said: “In these days when we hear all too much about race, I advise you to read X's book on ‘race among the herrings’. You will then see what we know about race today, when human passions are not involved.”
Experience and Dialectic: A Study in Dialectical Interplay
Authors: Mathur Dinesh Chandra
Published: March 2007

In the intellectual history of the West and the East the words “experience” and “dialectic” have been used in various senses. Their respective roles in knowledge have been differently conceived—depending invariably on the meanings given to the words “knowledge” and “experience.” The problem of the mutual relationship between experience and dialectic is at bottom that of the relation between experience and reason. Reason can be understood in a static sense and a dynamic sense. It may stand for that human capacity which apprehends formal logical relations between certain propositions and deduces conclusions from given premises. Or it may refer to that dynamic effort of the human mind to articulate, to grapple with and render intelligible the immediately felt experience. In this latter sense reason is involved in a dialectical and dramatic process which aims at recapturing, as it were, the felt unity and totality of experience. That is why underlying the diverse uses of “dialectic” one can discern in the concept a common flavor which is a unique combination of the rational and the dramatic, the intellectual and the imaginative, the discursive and the non-discursive. Failure to understand the proper relation between experience and dialectic has given rise either to “insoluble paradoxes” or to grandiose, “metaphysical,” over-all solutions which are hardly convincing. In this paper I intend to bring out, what seems to me, the proper way of understanding their relation through a critical consideration of the dialectics of the famous Mādhyamika dialectician Nāgārjuna, of ancient India, interspersed with incidental remarks on some Western dialecticians.
Magic and Dialectic
Authors: Guggenheimer Heinrich W.
Published: March 2007

In the Biblical story of the creation we read (Gen. II): “The Lord in the exercise of His power created from the soil all the wild animals of the field and all the birds (and other animals) that fly in the sky. He brought to the Man to see what name he would give it. Whatever the Man called a living soul, that would be his name. The man gave names to all the domestic animals and to the birds of the sky and to all the wild animals of the field; but there was not found a helpmate appropriate to Man.” An early medieval commentary (Midras Beresit Raba, quoted from ed. Levin-Epstein, Jerusalem, 5712 = 1951/2) reports the following explanation (xvii, 4): “The students asked Rabi Yohanan ben Zarai: It is written (Gen. 1, 24), ‘And God said, let the earth bring forth living souls according to their species…’ What, then, is the meaning of the verse, ‘The Lord created from the soil…?’ He said to them: The first verse (1, 24) relates to the creation, whereas the second mention (II, 19) refers to the power of the humans over the animal kingdom. This can be seen from the verse (Deut. xx, 19): ‘If you will use your power against a city…’.” (This means that the word wayser should not be derived from the root ysr, to create, but from the root swr, to behave in an inimical fashion. The best translation of the verse would then be: “The Lord in the exercise of His power forced from the soil all the animals of the field… and brought them under the power of the Man under condition that he would name them.” It is to be noted that the word “he created” appears previously in II, 7 as applied to the creation of Man. There it is spelled wyysr, seemingly to exclude a derivation from swr. This is similar to the massoretic treatment of wyr’, he saw, and wyyr’, he feared. The first root is r'h, the second yr’. Naturally, biblical scholarship cannot take notice of these remarks since it must believe in a theory of sources.) The attitude underlying this commentary is that the knowledge of the right name gives power over the bearer of that name. This attitude is a well-known principle of magic in all its forms. It can be found in folk-tales like that of Rumpelstilzchen. J. G. Frazer, in The Golden Bough (quoted from 2nd ed., vol. 1, London, 1900) has made a classical study of this kind of magic. He writes of the Egyptians (p. 446): “For it was believed that he who possessed the true name possessed the very being of god or man, and could force even a deity to obey him as a slave obeys his master.” For the same reason, we are told (p. 447): “The city of Rome itself had a secret name which it was unlawful to divulge.”
Toward a Naturalistic Philosophy of Experience
Authors: Farber Marvin
Published: March 2007

It is true that all ideas begin with experience, in a factual, temporal sense. It is also true that the validity of many ideas does not depend upon the observations of natural experience. “Experience” is used therewith in two different senses of the term, which cannot be fused by calling them different modes of experience. The difference between the inductive and the deductive, or the empirical and the formal, is involved. It has been one of the supports for the doctrine of a priori knowledge. The difference between direct experience, in which one is “at the mercy of the object,” and reflective experience, which is regarded by some philosophers as more adequate and independent, has also been prominent. It has led to the doctrine of transcendental knowledge, in response to the understandable wish to be emancipated from the natural conditions of experience. Curiously, it does not seem to be realized that an emancipation from nature would also involve independence from all conditions of human culture. That the direction of flight is away from the limitations of the natural world is evident. Not so evident is the goal, which hardly offers the desired haven of refuge in a nonnatural world that is devoid of culture as we know it.
The Blacksmith's Taboos From the Man of Iron To the Man of Blood
Authors: Makarius Laura
Published: March 2007

The status of the blacksmith in tribal societies poses one of the most puzzling problems of anthropology. By a strange paradox, this noted craftsman, whose bold and meritorious services are indispensable to his community, has been relegated to a position outside the pale of society, almost as an “untouchable.” Regarded as the possessor of great magical powers, held at the same time in veneration and contempt, entrusted with duties unrelated to his craft or to his inferior social status, that make of him performer of circumcision rites, healer, exorcist, peace-maker, arbiter, counsellor, or head of a cult, his figure in what may be called the “blacksmith complex,” presents a mass of contradictions. These contradictions are to be met with wherever, as in the case of barbarian societies and archaic civilisations, iron ore is smelted and iron is worked, even though it is in black Africa that the enigmatic character of the blacksmith is most clearly delineated.
Egalitarian and Utopian Traditions in the East
Authors: Chesneaux Jean
Published: March 2007

Socialism was born in the West in the 19th century, be it the Utopian visions of Saint-Simon, Owen or Fourier, or the system, at once theoretical and militant, founded by Marx and Engels. It was the heir not only of the philosophers and economists of the modern age, Diderot, Hegel and Ricardo, but also of a more ancient egalitarian and Utopian tradition, which constitutes its “prehistory” and its “proto-history”: social movements such as the Bohemian Taborites, the Münster anabaptists or the English diggers; and similarly the Utopian outlooks like those of Thomas Moore or Campanella or, still more ancient, Plato himself.
The Violence of Man
Authors: Wieck David T.
Published: March 2007

Violence pervades the mainstreams of human culture; indeed one could try to write the whole history of mankind as a history of violence. Traditional political histories, chronicles thick with wars, civil wars, conquests, struggles for nation and empire, seizures of state power, assassinations, insurrections, only begin to tell the story. Consider, for example: The plunder of India, the enslavement and exportation of Africans, the extortion of monopolies in the world's minerals, the exploitation and degradation of starving populations menaced by police and armies—all perfectly legal by the Thrasymachean laws of Europe and America—translates itself (congeals) finally into wealth, which bargains against poverty from positions of financial and technological power; which proclaims then a morality of peace, proposes to wipe the moral slate clean, but wishes to perpetuate a balance of power progressively more unfavorable to the powerless; and which is prepared for new violence (executes new violence) in order to preserve its disproportionate wealth, its privileged status, its authority. Now we have before us fuller principles for writing the history of mankind as the history of violence; for none of this is new under the sun, and a similar pattern has been repeated, former victims of colonialism not excepted, in the internal history of nation after nation.
Freedom and Constraint in Productivist Society
Authors: Kende Pierre
Published: March 2007

The following reflections center round a current of thought and a way of action which an increasing number of our contemporaries recognise as the great conformity of our age, namely the cult of economic growth. Even thirty years ago this was a partial truth; today it seems to be the favorite anxiety of those political forces endeavoring to be modern regardless of the philosophies to which they refer. Focussed as it is on the acceleration of material progress, is this “productivist” anxiety not the unifying idea of a world in a state of fusion? A world that is becoming more and more indifferent because of its traditional divergences? And the pragmatism of this idea, when translated into equations, suits all those for whom man is equal to his technical strength and for whom progress corresponds to a quantum of accountable acquisitions…
Objective Foundations of the Scientific Method
Authors: Mshvéniéradzé Vladimir V.
Published: March 2007

Contemporary scientific research has reached such fundamental layers of laws to be discovered that questions of scientific methodology, of means and procedures of analysis, of creating (or of perfecting) a method of research can no longer be answered “along the line” in the course of a strictly scientific progression. It is necessary to consider them as a particular branch of research, to separate them as independent stages, although absolutely indispensable within the structure of contemporary science.
Re-Examination of the Concept of Revolution
Authors: Marcuse Herbert
Published: March 2007

The concept of revolution in Marxian theory telescopes an entire historical period: the final stage of capitalism; the transitional period of proletarian dictatorship, and the initial stage of socialism. It is in a strict sense a historical concept, projecting actual tendencies in the society; and it is a dialectical concept, projecting the counter-tendencies within the respective historical period, in as much as they are inherent in this period. These tendencies and counter-tendencies are manifestations of which Marxian theory and practice themselves are essential elements. Marxian theory itself is a power in the historical struggle, and to the degree to which its concepts, “translated” into practice, become forces of resistance, change and reconstruction; they are subject to the vicissitudes of this struggle, which they reflect and comprehend, but do not dominate. “Re-examination” is therefore an element of the concept of revolution, part of its internal development.
The “Scientific” and the “Ideological” in a Marxist Perspective
Authors: Hyppolite Jean
Published: March 2007

It is the essence of a work such as Marx's to provoke new interpretations in the course of history. His work is, in fact, at once thought, and an action aimed at transforming the human and social world. The sudden appearance of a communist world, in historically unforeseen forms, its coexistence with a capitalist world—itself quite different from its 19th century version—and the relationship between developed countries and those developing countries which were once colonies; this present state on our planet leads to new inquiries about Marxism and to a return to Marx's fundamental writings and texts, which are inseparable from Lenin's interpretations. Any reading and interpretation of Marx in a contemporary historical context is due, today, to Louis Althusser and his pupils. We are not, however, going to dwell on this actual (still unforeseable) meaning, but on some of the major themes of this interpretation. What is the “scientific,” what is this new science, historical materialism, that Marx had begun to form? what, in this light, becomes of philosophy, that is, with Marx and Lenin, dialectical materialism? and lastly what sort of relation is there between the ideologies, in a sense of which Marx is the instigator, and science or philosophy?
Punctuality an Inquiry Into the Psychology of Modern Man
Authors: Melka Raymond
Published: March 2007

Modern man in the western world is constantly afraid of wasting time. He therefore measures time, uses it in small quantities, and conducts his activities in such a way as to waste as little as possible; he arranges his appointments with a remarkable degree of precision, his offices are known for their scrupulous punctuality, and the word “urgent” is nowadays used a great deal. Sportsmen are intent on breaking the kilometre record by a few tenths of a second, and the omnipresent instruments for measuring time—watches, clocks, chronometers, also agendas, calendars, etc., reveal the preoccupations of modern man. Civilization today shows itself acutely conscious of the value of time, and regards it as a sign of economic rationality that everyone should attempt to divide his time economically between all the tasks of which his existence is made up. “Time is money,” says the popular proverb, and one meets hundreds of people who express their anxiety “not to waste time” on activities of lesser importance, which “can afford to wait” or do not “deserve to have too much time spent on them.” So that the importance of a matter is measured in practice by the amount of time one is willing to spend on it. Equally, time itself gains in precision and exactness, and we try to fit into an incompressible period of time a mass of activities which would formerly have been spread over a longer period. Our civilization is the civilization of impatience.
The Money Game: Notes On Fantasies of Temporal Recovery and Preknowledge
Authors: Cottle Thomas J.
Published: March 2007

Temporal recovery and prescience or preknowldge clearly belong to the realm of imagined time, for they brazenly threaten to disobey the unidirectional structure of successive or linear time. It goes without saying that the acts of fantasizing recovery or preknowledge belong to what becomes an expanded sense of nowness. Fantasizing trascends mere temporal imagining, for the processes of recall and expectation are transformed and accelerated into momentary wish fulfillment.

Figuratively speaking, fantasizing and imagining may be thought of as running in opposite directions along the same spatial plane. Apparently restrained by the objective mold of chronological succession, imagining in the form of recall returns the experience to the present while fantasy of recovery “succeeds” in “transporting” us to the “time” of the original experience. Expectation on the other hand, “projects” outward our feelings, hopes, and dreams as bolts of content to fill the emptiness of future while fantasies of preknowledge barely “succeed” in bringing to us, through subjective prematureness, an elaborated interpretation of a now replete future.
The Immorality of Morality
Authors: Daley James W.
Published: March 2007

The traditional morality of conscience, according to Freud, is based for the most part on the suppression of the instincts. His psychoanalytic theory provides a genetic and functional account of how and why this is so. Genetically, the theory purports to explain the ontogenetic and phylogenetic development of the traditional morality of conscience. Functionally it attempts to explain the failure of this morality and propose an alternative theory which will work out better in practice. Each part of his theory can be discussed separately, but neither can be divorced completely from the other. Freud's theory is not only an explanation of what morality in fact is from a descriptive scientific point of view, but also what morality ought and ought not to be from the normative standpoint of psychoanalysis. Thus, each part of the theory is integrally related to the other.
The Method of Morelli and Its Relation To Freudian Psychoanalysis
Authors: Spector Jack J.
Published: March 2007

Giovanni Morelli (1816-91), the Italian connoisseur, in the 1870’s and 1880’s, writing under the pseudonym Lermolieff worked out a method for distinguishing original works of art from copies. His method was a curious one, involving the study of small and unimportant details of the painting in order to discover the authentic touch of the master. An illustration from his book, Italian Masters in German Galleries shows ears from paintings by the Florentines Leonardo da Vinci and Lorenzo di Credi, and through the differences in form between these two details, Morelli believed he could distinguish two artists of the same school. A second illustration from Morelli's book shows that conversely, two different parts of the body bear a family resemblance to one another—here the hand and ear are both long, thin and tapering forms. In his study of paintings in the Borghese Gallery, Morelli explained how such details could help the connoisseur identify a master: “Copyists can never have any character or style, for ‘form’ in their works is not due to their own idea … As most men, both speakers and writers, make use of habitual modes of expression, favourite words and sayings, which they often employ involuntarily and sometimes even most inappropriately, so almost every painter has his own peculiarities, which escape him without his being aware of it … Anyone intending to study a painter more closely and to become better acquainted with him, must take into consideration even these material trifles (a student of calligraphy would call them flourishes), and know how to discover them …”
Science and Poetry
Authors: Gaspar Lorand
Published: March 2007

Science and poetry: it is sufficient to conjure up together these two terms of human experience to arouse an idea of opposition in some, an idea of exclusion in others and of suspicion in most. Two methods of perception of the exterior and interior world, at opposite ends of the human mind have produced two languages. They are so far from each other these two languages that have common origin, and after extending their branches to the opposite ends of the earth seem to be able to join together wishing to go beyond.
The Embourgeoisement of Avant-Garde Art
Authors: Noszlopy George T.
Published: March 2007

Avant-garde art has reached a paradoxical situation: it has become accepted by the bourgeoisie. Though professedly anti-traditional from the beginning, it built up a tradition of its own; an aesthetic and morality of uncompromising permanent revolution. The containment of the avant-garde, which began during the 1950s and has been one of the most interesting social developments in art, broke the continuity of more than one and a half centuries of non-conformism and rebellion.
The Shattered Mirror
Authors: Ergmann Raoul
Published: March 2007

The knowledge of art is revealed, in the modern world, by a variety of mechanical and economic means, for which history had provided no parallel; the techniques of photography and of reproduction, working in concert with the opening of new markets for “cultural goods” lavish on an ever-increasing public reproductions of works of art. This revolution resembles that previously accomplished for the broadcasting of words and ideas, by the invention of printing; we do not yet know if it can be of the same importance in its field.
News and Publicity
Authors: Saxer Ulrich
Published: March 2007

When the first snow flutters down onto the roofs and streets of London, Moscow or Zürich, it is “news”—although the same thing happens about the same time every year. The fact that this (usually very transitory) white splendour is news is demonstrated by the fact that the editors of the local papers in these three cities inform their respective readers of it. The readers—or those of them who live in the area—will have usually already noticed the meteorological event for themselves. Those who live elsewhere, and who read the report and look at the pictures of it, will of course not have noticed the fact for themselves. The two groups of readers will pay a very different degree of attention to the news-item, depending on the importance it has for them. But if this first snow affects international air traffic, due to the closing down of one or other airport in the three cities, then it becomes, through its effects, a piece of “news” for the travel experts, and perhaps even the economic experts, of the mass media, and it is accorded national or even international publicity.
Advertising: the Central Institution of Mass Society
Authors: Griff Mason
Published: March 2007

At the termination of the First World War a new social order arose which has been labelled mass society. Mass society gained impetus during and as a result of the Civil War and increased momentum during the First World War.

It was especially in the United States, but also in Great Britain, France, Northern Italy, the Low Countries, Northern European countries and Japan that mass society and its culture made its first appearance. Some of its features have begun to appear in Eastern and Central Europe, and, in an incipient way, in the Asian and African countries.
The Rationalism of Leonardo Da Vinci and the Dawn of Classical Science
Authors: Kouznetsov Boris
Published: March 2007

The fundamental concept of classical science is the differential representation of movement. Classical science studies movement between two points or between two instants of time. Peripatetic physics is based on a static scheme of natural positions, and it only considers movement from the point of view of its limiting points. Its theory of movement does not take account of the local state of moving bodies at every intermediate point of their path. Classical science, on the other hand, deals with instantaneous local states, which, in the special case of a body left to itself, do not change; in the general case, the interactions of bodies consist in acceleration that is proportional to the force applied. Thus, the basic concepts for classical science are the limiting relations between the distance traversed and the time taken, and between speed and time; and these lose their meaning in the absence of an integral concept of moving bodies. Classical science appeared when the differential concept of movement became a system of differential laws, and found its essential mathematical formulation in the infinitesimal calculus. There had already existed a vague and unformed concept of a unitary local event, state, or relationship, which could be subjected to scientific analysis to the extent that it was conditioned by preceding events, states and relationships and itself determined subsequent ones. This concept had not yet been connected to the study of movement, it was sometimes applied to areas very remote from mechanics, while at other times it approached very close to physics, mechanics and mathematics, to the ideas of classical science. It approached very close—but it had not yet entered into these ideas. This was the dawn of classical science.
The Logic of Imagination
Authors: Caillois Roger
Published: March 2007

It is often difficult to distinguish between the animals of fable and those of zoology. The sphinx, the chimera, the centaur and the hippogriff belong, and always have belonged to the first category. But animals such as the unicorn have long been catalogued and described in works of natural science. In the seventeenth century, a catalogue such as John Johnston's A Description of the Nature of Four-Footed Beasts, written in Latin, translated into English and published in London in 1678, still distinguishes eight different types with corresponding illustrations. Indeed, a unicorn is no more improbable than a narwhal, whose horn, incidentally, was long thought to be the unicorn's. If we thus confuse real animals with mythological ones, what becomes of the habits, size and appearance given to them by travellers on returning from the far countries where they claim to have seen them?
Science Policy and Its Myths
Authors: Salomon Jean-Jacques
Published: March 2007

The destiny of our age is rationalisation, intellectualisation and, above all, a disenchantment with the world. The success of science as a technique of forecasting has broken a spell; there is no longer a complete image of the world that can be revealed by rational knowledge. Scientific activity is no royal road to the gods, nor to the essence of the world, nor to the truth of nature lying hidden behind its outward appearances; the spell of mysterious powers to be discovered or invoked has died away with the multiplication and the success of objective, neutral, purely technical instruments for the mastery of natural phenomena. If science robs the world of enchantment, it is because it offers only instrumental answers to the questions we ask of it.
What Is a Rational Choice?
Authors: Cazes Bernard
Published: March 2007

“One can hardly judge the honesty and beauty of an action by its utility.”

Montaigne, Essays, III, 1.

“Those who choose well are those who have the right spirit; those who take the bad part are those who have the false spirit; this is the first and the most important difference which one can put among the qualities of the spirit of men.”

La Logique de Port-Royal, First part.

For some years, much effort has been deployed in several countries to put at the disposition of the responsible authorities a presentation as explicit as possible of the costs and advantages which would proceed from the different courses of action among which they have to choose. In the United States this is called “Planning-Programming-Budgeting System” (or PPBS), in France “Rationalisation des Choix Budgétaires” (or RCB), in England “Output Budgeting”.
The Return of the Image
Authors: Berque Jacques
Published: March 2007

The imaginary is rightly called a power of contestation and of creation. Insofar as such a power wields images drawn from practical processes and dry abstraction, it is assumed from the first that we are able to evoke such images. This faculty, which can be compromised by certain developments and types of culture, must first of all be named. Let us call it, as Charles Fourier might have done: image-evocative power. By postulating its existence, we are acknowledging the fact that we notice it, and acknowledging the links that attach it to Nature. But we are also noticing the things that threaten it in an era of technology which tends towards analytical reduction and operational formalism.
The Convergence of Cultural Traditions in the Mediterranean Area
Authors: von Grunebaum Gustav E.
Published: March 2007

The explorer who realizes that an island, a passage, an ocean for which he has been searching do not exist is compensated for his disappointment by an adjustment of the map to carry his name for all to appreciate; the ethnographer who pushed the platypodes and the triamatikoi over the brink into fable land had the satisfaction of a gain in the regularity and rationality of our world; but the historian who somewhere between analytical description and synthetic reconstruction discovers the non-existence, or better though less dramatically: the inappro-priateness and functional inoperativeness of his key concept, can do nothing to mask his discomfiture than to set forth his negative conclusion as stringently as he would have its opposite.
Alienation, Positive and Negative
Authors: Krishna Daya
Published: March 2007

The term “alienation” designates a state which is simultaneously both cognitive and affective in character.* It involves an awareness of the other and a felt estrangement from it, accompanied with a feeling that this ought not to be so. The “otherness” of the other is a necessary precondition for the feeling of alienation, but the “other” is only a correlate of the “I” in reference to which alone alienation can ever arise. Things are not related by the relation of “I-other,” nor can they possibly be related by it. Even among animals the relation is only implicit, for the consciousness of the “I” is never explicitly there. With man, who is essentially a being conscious of himself, the relation “I-other” constitutes the very essence of his distinctive being in this world.
Emerging Ideologies and the Concept of Dialectic: An Exploratory and Speculative Essay
Authors: Truitt Willis H.
Published: March 2007

What I would like to explore in this short paper is the possibility of a theoretical interpretation of a social dialectic of emergence. I shall not be concerned to criticize or defend the dialectical method in social theory as such, but rather to give one interesting interpretation of it. In so doing, I have chosen two applications which I shall use to show what is meant here by emergence. The first of these treats ideological development in American advanced capitalism, the second examines certain aspects of Soviet Russian development. Both applications are schematic and require further fleshing out. So I put my views forth here only in an exploratory way. Employing the categories used in this paper, I am now preparing a more detailed study of the ideological development of Zionism, to be published subsequently. This latter study may provide more concrete answers to some of the issues raised in the present paper.